[via Dragos and economist.com]

Yes, Google will “support” an existing (and well-known) project by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce a laptop for the poor, but so will many companies, and who wouldn’t? At one point, Mr Page mocked such inflated expectations by “announcing” Google Fastfood, a button in car dashboards that delivers instantaneous hamburgers.

Mr Page’s ambition started early. When he was 12, he read a biography of Nikola Tesla, a prolific inventor who never got credit for much, but is now a hero among geeks. Mr Page decided that he would be different: a great inventor and an acknowledged world-changer to boot. As the son of a computer-science professor, he channelled his energy into technology. By the time he was in college, Mr Page was building working inkjet printers out of Lego bricks—probably just to show that he could.

Playing God

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. It’s “in their DNA,” says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist famous for investing early in both Yahoo! and Google. Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We’re not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world’s information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.