What Has Google Ever Done For Us?
A Swedish Bastard’s Love Letter to the Tech Giant That Stopped Promising Not to Be Evil
But what do I know?
REG: All right, but apart from Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Drive, Photos, Translate, Calendar, and a Nobel Prize-winning protein-folding AI that’s helping cure diseases... what has Google ever done for us?
FRANCIS: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
FRANCIS: Well, I mean... they did give us two-factor authentication.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
XERXES: And passkeys.
LORETTA: And weather prediction AI that’s more accurate than traditional models.
REG: Yeah, all right. I’ll grant you Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Drive, Photos, Translate, Calendar, AlphaFold, two-factor authentication, passkeys, and weather AI are all very good things—
MATTHIAS: And quantum computing research!
FRANCIS: And brain mapping!
LORETTA: And wildfire detection satellites!
REG: All right! All right! But apart from Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Drive, Photos, Translate, Calendar, AlphaFold, 2FA, passkeys, weather AI, quantum computing, brain mapping, and wildfire detection... what has Google EVER done for us?
EVERYONE: silence
JUDITH: ...brought peace?
REG: Oh, SHUT UP!
So Here We Are
I’ve been a bit of an arsehole to Google lately. Tis the season, after all. I’m Swedish. Being mildly critical of large corporations is practically a national sport, right between cross-country skiing and quietly judging people who talk too loudly on trains.
But then I listened to Hannah Fry interviewing Demis Hassabis on the Google DeepMind podcast, and I remembered something important: these people are actually trying to do something extraordinary.
Not “extraordinary” in the “we’re disrupting the synergy of paradigm shifts” tech-bro way. Extraordinary in the “we just won a Nobel Prize for solving a 50-year-old problem in biology” way.
Let me explain. Using the three-layer thinking framework. Because that’s how we roll here at COGNITIVE-LOON.
Layer 1: What’s the Obvious Answer?
The obvious take: Google is too big, knows too much about us, changed their motto from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Do The Right Thing” (which, let’s be honest, sounds like what a corporate lawyer writes when the original slogan becomes legally inconvenient), and they’re discontinuing the Dark Web Report.
Yes, you read that right. Here’s the email I received:
“We are dismantling the darknet report... It stops monitoring new results on January 15, 2026, and the tool and its data will no longer be available from February 16, 2026. Although the report offered general information, the feedback showed that it did not provide any useful next steps.”
Translation: “We built a thing. Turns out it was mostly useful for making people anxious without giving them anything to actually do about it. So we’re killing it and focusing on things that actually help.”
This is, in a weird way, refreshing honesty from a tech giant. “Our product didn’t work well. We’re stopping it.” No pivot. No rebrand. Just... ending something that wasn’t working.
Surface-level conclusion: Google is a massive corporation doing massive corporation things.
Layer 2: What Am I Missing?
Here’s what I was missing until Hannah Fry reminded me.
The AlphaFold Story
In 2020, a team at Google DeepMind solved a problem that had haunted biology for fifty years: predicting how proteins fold.
Why does this matter?
Proteins are the molecular machines that make life work. They’re made of amino acid chains that fold into complex 3D shapes. The shape determines what the protein does. Get the shape wrong, and you get diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer.
Before AlphaFold, figuring out one protein’s structure could take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
AlphaFold does it in minutes.
Not approximately. Not kinda-sorta. With atomic-level accuracy comparable to experimental methods.
In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.
Now, over 3 million researchers in 190+ countries are using the AlphaFold database. For free. To work on malaria vaccines, cancer treatments, antimicrobial resistance, plastic-eating enzymes, crop resilience.
As Hassabis put it to Hannah Fry:
“If a protein misfolds, it can lose its function and lead to disease, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s... What took us months and years to do, AlphaFold was able to do in a weekend.”
This isn’t corporate PR. This is actual science being accelerated at a pace we’ve never seen before.
The Bigger Picture
But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s what else Google DeepMind is working on:
Fusion energy: Partnering with Commonwealth Fusion to help contain plasma in tokamak reactors. If this works, we get unlimited clean energy. Everything changes.
World models: Creating AI systems that understand how the physical world actually works—not just language, but intuitive physics, cause and effect. This is the foundation for robotics that actually work.
AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof: AI systems that can solve complex mathematical problems at Olympiad gold-medal level. This matters because mathematics is the language of the universe.
