Bezos says ‘Star Trek’ was Echo inspiration
Amazon CEO says he loves space but has no designs on Mars
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is a Star Trek- loving space geek, but unlike Elon Musk, he’s got no plans to live on Mars.
“No bacon, no whiskey. People haven’t really thought this through,” he said.
Bezos spent 45 minutes in a public conversation at The Wash
ington Post’s Transformers Conference in Washington, D.C., which was webcast live.
He was interviewed by Martin Baron, executive editor of the
Post, which he bought in 2013. After a few jokes about whether he’d have a job when the conversation was done, Baron asked Bezos about Amazon’s Echo device and its cloud-based voice recogni- tion agent Alexa.
Amazon’s CEO said the original inspiration for the Echo was the talking computers of Star
Trek. While the Echo team is still a ways away from reaching that goal, he didn’t feel too badly because, after all, Star Trek was set more than 250 years in the future. “We still have a couple of centuries, but I don’t think we’ll need that much time,” Bezos said.
Bezos said he grew up playing pretend Star Trek every day with his friends when he was in fourth grade in Houston. “We would fight over who got to be Capt. Kirk or Mr. Spock, and somebody played the computer, too. It was really fun,” he said. “We made little cardboard phasers and tricorders. Good days.”
Bezos not only is the CEO of Amazon but also the founder of Blue Origin, a private spaceflight operator headquartered outside of Seattle in Kent, Wash.
He explained the million dollars of investment into space travel in industrial terms: His job, he said, is to help move heavy industries into near-Earth orbits where there’s better access to resources and energy. That way the Earth can eventually be zoned “residential and light industrial,” Bezos said.
By building the heavy-lifting infrastructure such as the reusable rockets Blue Origin is working on, Bezos hopes to significantly lower the cost of access to space. The next generation can use that to create an entrepreneurial explosion in space.
But he poked fun at fellow commercial space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX founder and CEO Musk, who are fascinated with Mars and the possibility of setting up human cities there.
Bezos called cybersecurity one of the great issues of the age and one very difficult to come to terms with.
“When it comes to national state cyber hacking, I don’t know how to solve that,” he said.
Baron pointed out people are worried about the ability of the Echo to be hacked, opening their homes to eavesdropping. Bezos countered that smartphones were infinitely more of a threat. The capability is there to turn any phone into a listening device, he said.
Bezos also responded to a question about Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s tirade against him as CEO. In Trump’s view, Bezos bought the Post as a toy and has been using it to try to dig up dirt on his campaign.
“Most of the world’s population live in countries where, if you criticize the leader, you can go to jail,” Bezos said. “We live in the oldest and greatest democracy in the world with the strongest free-speech projections in the world, and it’s something we are rightly proud of. It’s critical that we be able to carefully examine our leaders.”
Bezos said public institutions must scrutinize, examine and criticize elected officials, especially candidates for the highest office in the most powerful country on Earth.