At the end of the day no one company is a jack of all trades. If Google has a solid / reliable data storage infrastructure that can be had for a good price then why not? IBM at one point for example nearly self-destructed because they were a monolithic company who insisted that you had to only use their own products (Token Ring, Lotus Notes) even thou they had their massive downsides. Eventually the company broke up into micro-companies under the same name and were allowed to buy the most cost effective products instead of IBM only. I'm sure some folks at Google for example use Windows products despite it being from a competitor (Microsoft).
Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Why hack when some simple tricks like dropping a mountain sized piece of rock from orbit would likely end our civilization faster. Any alien race that has mastered Interstellar travel is already dealing with power levels that could blow our planet into dust if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to think this way how do we know that it wasn't aliens that dropped the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs off the planet and left mammals behind as a chance to reshape the planet!? Maybe we're the virus? The point is, it's not worth worrying about. Get the magical alien message first then worry about what to do with it, or not.
Very few geological or planet events occur within a lifetime or so seeing this in one's lifetime is pretty unique. Recall the Hale-Bopp comet which was one of the brightest comets seen at the beginning of the millennium which won't return until long after we're dead. (some 2000+ years) Scientists aren't familiar with Jupiter weather and it also isn't well understood so we don't know exactly what's going on so it's just a wild guess as to whether the spot will ultimately disappear or get bigger. The only thing we've noticed is that there's other smaller spots on the planet which come and go so it's not likely that the big spot is forever.
I think this article neglects a very simple fact that as we've automated our production over history (through the use of machines) our resource demands have shot up through the roof. Cars for example use tremendously more resources (to the point that we've had to tap into oil reserves that nature has stored for millions of years) compared to horses. We've been able to keep economics in check because we're in an age of consumerism. As technology advances we're able to produce more stuff at higher efficiency so to keep everyone employed the overall result has been to get everyone to use more things but realistically this can't go on forever. We'll eventually end up with resource shortages which will kill the entire system. So really this is more an economics problem and unfortunately humanity in general hasn't been known to change anything until almost the last possible second or worse.
When you consider Uber's track record for all the shady / bad things they've done, does the CEO mean invest or break the law? Because with Uber, it's honestly hard to tell.
All the focus on AI is largely missing the overall picture. It's the Automation of jobs that's killing jobs faster than even AI. When Ford assembled the first cars they had to be put together entirely by hand, so a gigantic labour force was required to mass produce cars. Nowadays it's done by robots. Farming was once done by hand and or with the assistance of horses or cattle. The addition of tractors, machinery and probably computer aided tractors has greatly increased the amount of area that a single farmer can farm freeing society from having to rely on nearly everyone to grow food.
Self Check-out, Banking from the computer or phone is fast wiping out service positions.
We live in a society where economic success of a nation is highly dependant on higher and higher levels of consumption in order to keep up with the ever increasing efficiency of production. (Otherwise we can't keep everyone employed.) It's partly why debt keeps sky-rocketing. But it will end because we can't keep consuming more, we've only got one planet and our resources are already straining. The future at this point is unavoidable, we need a completely different economic system or we'll be facing ruin at some point.
I doubt Tesla has any technology that would really be considered earth-shattering considering that the motor and electrical systems are not exactly unknown / cutting edge technology. Maybe a slight problem would be loss of strategic initiatives if there were any from the business side of things. A bigger problem would be paying for processing time from Amazon which is the equivalent of the hackers leeching cash and resources from Tesla. I'm somehwhat surprised thou that Amazon cloud being an obvious target of people trying to do this wouldn't have a security team that would be on the lookout of things like this. Surely it would be easy to write the equivalent of a viral scanner to look for cryptocoin algorithms and alert the owners "Ooops, you're crunching cryptocoins, have you been hacked?".
