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.
