Posted by iancmceachern 1/1/2026
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on leaving retirement to work on AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37226292 - Aug 2023 (25 comments)
Back at Google Again, Cofounder Sergey Brin Just Filed His First Code Request - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34645311 - Feb 2023 (16 comments)
All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.
As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.
Just like becoming a MD has much better odds at getting you some amount of money than dropping out of school. About the same path by the way.
But you can keep playing the lottery if you think it has better odds or even the same odds...
In our advanced society, with incredible automation, we should _all_ have vastly more freedom and control over our time.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
I addressed that in my comment, but let me address it again since it's the most frequent objection to this:
> You could choose to stop doing anything.
In the mechanical sense that an "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statement makes the program "choose" which branch to take, you're right, yes I could.
But then I'd also suffer the consequences.
As I pointed out, if I were to life down in despair and not go to work, I won't keep getting paid just because I didn't have agency over the "choice" of whether to lie down and sulk or get up and go to work.
But for "agency" to have any meaning, we can't interpret choice that way. If we don't have agency, then while I may have an artificial "choice", that "choice" can't change the outcome.
In that case every "choice" I make is just as deterministic as that IF ... THEN ... ELSE: The branch taken depends on the state of the system.
> Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(untealised futures) gives you agency. > > It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even that compute ca be deterministic but you should not care.
What you are describing is compatibilism: The school of thought on "free will" that effectively says that free will is real, but is also an illusion.
Personally I think that is basically brushing the issue under the carpet, though I also think it is the only definition of free will that is logically consistent.
I do agree with the point that you mostly should not care:
You need to mostly act as if every "choice" you make does matter, because whether or not you have control over it, if you do lie down in despair, your paychecks will stop arriving.
Cause and effect does not care whether or not you have agency.
Where I take issue with compatibilism is because there are considerable differences in how you should "choose" to act if you consider agency to be "artificial" or an illusion (compatibilism) or not exist at all (for this purpose these are pretty much equivalent) vs. if you consider it to be real.
E.g. we blame and reward people or otherwise treat people differently based on their perceived agency all the time, and a lot of that treatment is a lot harder to morally justify if you don't believe in actual agency. Real harm happens to people because we assume they have agency. If that agency isn't real, it doesn't matter if we have an illusion of it - in that case a lot of that harm is immoral.
To tie it back to the thread: Whether agency is not real at all, or just significantly constrained by circumstance, it changes the considerations in what we should expect ourselves and others to be able to overcome.
E.g. it makes no logical sense to feel bad about past choices, because they couldn't have gone differently (you can still feel bad about the effects, and commit to "choosing" differently in the future). You also then shouldn't feel bad if you haven't achieved what you wanted to if you believe the context you live within either have total control over the actions you take, or "just" a significant degree of influence over it.
And so we're back to my original argument that for most people, acting as-if they have agency by "choosing" to bet on making the surrounding conditions more amenable to good outcomes is a better bet than thinking they have agency or enough agency to achieve a different outcome.
But again: The fact that I believe we have no agency, does not mean I won't try to do things that will get me better outcomes. I just don't assume I could act any other way in a given instance than I end up acting in that given instance, any more than a movie will change if you rewind it and press play again.
That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe. Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.
Not to be confused with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient. They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state. You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state. And in fact, the more knowledge you have, the less agency. Because the fewer choices.
The meta level person doesn't just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.
Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?
Basically the question is whether we control our odds? Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans. We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency. Are we biased by construction toward the best odds of we can recognize them? Yes. Are their really things with the exact same odds in the system? Wouldn't that block us? Probably. But the system is already made in a way that it wouldn't happen by virtue of having (at least local) asymmetries. In practice we wouldn't be blocked. Someone perfectly symmetrical in a system that also is, would perhaps. But there might not be any two same most desired odds then so no. Unlikely.
And so I would answer to your question about regrets that I don't believe you had that choice. That you couldn't have chosen differently given the same inputs and state. Your "choice" followed the preceding state with the same predictability as a well functioning clock.
Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice. But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities.
Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome.
That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert. So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system.
That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system.
Randomness provides agency.
That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency. You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge.
I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about.
A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable?
But yes, other than that, there is not real accurate way to deny compatibilism I'm afraid.
In fact, true agency is the attempt to eliminate choice.
It is like being in a Labyrinth where the walls are moving.
The clock sits in the labyrinth and gets crushed by a moving wall.
An agentic person detects the movements and recalibrates.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.
Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.
> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."
Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.
> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.
Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?
Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)
What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.
So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.
Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.
My mind reels with ideas. Why didn't his?
It's something you can do when you have money and time but no ideas.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The third sentence of the article is
> But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5.
Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5?
They might have well said “Google co-founder shares secrets that stealing bread to eat when you’re hungry and sleeping under bridges is actually illegal”
The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.
(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.
This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:
(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total - there's far too much content for us to read it all.
I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, it's usually because they've seen other cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest explanation for this, though, is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(2) I've already forgotten point #2. Sorry! I fear that my short-term memory window is getting ever smaller - this is the 'sandblast' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)
To do so during a time when tech is also dragging its reputation into the mud by generally harming the rank and file, through large corporations whose actions are not held to account in anti-trust laws, to tech bro oligarchs who wine and dine with power while the rest of us are worst off in a time of unprecedented inequality, to tech laying off hundreds of thousands of employees over the last few years, to LLMs replacing hard working people with slop-generators… is just additional insult to injury.
The article is simply, itself, shallow. "… Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us" — no; barring unforeseen and extremely unlikely circumstances, I'm literally never going to have the "problems" faced by Brin, because I have no expectation of ever retiring with "perpetual wealth" levels of money.
As I said in a separate comment, TFA is distinctly lacks empathy.
HBOs Silicon Valley is more accurate than any Paul Graham essay