Tag: Google

Singularity University Summit, Seville, March 2015

Hyatt Hotels has revenues of $4bn and a market value of $8.4bn. AirBnB has revenues of $250m, 13 staff, pretty much no assets, and a market value of $14bn. It will soon be the world’s largest hotel company. Über was founded in 2009 and has a market cap of $40bn, despite – again – having pretty much no physical assets. It has taxi drivers up in arms all over the world. Magic Leap, a virtual reality company, raised $50m in February 2014 and then $550m in October. It persuaded the second set of investors to contribute by showing them a...

The Guardian asks: Are the robots about to rise?

The Guardian has a detailed article (here) about Ray Kurzweil, and the prospects for artificial general intelligence.  It's by Carole Cadwalladr, a feature writer and novelist who has produced a series of speculative pieces about the impact of technology. Presumably it was the sub-editor who added the obligatory Terminator photo, but it's still worth a read. In 2004 Andrew Marr wrote that the default answer to questions like this in newspaper headlines is "No".  (The observation was later named Betteridge's Law of Headlines.)  Phew.

Should you short Apple?

Here's a brief history of the human race, plus a glimpse into our near future. A few geological seconds ago, our ancestors discovered that cooking meat made it safer, more nutritious, and longer-lasting.  Cooked food is an efficient fuel, and it enabled the human brain to grow. Brains are expensive in terms of energy: ours use 25% of all the energy we consume.  If you're going to have a bigger brain, you need a more efficient source of energy.  The human brain is not the biggest in the animal kingdom, but it is large proportionate to our size and weight....

Google Glass for Virgins

Virgin Atlantic is trialling Google Glass.  For the next six weeks, Passengers flying Virgin Upper Class from Heathrow's terminal three will be greeted by staff wearing Google's wearable computers.  The Virgin staff will be able to greet their customers by name, and will have immediate access to their preferences for drinks and food.  They will be able to update travellers on weather, flight times, connections, and, well, pretty much anything the internet knows. If the trial goes well it will be rolled out to other locations.  Which prompts the question, is this the first time in history that Heathrow terminal...

Why did Google buy all those robot companies?

Late last year the internet was lit up by the news that Google had bought eight companies that develop and manufacture robots.  A newsworthy development in itself, but what really got people talking was that Google did its buying very quietly, and didn't explain what it wanted all that robot tech for. The move into robotics wasn't taken lightly.  The (undisclosed) cost of the shopping spree probably wasn't enough to have a perceptible impact on Google's torrential cash flow, but it is significant that one of their key talents runs the new department: Andy Rubin, who was responsible for establishing...

Europe hits the gas pedal on driverless cars

There is no longer any doubt that driverless cars are coming.  Google recently announced that its test cars have completed half a million miles, with a flawless safety record. It hopes the technology will be available to the public in 2017.  Elon Musk, of PayPal and Space X fame, hopes that his electric car company Tesla Motors will have autonomous cars ready a year earlier. Outside the USA, governments and manufacturers don't want to be left behind.  Nissan has carried out the first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a Japanese highway, and now European governments are getting...

Building muscle at Calico, Google’s health moonshot

Google made waves in September when it launched its health research arm Calico, led by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of Roche's US biotech company Genentech. Calico has now announced the hire of four heavy-hitters from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.  Not surprisingly, three of them have connections with Genentech.  Dr Hal Barron was chief medical officer of Roche, which acquired Genentech in 2009 for $50bn.  He becomes president of R&D at Calico. Dr David Botstein, who joins Calico as chief scientific officer, was VP of Genentech in the late 1980s before moving to academia at Princeton, and Dr Bob Cohen leaves...

Google Glass takes the broader view

Google has several thousand people test-driving its optical head-mounted display product known as Google Glass.  Each of these people has just been asked to invite three other people to join in and become "Explorers".  If you're reading this anywhere outside the USA you can put your phone back down as the programme is only available to US residents over 18 years old. Meanwhile, Marc Levoy, a Stanford professor, claims that Google's first foray into wearable computing will give its users "superhero vision".  And he should know, since he's has just finished a two-year sabbatical working on the Glass project.  He...

What is Calico?

The launch last week of Google's Calico - California Life Company - is an important step in the battle against ageing.  But we still don't know whether it is a head-on charge against death itself, or an incremental approach, tackling individual diseases with Big Data.  The distinction is, well, a matter of life and death. Aubrey de Grey is Chief Science Officer of SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.  He thinks that by repairing seven types of molecular and cellular damage to the body which are caused by our basic metabolic processes, we can halt the ageing...

Google’s quantum computer

This is a post-script to my recent post on Eric Schmidt saying that the Turing Test would be passed within five years.  An interview with a pioneer in quantum computing suggests that Google just might be hoping to build a human-level AI in that sort of time frame. Google has recently bought a quantum computer from D-Wave, and during a long but fascinating webcast interview on Singularity 1 on 1, Geordie Rose, founder and Chief Technology Officer at D-Wave Computers, talked about how D-Wave is a key partner in Google's programme to develop machine intelligence.  Rose did not commit to any timelines, but when...

Mr Geek goes to Washington?

The Economist claims that technology plutocrats are starting to engage with the US political process in a more comprehensive way than they have previously deigned to do. The paper cites Steve Jobs as typical of the existing attitude.  After hosting a dinner with Barack Obama and some fellow tycoons, he reportedly complained “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It infuriates me.” The Economist argues that earlier interventions in Washington from Silicon Valley have been limited to specific issues, but now an organisation called FWD.us, a campaign for immigration reform (seeking...

The Turing Test to be passed within five years – Eric Schmidt

“Many people in AI believe that we’re close to [a computer passing the Turing Test] within the next five years.”  So said Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, speaking at The Aspen Institute last month. The Turing Test, of course, was proposed in 1950 by brilliant computer pioneer Alan Turing as a way to decide whether a machine could be said to think. The Turing Test has many critics, but it seems to me that if a computer convinces a panel of humans that it has human-level consciousness and intelligence then we will have to accept that it is correct.  After all, that is...

Google Glass and different reactions to our cyborg future

Today I went on a tour of the Google campus at Palo Alto, arranged as part of a family holiday in California.  It was, of course, inspiring. (Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google late last year, and we were told that he works in building 42, but I did wonder if that was no more than a jokey reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) When I told Eryka, our charming Google staffer guide, that the first group of Google Glass users are now able to invite their friends to join the second wave, she gasped and reached for her phone...