Consumers today unfortunately don't see the true cost of what all their products are. If they did, I sometimes wonder how many things we could stomach. It also seems that unfortunately when something seems "too good to be true" it turns out that somewhere someone paid the price either in environmental damage, or in sheer human lives. I'm not really sure what the ultimate solution is, as consumers the best we can do is to try to be aware of how things are made / built and pick those which least destroy our environment and lives. But that's easier said than done. CFCs for instance were deemed completely safe and they are. Who could have discovered that once it got high in our atmosphere it would destroy ozone which would lead to an increase in deadly skin cancers.
I know for some folks it's an inexpensive and easy way to get around town but sometimes one needs to consider the moral values behind a company too. Some great examples are cheap clothes made in India, so cheap in fact working conditions are so bad a factory collapses and killed / maimed a whole bunch of workers for which they almost got no compensation for. Uber's self driving program has also gotten itself into more serious accidents than google has managed probably due to them rushing and pushing the limits of safety. They flipped one car and drove the wrong way on a one way street in another incident. Maybe their new management is better but are you willing to be the first to try their self-driving cars if they ever come out?
"We could be moral too!" - We Just Don't Want To Be Sure Uber we believe you, after having all your executives quit due to discrimination issues within Uber, outright ignoring local city rules, spying on politicians checking out the system. Getting into a massive lawsuit with Google Alphabet where it looks like you poached an engineer and potentially paid him to do industrial espionage. Looking to get self-driving tech to fire all your Uber drivers despite them being paid so little they need to sleep in their cabs. Yup, sounds like a fine company to me.;)
AMD cards initially were more efficient at Cryptocurrencies because they're more general purpose in that you can do more things with them. Eventually when the AMD cards ran out, they went after the next most efficient to use use cards which are the Nvidia cards. It would be silly for either AMD or Nvidia to dedicate resources to making cards more attractive because let's face it, they both sold out of everything they have. Why make your product more attractive when you can't even keep it in stock? AMD revealed too that they would make more video cards but the rapid sell-off of graphics cards has caused a memory shortage from their provider Samsung. Considering the size of Samsung, this means Nvidia is likely facing similar shortages too.
Eventually popular CryptoCurrencies either move on to dedicated hardware or they wane in popularity and vanish for the market so they're not a good way to bet your future on. The whole put in roadblocks to stop users from using GPUs for anything other than gaming is silly. Why would anyone realistically want a limited product? Who care what people do with their expensive graphics cards when you have people on youtube breaking Iphones for fun. Just be patient, the market will eventually swing back to normal.
To be honest I can't say I'm too surprised hearing about all the evidence against Uber. While no one can be entirely sure, there's a very high possibility that they were in the wrong so by settling it stopped an embarrassing and potentially damaging legal case against them. You only need to look at their history to see that virtually everything they've done is borderline sketchy and or illegal or in grey areas. Even the reason why they want to automate cars is to line their bottom line by getting rid of uber drivers.
I think part of the problem is a lot of folks don't really understand how current AI technology which hasn't changed in decades works compared to how our minds work things out. Recall that there was a recent AI project to find the meaning of the Internet and the answer it came up with was "Cats" because they seem to appear far more often then any other topic on the Internet. That is a mathematical mean or average, the optimal answer but ask any normal person and cats won't be the answer that they give you.
And there in lies one of the biggest problems with our current AI, it's only able to do things that we ask it and they need a clear solution. You can't exactly ask an AI, "do you think this person lived a happy life?". What makes this question bizarre is we're not entirely sure what the answer to that is ourselves but in most cases we can usually tell.
I have to admit I was watching it live and it looked like everything went smoothly as can be. I'm guessing SpaceX probably simulated everything for the launch but as they say sometimes you have to try it out in real-life to see if it really works! I imagine the United Launch Alliance might be panicking now as SpaceX is well on their way of making "Heavy" launches significantly cheaper as former heavy launches were all done by them with a significantly more expensive rocket.
