Is Google Nursing Artificial Intelligence?
Posted Jul 07, 2007
When George Dyson took a tour of Google's headquarters, he wrote an article for Edge that had a line which raised a few eyebrows:
The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
A lot of tech news sources jumped on this story, but when pressed for comment, Google executives didn't really address the question:
"Every engineer is able to take 20 percent of their time to work on non-core projects. Google News came out of that. We want to hire the best people and for them to work on the projects that they need to but we also want them to innovate. Most teams contain from three to five engineers. At our company if you have 20 people working on something then the project is not working," said Levick.
Google has given some insights into its AI work in the past. Speaking in 2003, Google Senior Research Scientist Mehran Sahami explained that Google News was using AI techniques to handle information.
"AI applications are using the infrastructure to get people useful information in interesting ways," said Sahami, according to reports. "There is no human intervention. Google News is an example of where AI is making a huge difference. It's used several million times a day," he added.
Sahami also reportedly hinted at AI-based research in progress at Google that has yet to be deployed, such as voice-driven search and query results clustering to help users navigate. "We want to combine information retrieval, large systems, and AI to work together towards the next generation of search engines," he said.
More from Dyson's article:
For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:
"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."
If anyone has further information:
UPDATE: further info from a news source I will never credit, cuz fuck 'em:
Responding to a direct question from Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, Google's Levick did not outright deny that Google was developing AI technology. Instead he postulated that the Google employee's comments were probably referring to the idea of "intelligent networks" of information rather than artificial intelligence.
However Levick did admit that Google's founders believe that current search technology is still in its infancy and the future would look very different. "Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] would say that search is nothing like it could be right now," he said.
When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google's core philosophy of "Don't be evil" guides all its actions.
Spread the Research:
Filed in: Future Tech
Next entry: Israeli Defense Force and Lateral Thinking
Previous Entry: Charles Tart on the Principles of Aikido
