First and foremost the video highlighted some really interesting products and services Google's been developing for commercial purposes. The one that stands out the most is probably their recent acquisition of Nest Labs, a small-start up co-founded by two Apple Engineers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. What does Nest Labs do? Well, they essentially create smart houses. They've found a way to deliver smart thermostats and smoke alarms; devices that can automatically learn heating and cooling preferences, coordinate it with monthly costs and budget restraints, and accomplish all of this with the extra comfort of being able to be controlled from any device that is capable of running the correlated application. Pretty cool, right?
So great, Google is on the verge of making Disney's 1999 made for TV-movie, Smart House, a very real possibility, but that's not all they're up to these days. What I'm about to discuss next though may alarm some people, for there's always someone to sound the dystopian alarm, and proclaim we're on the verge of seeing Schwarzenegger like machines coming for our day of judgement.
Over the last few months Google has gone on a shopping spree of very large and small companies within the advanced robotics industry, and when I say advanced, I mean it. Just take a look at their biggest acquisition, Boston Dynamics, and see what their machines are capable of doing. On top of all of this, they've been buying up companies that specialize in all sorts of robotic parts, from optics, arms, to legs.
Moreover, it was recently announced that Google was partnering up with NASA and D-Wave, a company who is making waves (no pun intended) within the field of quantum computing. What's quantum computing you may ask? Well, computers run off of bits, small tiny pieces of information that either exist within a binary state of a 1 or 0. Quantum computers operate off of qubits, pieces of information that exist under the conditions of quantum phenomena known as super-positioning and quantum entanglement. What does that mean? Essentially qubits can exist as both a 1 or a 0 at the same time, allowing for greater optimization of power, since these qubits would also be entangled with other qubits, exponentially increasing said power. It is believed that these computers one day will assist in tackling some of civilizations greatest issues; from climate change to global poverty, advanced algorithms could be used to solve tough questions and benefit society.
The last bit of recent news was that Google acquired DeepMind, a London based AI firm that was started in 2010 by child prodigy Demis Hassibis. What does DeepMind do? Well, the website is rather terse, with just a simple home landing page that states," We combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." From what I've gathered a lot of what they do will allow computers to critically analyze images and semantically interpret its content. Google hopes to utilize this to improve services such as Google Images, but with augmented reality devices such as Google Glasses in the works, one can only wonder what ideas they may have up their sleeves.
Now take all of this in, Google is making large advancements within the fields of machine learning, robotics, computing power, and on top of all of this, they have one of the most prominent futurists and technologists at the helm of their engineering; Ray Kurzweil. A man that Forbes. Inc magazine has called, "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison," Kurzweil has consistently made headlines for his accurate predictions of what technology would bring to human civilization, and he's positive his biggest prediction is only years away; the moment of the singularity, when artificial intelligence achieves a conscious like state parallel to human ability.
In the end, it's clear no other company is in a better position to usher in a new-age of technology, in fact, it very well seems that they're already on the verge of it. Still, there comes a point, I believe, where humans will have to make a decision under their own volition and decide to what extent we want technology to exist within our lives. I believe if anything, technology should be there to improve our existence within our environment, to makes us more efficient, to better our relationship with our ecosystem, and allow maximization of knowledge, sustenance, and welfare for citizens across the globe; but we have to ensure we do not perceive this as a justification for us to become dependent upon technology, rather, it's sole purpose should be to improve our lives, not define it.
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