One nitpicky-type thing for me in the article is saying that Sebastian Thrun invented the first driverless car. Yes, he was the head of the Standford team who won in 2005, but he was on the CMU team the competition before where Red Whitaker was the team lead. The fact that these teams were quite huge also prevents someone from saying that one person invented the driverless car. Being team lead on a team who wins the second competition certainly doesn't mean that person invented the tech. I know I'm being anal about it, but there were a lot of people who competed in the DGC, and it is quite annoying to hear people mention his name in that regard. Having talked to Sebastian a few times during the competition, I would think he thinks the same way.
It's important to put some face to tech/science
breakthroughs otherwise the general public doesn't
relate. Also, in that vacuum you'll get
politicians gaining credit. Kennedy gets
a lot for credit the moon landings because
their wasn't a clear face to put it to,
while in the manhattan project at least
oppenheimer gets credit.
(Except, ignore the Moffett field thing. That has nothing to do with AI research as far as I know.)
Anyway, any Googler will confirm that Sergey Brin, in particular, keeps returning to this idea: that Google's ultimate destiny is to realize Strong AI.
I'm not saying they've achieved anything. But I would not be surprised if they were putting substantial resources into it. It's even directly related to their bottom line. It doesn't have to end in HAL 9000. They may come up with some technology that is just more insightful about search queries. But even that would be worth billions and billions.
I've often wondered whether an AI system like OpenCyc could derive its knowledge base from web content, rather than relying on rules and assertions written by the AI's human caretakers. If anyone could do that, it would be Google.
"It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. [...] These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. "
Those are shoot-for-the-stars ideas? I hope those are at the lowest end of the scale. They seem pretty boring to me.
I've been hearing talk of self-restocking fridges for at least 10 years. It's the ultimate go-to cliche for the "connected devices" hype, that's now called the "internet of things."
Ironically enough, the refrigerator-ordering-ingredients thing was one of the talking points of Microsoft Home [1] when I worked there eight years ago...
I think Google is perfect company to make those future products that have been 5 years away for the last 15 years. Intelligent fridge probably comes to mind first, but there are a lot. Some of those ideas just need clever people to work on it (check), resources for research (check) and ability to produce it in scalable way (check). Maybe we'll finally see an affordable house robot that helps more than disturbs.
The "Internet connected refrigerator that manages food for you" has been an example of this sort of thinking for at least 10 years, and it's no closer to being something that anyone actually wants.
Intelligent refrigerators based on
computer vision (and not rfid) is
actually a shoot for the stars kind
of idea. It would also revolutionize
retailers, distributors, and manufacturers.
Those ideas are also pure speculation by the author. The closest she comes to backing any of them up was when she said that the founders like space elevators.
There have been times in my life where I've thought that I've had a "genius" idea and every cell in my body has said "Don't tell anyone. Hoard it. Cultivate it. And you'll be a revolutionary!"
And then I end up sharing. And there never ceases to be one or two or four perspectives shared that I never thought of before. And in the end, I think the idea flourishes because I was open and shared and iterated and shared those iterations.
Do these "top secret" labs ever make the big cognitive leaps that we hope for?
PARC gave the world Graphical User Interfaces, object oriented programming, ethernet, laser printers, precursors to PostScript, and a few other major breakthroughs.
It wasn't necessarily a "secret lab", but its distance from XEROX management on the east coast made it effectively an under the radar operation (to their detriment, of course)
Big cognitive leaps? Judging by the first paragraph of the article: "the future is being imagined...It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low."
the answer is "no". Of course that could just reflect a lack of imagination in NYT journalism, but really? I remember writing about that idea in early 1995 - about the same time that there was a fashion for universities to wire their Coke machines to the net, and about 5 years after Cambridge University frst wired its coffee pot to a network: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html
> Do these "top secret" labs ever make the big cognitive leaps that we hope for?
Clifford Cocks discovered public key cryptography years before RSA, while he was working for Government Communications Head Quarter (GCHQ) which is an environment with (especially at the time he did it) a lot of secrecy, both from workers to the outside world but also amongst workers internally.
Who knows what else they've discovered that has not yet been released?
I'd assume that it depends on the "top secret" -ness of the lab. In a large enough top secret lab, there is a diverse enough set of perspectives to still provide the sharing culture that ideas need to flourish.
In a right-sized enough top secret lab, you can keep the "that's just too crazy, it'll never work" attitude out, while affording the isolation from real-world concerns necessary for "too crazy" to become "just crazy enough".
It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating.
The stuff that could have been invented 5-10 years ago but was not interesting enough to warrant the effort
I've been hearing about fridges-that-order-groceries for at least ten years. It's one of those dumb ideas that just keeps coming up, despite the fact that there's no demand for it. Basically, I don't trust my fridge with my credit card... and besides, I don't want to order groceries by delivery anyway, particularly not the kind of perishable goods that I'd be keeping in my refrigerator.
I suppose I wouldn't mind having a fridge which knew what was in it, so I could check what I needed to pick up on my way home before I left the office. But I doubt the system could be made smart enough that it actually saved me more mental effort than it consumed. The low-tech version is to simply put cameras in your fridge so that you can check its contents remotely... but even if I had this set up I doubt I'd use it all that often.
