
Levandowski
is an engineer at Google X, the company’s semi-secret lab for
experimental technology. He turned thirty-three last March but still has
the spindly build and nerdy good nature of the kids in my high-school
science club. He wears black frame glasses and oversized neon sneakers,
has a long, loping stride—he’s six feet seven—and is given to excitable
talk on fantastical themes. Cybernetic dolphins! Self-harvesting farms!
Like a lot of his colleagues in Mountain View, Levandowski is equal
parts idealist and voracious capitalist. He wants to fix the world and
make a fortune doing it. He comes by these impulses honestly: his mother
is a French diplomat, his father an American businessman. Although
Levandowski spent most of his childhood in Brussels, his English has no
accent aside from a certain absence of inflection—the bright, electric
chatter of a processor in overdrive. “My fiancée is a dancer in her
soul,” he told me. “I’m a robot.”