Who doesn't dream of working part-time while still earning the same salary and maintaining the same standard of living? Well, Google co-founder Larry Page believes this "dream" should be a reality for everyone now.
In a rare joint long-form interview moderated by fellow billionaire, Vinod Khosla, the tech titan sat down with co-founder, Sergey Brin, to discuss and cover topics such as health care, self-driving cars, organizational structures of large companies, technology's impact on society, and their 16 year relationship as co-founders at Khosla Ventures' latest annual summit, ABC News reported. The video from the event was posted on YouTube on July 3.
"If you really think about the things you need to make yourself happy -- housing, security, opportunity for your kids ... it's not that hard for us to provide those things," Page said. "The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is not true."
At a time when robots and machines could help meet everyone's basic needs with much more convenience, the world should be living in a "time of abundance," Page said. He claimed that people's desire to feel needed, wanted and productive, often leads them to work in industries that the world doesn't necessary require, thus contributing to the destruction of the environment. "I was talking to Richard Branson about this," Page said of the founder of the Virgin Group. "They don't have enough jobs in the U.K. He's been trying to get people to hire two part-time people instead of one full-time, so at least the young people can have a half-time job rather than no job."
With a more productive society, Page said he believed people would be happy to "have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests."
However, Brin added that he had to "quibble a little bit" with his colleague's vision for future employment. "I don't think that in the near term, the need for labor is going away," Brin said. "It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something."
When a member of the audience asked if the two men had ever had a fundamental disagreement at the conclusion of the interview, they both replied no. "We've gotten to think a lot alike," Brin said.
