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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.""
A clean and uncluttered interface was the key to Google's search success as well as being the key supplement to their ad brokering business. I just hope "cluttering" up their business model won't have the opposite effect.
Forget about the AI rumor. It's just a rumor, the last sentence of TFA, unrelated to the rest.
More interesting is the following quote:
This somehow reminds me of Apple in the 90s. They were on a crusade. They had found the holy grail. They could not fail. They would bring their vision to the world.
They could fail. And they failed. It didn't destroy them, but put their feet back to the ground. Where they belong. Today they make great products while listening to their users needs. They have learned that even though they may be on a mission, missionaries usually do not change the world. Hard workers and creative people do, as long as they stay connected to reality.
Bill Gates from Triumph of the nerds:
Chriss
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So Google's big project is scanning every single book and indexing them online. It's a great idea. Why just search the internet when you can also be searching every work of literature? It's an obvious advance for Google, improving the search engine in a small but obvious way that makes a big difference as far as real usability.
Here's the thing: indexing books online is an incidental benefit. Google's real goal is to create a working, statistical AI. They've been hiring top-of-their-field AI researchers for a while. Last summer, Google won a competition for machine translation. They translated from Arabic to English and vice-versa better than all of their competitors. They did this using a statistical approach -- just feed the computer thousands and thousands of already translated documents, and eventually the machine can start making inferences based on probability. Given enough data, it works.
The same idea can be applied in the generic case. Wouldn't being able to ask an AI any question and receive a correct answer revolutionize society? And, the sum total of world literature is probably enough data to do so. They could call it AskG. He would know everything. And, the way they could roll it out, is by launching, and simultaneously updating wikipedia. It's well known that Wikipedia is riddled with small errors. Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city, and it's still there. Imagine if Google AI launches, and then announces that it has fixed Wikipedia. If Google AI made 50,000 edits it would overwhelm Wikipedia's normal editors, but whichever edits were checked by humans would certainly be confirmed as correct.
And, a new age of humanity would be ushered in. It would we a new Library of Alexandria. We would end the Age of Information and enter the Age of Knowledge. The singularity has already begun, but no one has realized it -- the singularity began the day Google went live.
Would AskG immediately fix quantum theory? Given all the data about science published by researchers, could G form new conclusions that humanity's best and brightest haven't? Could G solve the logistical challenge of solving world poverty?
There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.
See the best sci-fi short story ever written, Asimov's The Last Question, or a simple find and replace hack of that story, The Last Query.
This is just platitudes and idiocy.
The natural state of matter is not consciousness. If it were virtually everything would be intelligent. As it is only a few animals seem to possess intelligence on one planet.
We know that consciousness in Man is the result of billions of years of competition among trillions upon trillions of organisms which are our ancestors.
The idea that a single entity, designed, but not designed to be conscious will eventually become intelligent is the result of too much bad science fiction. Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
AI will be developed when we unravel the secrets to intelligence or when we produce enormously fast computer simulated evolution, but it will not come about as a side effect of people surfing porn.