Marissa Mayer: I’m not a feminist. I am not neurodivergent. I’m a software girl

Your continued enjoyment of AI is unusual. But techno-optimism seems to be making a comeback –

That’s nice to hear.

– and you remind me nostalgically of the enthusiasm of the internet in the early days. How do you stay so hopeful?

In general, I am an optimistic person. There are just so many wonderful, smart, wonderful people in the world. I remember hearing a talk from the early days of eBay, the Wild West days of the mid-nineties, and people were saying that everyone on the Internet is a troll out to rip you off. Someone on eBay said, “There are. But it is 1 percent.” eBay’s great insight is that you can actually handle that 1 percent manually.

Is it really only 1 percent?

I know feels like more bad actors. But overall, the observation that most people act with good intentions is correct. History has also made it clear that technology rarely lets us down. It is almost always additive. I approach new things with the question: What good could come from this?

So you have no objection to the new – and not to the blockchain? No colonies from Mars?

Look, I don’t like operating from fear. No one does their best when they are afraid. History also confirms this.

When you were a teenager at the National Youth Science Camp, you became fascinated by the mind of your mentor, Son Nguyen. Ultimately, you cared less about what he knew and more about how he thought. Two parts to this question: what to do You know, and what do you think?

What me know? Well, we all know thousands of facts, right? I know consumer technology. I know a lot about different companies. I happen to know a lot about movies.

Okay, so what do you think about it?

Here’s an example from 2002, when I was running products at Google News. My friend Krishna built this script that searches 15 sources and groups stories by topic, using k-means clustering, an AI technique. We hired five news sources to find a comprehensive range of news sources across the Internet. There are the obvious ones, but there are others like Layla’s Knitting News.

We started talking to some of the big sources and said, “Look, we have this little tool. We don’t know if it will become anything.” The Times, Reuters and The Washington Post dithered and debated whether or not to participate. Finally they agreed. I decided that once we had two or three, we would just go.

So we just went ahead and searched 4,000 sources and launched them all. We were prepared for a group of people asking to be taken out. But the opposite happened. By noon we had 1,500 more sources, sources that we had not yet found, that now wanted to come in.

Immediately afterward, we hired a lawyer who had worked in news licensing. We ended up in a who’s-first conversation. He said, “How did you get four thousand publishers to sign up? All the demands from all those different companies must have been insane.” I was like, “We just put them in there and let them opt out.” He said, ‘No, no, no. I need the terms.” He thought we had negotiated 4,000 contracts. He says, “How many did you contact?” I thought, “Three.” He said, “No, no, no. You don’t understand what I’m asking.” I said, “I’m not sure I know what you’re asking.”