Weather prediction: GraphCast predicts weather 10 days out more accurately than the industry gold-standard, and can predict hurricane tracks days before traditional models.
Brain mapping: Working with Harvard to map the human brain at unprecedented detail.
The strategy Hassabis described to Hannah Fry is elegant: identify “root node” problems—problems that, once solved, unlock cascades of downstream benefits.
Protein folding was the first proof point. Energy, materials science, and the limits of computation itself are next.
Layer 3: What Question Should I Actually Be Asking?
Here’s the reframe: The question isn’t “can we trust Google?” The question is “can we steward this technology transition responsibly?”
And this is where the interview got genuinely interesting.
Hannah Fry asked Hassabis about the Industrial Revolution, and his answer was sobering:
“The difference this time is that it’s probably going to be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and it will probably happen 10 times faster—more like a decade than a century.”
Ten times bigger. Ten times faster.
The Industrial Revolution gave us modern medicine, sanitation, abundance—but it also took roughly a century of social upheaval, labor movements, and institution-building to figure out how to distribute those benefits.
We might have a decade.
Hassabis isn’t naive about this. When Fry asked what keeps him up at night, he didn’t dodge:
“The next stage is agent-based systems... more autonomous. So I think the risks go up, as well, with those types of systems. So I’m quite worried about what those sorts of systems will be able to do maybe in two, three years’ time.”
This is the CEO of Google DeepMind saying he’s “quite worried” about what his own technology will enable in 2-3 years.
That’s not the language of a tech-bro dismissing concerns. That’s the language of someone who actually understands the stakes.
Meanwhile, In Practical Reality: Your Digital Security
Right. Philosophy is lovely, but Google also just reminded us that we need to actually protect our accounts.
Since they’re discontinuing the Dark Web Report, here’s what you should actually do instead. Consider this your Swedish grandfather’s guide to not getting hacked:
1. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Enable it. Now. On everything.
CISA (the US Cybersecurity Agency) found that accounts with MFA are 99% less likely to be compromised. That’s not a typo. Ninety-nine percent.
How to do it on Google:
Go to your Google Account → Security
Select “2-Step Verification”
Follow the setup steps
2. Passkeys (The Future)
Passkeys are cryptographic credentials tied to your device. They can’t be phished, can’t be guessed, can’t be forgotten.
They use your fingerprint, face scan, or device PIN to authenticate. No passwords to steal.
Google’s description: “Passkeys provide the strongest protection against threats like phishing. Once you create a passkey, you can use it to easily sign in to your Google Account.”
To create one:
Go to https://myaccount.google.com/signinoptions/passkeys
Click “Create a passkey”
Follow the instructions
Your biometric data stays on your device. Google never sees it.
3. The Advanced Protection Program (For High-Risk Users)
If you’re a journalist, activist, politician, business leader, or just someone who really, really doesn’t want to get hacked:
Google’s Advanced Protection Program requires FIDO2 security keys (or passkeys) for login. It blocks untrusted third-party apps and provides the strongest account takeover protection available.
4. Password Manager
Use Google Password Manager or another reputable option. Stop reusing passwords. Seriously.
Password-based attacks have increased 61% recently. Using the same password on multiple sites is like using the same key for your house, car, office, and bank vault, then leaving copies at every café you visit.
5. Recovery Options
Set up backup codes (print them, store them safely)
Add recovery email and phone number
Keep them updated
6. Results About You
Google has a tool that lets you find and request removal of your personal information (phone number, home address) from search results. Use it:
Settings → Privacy & Personalization → Results about you
The “Don’t Be Evil” Thing
Let’s address the elephant in the server room.
Google’s original unofficial motto was “Don’t Be Evil.” It appeared in their code of conduct from 2000 until 2018, when they moved it from the preface to just a line at the end: “And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right—speak up!”
When Alphabet (Google’s parent company) was created in 2015, the new code of conduct said “Do the right thing” instead.
Critics had a field day. “Evil is fine now!” the headlines screamed.
Here’s my take: The motto was always a bit naive. Removing it was more honest than keeping it while doing things that made people question it.
What matters isn’t what they say. It’s what they do.