It's probably wise to start preparing for the changes that are coming. We're inherently lazy. It doesn't take a genius to notice that when it comes to protecting the environment or heath a lot of folks wait until it's almost too late before doing anything. It's one of the reasons why I find people who deny climate change for the most part disappointing. Most are playing the let's ignore it until it becomes a serious issue at which point it's either harder to fix or fatal. And in many ways it's already starting, many areas are seeing more flooding, fires and general weather damage that they have never seen before. The flood of migrants into Europe are primarily folks in Africa fleeing multi-year droughts for example. Now I'm not one to say that the world will end but at the very least it might be a good idea to be prepared for it. Insurance companies for example are taking this seriously because they're often on the paying end when things go south because they don't want to go bankrupt when the next disaster hits.
Although this one will probably be adrift in space, I just realized that they could claim the title of the fastest car in history since it'll be zooming through space at speeds not possible on land. Too bad it won't be under it's own power.
Okay so there's lots wrong with this line of thinking. First it's not AI is taking away jobs but automation. As we get machines to handle various jobs it lessens the workload on us.
Two retraining isn't going to help you too much. Being adaptable is a more important requirement. It doesn't guarantee you success but it allows you to adopt changing situations which gives you a better chance when the opportunity arrives. Too many folks refuse to adopt or change when the situation arises. I've gone from systems admin to call center rep to helpdesk to programmer and back again in less than a decade. Don't give up and adopt to life as it changes. Sounds easy but it's much harder than it seems.
Third, nothing is going to save us from this issue. Many folks mistakenly think that the US for example produces less in modern times. The reality is we actually produce more but require less people to do so. Economic output has never shrunk. So in order to keep the same workforce we need to consume more to keep up. Why else do we consume more resources and energy than any generation before it? It's to keep up with this issue but there's a problem, we're going to reach the point where the planet exhausts and can't keep up then our economies are going to crash.
In the long run, we need to switch to a society where you don't need a job to survive. It's the unfortunate only way otherwise society is going to implode. I've seen suggestions for the arts and or creativity as there's no limits on that.
The sad reality of this situation is that everyone wants "free" services. People love free E-mail, free cloud storage, free search engines but in the end no one is willing to pay for them. I've been long aware that they do track if anyone's even paid slight attention to banner ads because the sites you visit tend to follow you around in the ads. I mean seriously, do a search for something on newegg and bang suddenly that item follows you around on ad banners. Other hints such as google allowing you to use persistent login which basically attaches a tracking cookie in your browser but allows you to mostly login without having to type in username and password in Gmail is convenient. I however am not paranoid, sure Google probably knows a LOT about me but they do have the decency to mostly keep it anonymous to advertisers. Advertisers (companies) mostly want to know what you're interested in so they can pitch things that will sell. They're not after you personally. Maybe that will change someday with Google getting desperate or the government for some unknown reason is interested in your activities but for the most part most people over-react. I can't blame Google for this as they're simply doing what people in general want. Unless you can honestly tell me that you'd rather pay for all the Internet services that are "free".
I think this engineer has a serious lack of understanding how a large company works! First off of course they're conservative! What they're doing is obvious working because they're making money and succeeding in what they're doing. They're not going to do a risky change just as an experiment which could risk sinking the entire company. Second politics are obvious! There's no large organization that is politics free, the only way you're going to not have politics is either everyone is the same which is lie or your company is very small. Otherwise expect some politics. Google still innovates with the AlphaGo (AI) research projects and their self-driving vehicle projects among other things. I think this engineer is just bitter that they can't just go up google and say I have this awesome idea, give me all the resources I want now.
And there's merit to keeping focused on your core products. Google to today still makes a rock solid search engine. Compare that to Microsoft who's Window releases switch non-stop between disasters and great products. Chrome grew from a non-existant browser to the market leader while Microsoft's IE or Edge despite all their effort has lost as former market leader. Things like this don't happen without a company doing what customers want.
