Nice, but not science...

I am not at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, even though I am only about 30 minutes from where it is held...
So I was interested to see Larry Page addressed the meeting and admonished scientists for their failings

AAAS podcast here

Apparently science needs to be more entrepreneurial, needs better marketing, and has some problems to solve.

Now, I actually agree with science's need to be more entrepreneurial, even though I come from one of the more abstract and useless of the sciences. Science is too conservative, and too many scientists don't think about how their research might be of use beyond the narrow purpose it was done for.
It is tricky business, because we don't actually want too many good scientists getting distracted by secondary applications, getting rich and stuff like that; they are needed to go on to think up other new useless stuff.

I am more ambivalent on the "marketing".
It would be good for science for more people to be aware of what is involved and what is accomplished in science; but more hype or oversimplified buzz is likely to backfire, with marketing comes deeply ingrained cynicism (of course, marketing can be effective, even if it is received cynically, it might be worth having the public be more cynical about science if the simultaneously were more knowledgable about it)

Then, apparently, Larry (may I call him Larry?) rattled off some problems: car crashes, road transport, solar power, electrical grids... very good, very important problems.

BUT, as a first approximation not a single one of them has anything to do with science.
They are all engineering and societal problems, that can be solved by development and changes in legal and economic incentives. Any contribution by actual research to the solution is likely to be small, or non-existent (autonomous cars probably need some additional algorithmic development, but it is a minor and applied comp sci problem).

This is scary: Larry Page is very smart, highly educated, extremely influential, and in charge of one of the most effective and cash rich companies on the planet, which incidentally does a fair bit of research and a lot of development.
And this is what he considers science challenges?

Ouch.

He is right on the last part though; many scientific undertakings do not succeed because of lack of human effort, not technical hurdles - there are a lot of important scientific problems that languish or were abandoned simply because of lack of people with suitable talents and resources to acquire and support them.
This is happening right now, with projects stalled or abandoned and expertise dispersed and lost because there are not enough resources right here right now to actually get on with it.

There are also problems that are not solved because of technical difficulty, including very important problems, but those are surprisingly rare. Progress is more typically resource limited.