And what they’re doing includes:
Giving away AlphaFold’s predictions for 200+ million proteins for free
Publishing research that wins Nobel Prizes
Building AI that actually helps scientists solve real problems
Working on fusion energy and quantum computing
Being fairly transparent about the risks of their own technology
Is Google perfect? God no. They’re a massive corporation with massive corporate incentives. They collect too much data. They’ve made mistakes. They’ll make more.
But the binary “Google good” or “Google evil” framing is childish. Reality is more complicated.
The Turing Machine Question
Here’s the thing that’s been rattling around in my head since listening to Hassabis.
When Hannah Fry asked whether there are things humans can do that machines never will, Hassabis gave this remarkable answer:
“Nobody’s found anything in the universe that’s non-computable, so far... I think that’s the central question in my life, really, ever since I found out about Turing and Turing machines... What is the limit of a Turing machine?”
He believes that if we build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), we can compare it to the human mind and finally see what’s special about consciousness. Maybe creativity. Maybe emotions. Maybe dreaming.
“I’ve always felt this, that if we build AGI, and then use that as a simulation of the mind, and then compare that to the real mind, we will then see what the differences are and potentially what’s special and remaining about the human mind.”
This is either terrifying or exhilarating, depending on your disposition.
For me, it’s both.
Hannah Fry and Demis Hassabis
A brief word about these two humans, because they’re genuinely two of my favorite people.
Hannah Fry is a mathematician at UCL who has this extraordinary gift for making complex ideas accessible without dumbing them down. She asks the questions you want asked. She doesn’t let guests off the hook. And she does it all with a warmth that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation between friends.
Demis Hassabis is a former child chess prodigy who went on to design video games, get a PhD in neuroscience, and then build an AI company that Google bought for £400 million. He’s won a Nobel Prize. He still seems genuinely excited about science in a way that feels authentic rather than performed.
Watching these two talk is like watching ping-pong between people who actually understand what they’re hitting.
So What Has Google Ever Done For Us?
Well:
Search: Changed how humans access information
Gmail: Free email with incredible spam filtering
Maps: Navigation for literally billions of people
YouTube: The world’s largest repository of human knowledge (and cat videos)
Android: Powers most smartphones on Earth
Chrome: Most-used browser globally
Drive/Docs: Free office suite and storage
Photos: Unlimited photo storage with AI organization
Translate: Real-time translation between 100+ languages
AlphaFold: Revolutionized biology, won Nobel Prize
AlphaGo/AlphaZero: Proved AI could master intuition-heavy games
GraphCast: Better weather prediction
Passkeys: Phishing-resistant authentication
2FA: 99% reduction in account compromise
Fusion research: Working on unlimited clean energy
Quantum computing: Pushing computational boundaries
Brain mapping: Understanding the human mind
Wildfire detection: FireSat satellite constellation
AlphaGeometry: AI solving Olympiad-level math
Apart from all that, what has Google ever done for us?
The Actual Conclusion
Here’s where I land:
Google is too big. This is true.
Google knows too much about us. Also true.
Google has done things that made people uncomfortable. Very true.
AND
Google employs brilliant people who are genuinely trying to solve civilization-level problems. Also true.
Google’s AI research is accelerating science in ways that will save millions of lives. True.
Google provides free tools that billions of people use every day. True.
The world isn’t binary. Technology isn’t good or evil. It’s just powerful. What matters is who wields it, how they wield it, and whether we—as a society—have any say in the direction it takes.
As Hassabis said:
“My mission has always been to help the world steward AGI safely over the line for all of humanity.”
Whether you believe him or not is up to you. But at least he’s saying it out loud.
Your Homework
Enable 2FA on your Google account today. Go to Settings → Security → 2-Step Verification. Do it now. The article will still be here when you get back.
Create a passkey. Go to https://myaccount.google.com/signinoptions/passkeys. It takes two minutes.
Check “Results about you.” Remove your personal information from Google Search results.
Listen to the full Google DeepMind podcast. Hannah Fry’s interviews are consistently excellent.
Stay curious. The next decade is going to be unlike anything humanity has experienced. The least we can do is pay attention.
Pay attention. Do your best. Pay it forward.
That’s what Google should have made their motto, honestly.
But what do I know?
I’m just a Swedish bastard who still uses Go ogle.🕯
🪶Peace, Love and Respect
Hans Jonsson writes at hejon07.substack.com about consciousness, complexity, and the patterns that connect everything. He has been paying attention for 46 years and counting.