Folks complain that google collects a huge amount of information and sells it to advertisers. Good point but without doing that, how do you run a system that large for "free"? The one thing that I believe Google is still doing right is keeping individual information away from advertisers, that is they can't identify you as an individual but instead advertisers get an aggregate view. It might change someday which is frightening considering how much data Google has but till then we can reap the benefits of their "free" services. Don't like it? Switch to a competitor who runs either worse services or does the exact same thing but isn't as "open" about what they're doing.
Ever heard of artificial flavouring? So here's a fun question, why are many of us able to tell the difference between artificial flavouring and natural flavouring? The answer is because natural flavouring like many plants have thousands of chemicals which our taste buds can pick up. Generally speaking it's difficult to reproduce artificially. Synapses in our brain are affected by hormones and signalling chemicals including drugs. An artificial Synapse can't remotely come close to simulating that at this point. So our artificial synapse like flavouring is massively simplified for it to work.
The thing a lot of AI news fails to point out is they created a Synapse based on our models and assumptions on how it sort of works. Or at least how we *think* it might work. Actual biological systems are far more complex and so this is not an accurate representation of a synapse in our brain. Sadly many of these models are very rough approximations, they're not reflective of what's going on in reality. We're still likely far from true autonomous AI.
I think this one's a tough call. Gene editing could hold the key to curing some incurable diseases but it could also produce a moral issue where it's used for eugenics instead. People after all are willing to alter themselves for vain reasons but is that right? I think there's a slightly lesser risk of disease outbreak unless government is doing hostile black ops research but don't expect zombies or anything like that. Think more a plague outbreak.
Science is a double-edged sword, think nuclear science. It's given us so many modern technologies we take for granted but also it's also given us a chance to blow ourselves off the planet. Genetics is probably similar.
I admit I don't have kids because I'm single but I didn't grow up around the Internet until my University years and even then I would say that it's full of wonderful things and horrible things. I don't think giving your kids full access to everything is wise and possibility slightly irresponsible. Life shouldn't revolve around social media at least in the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
At the end of the day no one company is a jack of all trades. If Google has a solid / reliable data storage infrastructure that can be had for a good price then why not? IBM at one point for example nearly self-destructed because they were a monolithic company who insisted that you had to only use their own products (Token Ring, Lotus Notes) even thou they had their massive downsides. Eventually the company broke up into micro-companies under the same name and were allowed to buy the most cost effective products instead of IBM only. I'm sure some folks at Google for example use Windows products despite it being from a competitor (Microsoft).
Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Why hack when some simple tricks like dropping a mountain sized piece of rock from orbit would likely end our civilization faster. Any alien race that has mastered Interstellar travel is already dealing with power levels that could blow our planet into dust if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to think this way how do we know that it wasn't aliens that dropped the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs off the planet and left mammals behind as a chance to reshape the planet!? Maybe we're the virus? The point is, it's not worth worrying about. Get the magical alien message first then worry about what to do with it, or not.
Very few geological or planet events occur within a lifetime or so seeing this in one's lifetime is pretty unique. Recall the Hale-Bopp comet which was one of the brightest comets seen at the beginning of the millennium which won't return until long after we're dead. (some 2000+ years) Scientists aren't familiar with Jupiter weather and it also isn't well understood so we don't know exactly what's going on so it's just a wild guess as to whether the spot will ultimately disappear or get bigger. The only thing we've noticed is that there's other smaller spots on the planet which come and go so it's not likely that the big spot is forever.
I think this article neglects a very simple fact that as we've automated our production over history (through the use of machines) our resource demands have shot up through the roof. Cars for example use tremendously more resources (to the point that we've had to tap into oil reserves that nature has stored for millions of years) compared to horses. We've been able to keep economics in check because we're in an age of consumerism. As technology advances we're able to produce more stuff at higher efficiency so to keep everyone employed the overall result has been to get everyone to use more things but realistically this can't go on forever. We'll eventually end up with resource shortages which will kill the entire system. So really this is more an economics problem and unfortunately humanity in general hasn't been known to change anything until almost the last possible second or worse.
