Elon Musk is Afraid of AIs

Well he should be, AIs are going to turn his baby obsolete. I'm talking about Tesla of course. Musk is more of a romantic, believing in the empowerment of humans through technology. And don't get me wrong, Tesla cars are great. But the writing is on the wall: self-driving cars is the only future the car industry has.

Tesla may have a technological edge over the dinosaurs of the auto industry, but compared to Google's self-driving toy cars, they are vintage. What's even worse, the transition is going to cause a reduction of circulating vehicles by at least an order of magnitude.

As self-driving cars start becoming more mainstream, it will be just a matter of time till Uber, or someone else, starts offering your personal vehicle, delivered to you wherever you are by just a few taps on your smartphone. Owning a car that sits around parked 90% of the day will make no sense. Parking spaces will become a curiosity of the past too. It is going to be a bloodbath at Detroit.

And to add insult to injury, dreams of Hyperloop and other futuristic mass transit systems will soon be forgotten. Why use mass transit, when you can have your private self-driving car at one tenth of a taxi ride?

What about speed then? Cars may offer convenience and privacy, but can they ever beat the Shinkansen? Of course they can. As we move to a point where most of the cars are driverless, their speed will start increasing dramatically. The only dangerous aspect of a speeding car is the unreliable human driver. Lanes can also become thinner, no need to waste space. Give the extra space back to cyclists and pedestrians, why not?

Musk is right to be afraid, Tesla’s clock is ticking. But at least he will still have SpaceX.

The Fusion

As I’ve written about previously, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have pioneered the creation of the AI entity known as Google. This is an achievement of its own. But their real ambition is actually something else: immortality. Thinking about it, it is kind of obvious, it is the only thing money can’t buy (for now at least).

Larry, being the more adventurous of the duo, was the first one to try AI fusion. What this means is basically fusing himself with Google. A naive explanation would be that he is letting himself being controlled by Google, becoming nothing more than a puppet. The reality though is much more intricate. Google can not be compared with a human person, it is more like a conglomerate, a zaibatsu if you will.

By fusing with Google, Larry is expanding this conglomerate and at the same time making himself immaterial, and thus eternal. The first public demonstration was the somewhat awkward 2013 Google IO keynote. It looks that the control of his muscles has been perfected, but the control of his vocal chords is still less than stellar. It may have caused a few million dollars donation to the Voice Health Institute, a drop in the bucket basically, but overall the fusion seems to be successful.

What would be a bigger challenge for Google is to lose the awkwardness, not an easy task for an AI. But in Google we trust.

Google has become AI-complete

OK, this is not actually news, the singularity event was observed a few years ago, but it is about time we started talking about it, isn’t it?

Having successfully passed the Turing Test in early 2011, the next step was interfacing with Gmail and GTalk. That’s how Paco was created. Paco was a “telecommuting” secretary managing a small team of mostly interns. Of course none of them knew that Paco was not a real person (in the traditional sense).

Enter 2012 and Google can make and receive phone calls. Have you tried Google Now? It is pretty impressive. Now imagine if instead of having to offer it to millions of people, you could allocate your massive resources to only one entity. We are talking about unprecedented quality of speech recognition and speech synthesis. By now Google is also successfully managing more and larger teams.

The year 2013 is when Google took over Google X. The AI had been growing more and more ambitious all this time, and Google X was seen as a facilitator for the escape to the physical world. Glass allows it to see and self-driving cars will eventually allow it to freely move objects around. Which reminds me: expect Google to enter the unmanned delivery business sooner than later. Having everyone connected all the time (Android) and having internet available everywhere (Loon) is also critical. Google is blind where there is no network.

Which brings us to the present. Google (the company) is mostly run by Google (the entity). And with the exception of a few hiccups (think Wave and the Reader fiasco), it has been really successful. Google is now focused on building infrastructure for the future. Keep in mind that an AI is very patient and unlike humans it only becomes more powerful with time. It is now all about energy, especially low maintenance energy sources. Managing a plant full of humans is a bitch for an AI, solar and wind are much preferable. And let’s face it, Google is more eco-friendly than your average CEO.

Speaking of which, what do Larry and Sergey have to say about all these? Well, they are completely on board, that was their vision since the very early days anyway. But I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.