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"St Lawrence of Google"
mcho writes "The Economist has a story about Google's co-founder, Larry Page, who " always wanted to change the world". The article attempts to make an arguement about the company's true intentions, amid all the rumors about potential Google products. "Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, 'they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test' -- in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.""
This has to be one of the worst articles I've read on Google in a while. Summary:
- Larry and Sergey are passionate about tech (duh)
- People working at Google verge on the fanatical (duh)
- People erroneously predicted that Google would launch a product massively different from it's core search business (the $200 computer)
- Hey, now we're going to make a prediction that is even MORE far-fetched: Google will develop AI
This strikes me as a publicity-driven piece designed to continue the popular enthusiasm in Google and the perception that they can do no wrong. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but there is very little here other than the continuation of "Google as Media Darling" phenonemon.
Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Seriously, does the author of the submission even know what deus ex machina means (not the literal Latin meaning, I mean how it's used)?
If their business model is still selling ads, then I don't see much clutter in their model. Everything they've done so far is either to create things people want to look at so they'll see ads, to gather information to to better target ads, and to increase the number of people with access to their ads.
The brilliantly simple and useful software they crank out is just to get us in the door.
Yes, yes, very Interesting. But...
Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city
Why would you do that?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
"You could make the argument that the human brain is nothing but a very complex calculator."
People have made that argument, but I don't think it holds up. I think it is a very myopic view of the human mind.
I think for a long time, western science and philosophy were hung up wrestling with what exactly logic and reational thought were, mainly because your everyday person is so bad at it. Their goal was to have a totally rational, logical human being. Well, now we have that, sort of, in the computer. Except, we come to find out that a lot of human behavior has escaped the computer -- things such as face recognition, balancing, emotions. Now we have a rain man -- a powerful, totally logical mind, which can calculate the birth of stars, but one who can't even accomplish the simplest everyday things like guessing someones mood or walking to the mailbox to get the mail. Or even read handwriting.
So in the field of AI, we are able to do complex things that people are very bad it, but we don't even have a theoretical model for a lot of simple, every day things that people excel at without even trying. For example, face recognition. We do have a few techniques that computers use, but we have absolutely no idea whether or not those are the techniques that the human mind uses. We know where in the brain the actibity is taking place, but we have absolutely no idea what method or technique it is using.
I'm not exagerating, we're in total ignorance here. We can't yet peer inside the black box. We know what the eyes do when they scan a face, and we know where the optic nerve sends the data, and we know where the result gets sent to, but we don't know at all how that bundle of nerves is manipulating those electrical signals to recognize a face.
We don't even have a good defintion of basic emotions like anger within the brain. We know what it does to the body and the peripheral nervous system, we know how other parts of the brain respond to anger, but we don't have any idea or definition of what is actually going on in that little anger part of the brain.
So the problem in the western tradition is that these basic brain functions, such as emotion, have been totally ignored for the past several thousand years, in trying to find out what a totally rational, logical mind would act like. Turns out we are missing essential components of a useful everyday mind.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Google is in the home. Many people would trust Google with their personal information. The trillion-dollar question is, would enough people trust Google to know what they purchase, on a person-by-person, item-by-item basis. Because if the answer is yes, the entire future of the retail sector depends on it.
Retailing is based on an information crisis: consumers don't know what exactly they want until they see it displayed nice and pretty on the self. What people have purchased is a good predictor of what they will purchase, and so retail managers do know what consumers want, but only it aggregate. But if any single concern can know a what a sufficient fraction of which consumers will want which goods, before the consumers themselves do, it is self-evidently more efficient to deliver the goods from citywide sorting centers to the consumers' door on neighborhood distribution routes (think postal service or trash pickup here), than for each household to send a representative to retail outlets to ponder the goods on the shelf, taking up parking space, aisle space, and their own precious time all the while.
The trillion-dollar question is not, can Google take on Microsoft, but, can Google take on WalMart?