When you consider Uber's track record for all the shady / bad things they've done, does the CEO mean invest or break the law? Because with Uber, it's honestly hard to tell.
All the focus on AI is largely missing the overall picture. It's the Automation of jobs that's killing jobs faster than even AI. When Ford assembled the first cars they had to be put together entirely by hand, so a gigantic labour force was required to mass produce cars. Nowadays it's done by robots. Farming was once done by hand and or with the assistance of horses or cattle. The addition of tractors, machinery and probably computer aided tractors has greatly increased the amount of area that a single farmer can farm freeing society from having to rely on nearly everyone to grow food.
Self Check-out, Banking from the computer or phone is fast wiping out service positions.
We live in a society where economic success of a nation is highly dependant on higher and higher levels of consumption in order to keep up with the ever increasing efficiency of production. (Otherwise we can't keep everyone employed.) It's partly why debt keeps sky-rocketing. But it will end because we can't keep consuming more, we've only got one planet and our resources are already straining. The future at this point is unavoidable, we need a completely different economic system or we'll be facing ruin at some point.
I doubt Tesla has any technology that would really be considered earth-shattering considering that the motor and electrical systems are not exactly unknown / cutting edge technology. Maybe a slight problem would be loss of strategic initiatives if there were any from the business side of things. A bigger problem would be paying for processing time from Amazon which is the equivalent of the hackers leeching cash and resources from Tesla. I'm somehwhat surprised thou that Amazon cloud being an obvious target of people trying to do this wouldn't have a security team that would be on the lookout of things like this. Surely it would be easy to write the equivalent of a viral scanner to look for cryptocoin algorithms and alert the owners "Ooops, you're crunching cryptocoins, have you been hacked?".
Consumers today unfortunately don't see the true cost of what all their products are. If they did, I sometimes wonder how many things we could stomach. It also seems that unfortunately when something seems "too good to be true" it turns out that somewhere someone paid the price either in environmental damage, or in sheer human lives. I'm not really sure what the ultimate solution is, as consumers the best we can do is to try to be aware of how things are made / built and pick those which least destroy our environment and lives. But that's easier said than done. CFCs for instance were deemed completely safe and they are. Who could have discovered that once it got high in our atmosphere it would destroy ozone which would lead to an increase in deadly skin cancers.
I know for some folks it's an inexpensive and easy way to get around town but sometimes one needs to consider the moral values behind a company too. Some great examples are cheap clothes made in India, so cheap in fact working conditions are so bad a factory collapses and killed / maimed a whole bunch of workers for which they almost got no compensation for. Uber's self driving program has also gotten itself into more serious accidents than google has managed probably due to them rushing and pushing the limits of safety. They flipped one car and drove the wrong way on a one way street in another incident. Maybe their new management is better but are you willing to be the first to try their self-driving cars if they ever come out?
"We could be moral too!" - We Just Don't Want To Be ;)
Sure Uber we believe you, after having all your executives quit due to discrimination issues within Uber, outright ignoring local city rules, spying on politicians checking out the system. Getting into a massive lawsuit with Google Alphabet where it looks like you poached an engineer and potentially paid him to do industrial espionage. Looking to get self-driving tech to fire all your Uber drivers despite them being paid so little they need to sleep in their cabs. Yup, sounds like a fine company to me.
Somehow I'm reminded of "Pokemon Go" and their goofball "Gotta Catch'em All" phrase. :)
AMD cards initially were more efficient at Cryptocurrencies because they're more general purpose in that you can do more things with them. Eventually when the AMD cards ran out, they went after the next most efficient to use use cards which are the Nvidia cards. It would be silly for either AMD or Nvidia to dedicate resources to making cards more attractive because let's face it, they both sold out of everything they have. Why make your product more attractive when you can't even keep it in stock? AMD revealed too that they would make more video cards but the rapid sell-off of graphics cards has caused a memory shortage from their provider Samsung. Considering the size of Samsung, this means Nvidia is likely facing similar shortages too.
Eventually popular CryptoCurrencies either move on to dedicated hardware or they wane in popularity and vanish for the market so they're not a good way to bet your future on. The whole put in roadblocks to stop users from using GPUs for anything other than gaming is silly. Why would anyone realistically want a limited product? Who care what people do with their expensive graphics cards when you have people on youtube breaking Iphones for fun. Just be patient, the market will eventually swing back to normal.
To be honest I can't say I'm too surprised hearing about all the evidence against Uber. While no one can be entirely sure, there's a very high possibility that they were in the wrong so by settling it stopped an embarrassing and potentially damaging legal case against them. You only need to look at their history to see that virtually everything they've done is borderline sketchy and or illegal or in grey areas. Even the reason why they want to automate cars is to line their bottom line by getting rid of uber drivers.
I think part of the problem is a lot of folks don't really understand how current AI technology which hasn't changed in decades works compared to how our minds work things out. Recall that there was a recent AI project to find the meaning of the Internet and the answer it came up with was "Cats" because they seem to appear far more often then any other topic on the Internet. That is a mathematical mean or average, the optimal answer but ask any normal person and cats won't be the answer that they give you.
And there in lies one of the biggest problems with our current AI, it's only able to do things that we ask it and they need a clear solution. You can't exactly ask an AI, "do you think this person lived a happy life?". What makes this question bizarre is we're not entirely sure what the answer to that is ourselves but in most cases we can usually tell.
I have to admit I was watching it live and it looked like everything went smoothly as can be. I'm guessing SpaceX probably simulated everything for the launch but as they say sometimes you have to try it out in real-life to see if it really works! I imagine the United Launch Alliance might be panicking now as SpaceX is well on their way of making "Heavy" launches significantly cheaper as former heavy launches were all done by them with a significantly more expensive rocket.
It's probably wise to start preparing for the changes that are coming. We're inherently lazy. It doesn't take a genius to notice that when it comes to protecting the environment or heath a lot of folks wait until it's almost too late before doing anything. It's one of the reasons why I find people who deny climate change for the most part disappointing. Most are playing the let's ignore it until it becomes a serious issue at which point it's either harder to fix or fatal. And in many ways it's already starting, many areas are seeing more flooding, fires and general weather damage that they have never seen before. The flood of migrants into Europe are primarily folks in Africa fleeing multi-year droughts for example. Now I'm not one to say that the world will end but at the very least it might be a good idea to be prepared for it. Insurance companies for example are taking this seriously because they're often on the paying end when things go south because they don't want to go bankrupt when the next disaster hits.
Although this one will probably be adrift in space, I just realized that they could claim the title of the fastest car in history since it'll be zooming through space at speeds not possible on land. Too bad it won't be under it's own power.
Okay so there's lots wrong with this line of thinking. First it's not AI is taking away jobs but automation. As we get machines to handle various jobs it lessens the workload on us.
Two retraining isn't going to help you too much. Being adaptable is a more important requirement. It doesn't guarantee you success but it allows you to adopt changing situations which gives you a better chance when the opportunity arrives. Too many folks refuse to adopt or change when the situation arises. I've gone from systems admin to call center rep to helpdesk to programmer and back again in less than a decade. Don't give up and adopt to life as it changes. Sounds easy but it's much harder than it seems.
Third, nothing is going to save us from this issue. Many folks mistakenly think that the US for example produces less in modern times. The reality is we actually produce more but require less people to do so. Economic output has never shrunk. So in order to keep the same workforce we need to consume more to keep up. Why else do we consume more resources and energy than any generation before it? It's to keep up with this issue but there's a problem, we're going to reach the point where the planet exhausts and can't keep up then our economies are going to crash.
In the long run, we need to switch to a society where you don't need a job to survive. It's the unfortunate only way otherwise society is going to implode. I've seen suggestions for the arts and or creativity as there's no limits on that.
The sad reality of this situation is that everyone wants "free" services. People love free E-mail, free cloud storage, free search engines but in the end no one is willing to pay for them. I've been long aware that they do track if anyone's even paid slight attention to banner ads because the sites you visit tend to follow you around in the ads. I mean seriously, do a search for something on newegg and bang suddenly that item follows you around on ad banners. Other hints such as google allowing you to use persistent login which basically attaches a tracking cookie in your browser but allows you to mostly login without having to type in username and password in Gmail is convenient. I however am not paranoid, sure Google probably knows a LOT about me but they do have the decency to mostly keep it anonymous to advertisers. Advertisers (companies) mostly want to know what you're interested in so they can pitch things that will sell. They're not after you personally. Maybe that will change someday with Google getting desperate or the government for some unknown reason is interested in your activities but for the most part most people over-react. I can't blame Google for this as they're simply doing what people in general want. Unless you can honestly tell me that you'd rather pay for all the Internet services that are "free".
I think this engineer has a serious lack of understanding how a large company works! First off of course they're conservative! What they're doing is obvious working because they're making money and succeeding in what they're doing. They're not going to do a risky change just as an experiment which could risk sinking the entire company. Second politics are obvious! There's no large organization that is politics free, the only way you're going to not have politics is either everyone is the same which is lie or your company is very small. Otherwise expect some politics. Google still innovates with the AlphaGo (AI) research projects and their self-driving vehicle projects among other things. I think this engineer is just bitter that they can't just go up google and say I have this awesome idea, give me all the resources I want now.
And there's merit to keeping focused on your core products. Google to today still makes a rock solid search engine. Compare that to Microsoft who's Window releases switch non-stop between disasters and great products. Chrome grew from a non-existant browser to the market leader while Microsoft's IE or Edge despite all their effort has lost as former market leader. Things like this don't happen without a company doing what customers want.
Folks complain that google collects a huge amount of information and sells it to advertisers. Good point but without doing that, how do you run a system that large for "free"? The one thing that I believe Google is still doing right is keeping individual information away from advertisers, that is they can't identify you as an individual but instead advertisers get an aggregate view. It might change someday which is frightening considering how much data Google has but till then we can reap the benefits of their "free" services. Don't like it? Switch to a competitor who runs either worse services or does the exact same thing but isn't as "open" about what they're doing.
Ever heard of artificial flavouring? So here's a fun question, why are many of us able to tell the difference between artificial flavouring and natural flavouring? The answer is because natural flavouring like many plants have thousands of chemicals which our taste buds can pick up. Generally speaking it's difficult to reproduce artificially. Synapses in our brain are affected by hormones and signalling chemicals including drugs. An artificial Synapse can't remotely come close to simulating that at this point. So our artificial synapse like flavouring is massively simplified for it to work.
The thing a lot of AI news fails to point out is they created a Synapse based on our models and assumptions on how it sort of works. Or at least how we *think* it might work. Actual biological systems are far more complex and so this is not an accurate representation of a synapse in our brain. Sadly many of these models are very rough approximations, they're not reflective of what's going on in reality. We're still likely far from true autonomous AI.
I think this one's a tough call. Gene editing could hold the key to curing some incurable diseases but it could also produce a moral issue where it's used for eugenics instead. People after all are willing to alter themselves for vain reasons but is that right? I think there's a slightly lesser risk of disease outbreak unless government is doing hostile black ops research but don't expect zombies or anything like that. Think more a plague outbreak.
Science is a double-edged sword, think nuclear science. It's given us so many modern technologies we take for granted but also it's also given us a chance to blow ourselves off the planet. Genetics is probably similar.
I admit I don't have kids because I'm single but I didn't grow up around the Internet until my University years and even then I would say that it's full of wonderful things and horrible things. I don't think giving your kids full access to everything is wise and possibility slightly irresponsible. Life shouldn't revolve around social media at least in the beginning.