Maybe I'm being overly harsh on the smart-fridge idea. But I think it's representative of a huge class of dumb ideas: let's use fancy technology to save some minor effort for the consumer, at the cost of the consumer now having to go to the effort of acquiring, learning and maintaining yet another fancy piece of new technology. Screw it, I want my microwave with dials back.
While I might enjoy the convenience, the way I stock my fridge just isn't a constant datapoint. If there are no eggs in my fridge, it might be because I don't want any eggs for a while, not because I didn't think of buying any.
To solve this, you'd need human interaction etc. etc. and you soon arrive at a point where you just stock the frigging thing yourself anyhow. For a one-household effort, this really doesn't warrant the effort.
A different story could be approaching it as some sort of communal effort, say the combined amount of fridges in one multi-story house or student dorm. If you could plan your meals /assisted/ by your fridge and it could tell you that the guy next door has eggs that are free, you wouldn't need to buy a whole carton just because you want to bake a cake, thus possibly reducing waste.
In the end, this puts us back to the old privacy implications versus efficiency problem that remains largely unsolved.
Or, more realistically: not economically viable enough to warrant dropping millions of dollars into R&D that may never be profitable. Google's piles of cash change this.
I'd prefer ones that warn you when they get too warm via text message. Might not do anything if the power went out, but if the door was slightly ajar, it'd be a lot better to get an alert than to have all your ice cream melt and your meat thaw.
Oh, and they should start putting windows in the doors so that people don't stand there with the door open, thinking about what to eat.
I'm pretty sure all of that is trivial for a good engineer to wire up these days. Though if we ever had a 'smart' enough fridge, I could also see people integrating things with the various social dieting apps or whatever.
I am hacker and a geek, but nowadays I am more and more interested in marketing.
I am wondering in what part the existence of such a lab and the emphasis in their communication on A.I. is a conscious marketing effort. I can imagine that even if nothing from that lab will make direct profit for them, and even if their search engine will never be even close to strong A.I. they can communicate an excellent marketing message: when you use Google you use strong A.I. (or at least almost).
If we think about it this way the secretiveness can also make the story more exciting from a marketing perspective. Also if this is their main motivation then they will create more 'spectacular' prototypes rather than just honestly trying to solve deep problems.
Being more and more interested in marketing in the way you've described means to me that you are cultivating a more and more robust, healthy skepticism of the messaging that comes from our media/corporate centers.
"Because Google X is a breeding ground for big bets that could turn into colossal failures or Google’s next big business — and it could take years to figure out which — just the idea of these experiments terrifies some shareholders and analysts.
“These moon-shot projects are a very Google-y thing for them to do,” said Colin W. Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “People don’t love it but they tolerate it because their core search business is firing away.” "
Is it just me or does this represent the worst of Wall Street short-term thinking? I mean, the first sentence could really be read as an indictment of venture capital as a whole.
I think what Google's best at is not so much innovation as taking existing innovations typically reserved for Dept. of Defense/B2B uses and bringing it to consumers for free.
We already know the DoD already has tech that is years ahead. Google is one of the few companies who can not only afford to bring crazy breakthroughs like Google Street but to do so in a financially profitable or feasible manner.
> We already know the DoD already has tech that is years ahead.
You'd be amazed at the age of a lot of the tech involved in military technology.
Once a design gets approved there's very little opportunity to change it, and so years later people are having to try and source obsolete ICs or transistors. And if the designers are careless things get obsolete really quickly; I know a design that used a Bourns resistor network with a 1% tolerance. This package was once offered by Bourns, but the standard was 2% tolerance, and the 1% part was rare and thus very expensive. See the number of brokers offering new-old stock or obsolete components at expensive prices. (Obligatory "YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK" quote here.)
I disagree that dod has the best
tech already in "top secret". The
best tech is often dod sponsored,
but is made public by the university
researchers who usually create it.
And it's not costly, you can go read
it and use it, often the stuff is
released as open source software
on the researchers' website.
I can't help but feel the article starts by missing the point. Connecting random devices to the internet is only a good thing when you get something neat out. Sticking a 3G modem in random devices & a bit of hardware is low-hanging fruit.
Nothing is ever flawless. If you focus on refining one technology too long, the world will change around you and it'll become obsolete. Imagine Microsoft patching Windows 95 for 15 years.
Maybe it's somehow an important proof-of-concept AI challenge, but restocking my fridge does not make the list of things I desperately need better technology for.
The driverless cars are old news and space elevators are a niche at best. Whatever makes Google X interesting must truly be top secret.
not sure if you're being serious, but no, google labs was a bunch of experimental projects run by normal google software engineers. this is an entirely separate thing.
Too bad I can't watch the spaghetti cannon at work during lunch. I know it's silly, but silly is fun.
Stuff like YouTube (as well as Netflix) is helping to kill broadcast TV (alright, reality TV and other low value cruft is also helping to kill broadcast, as well as fixed show schedules). Long term, internet video is more democratic, as well as flexible and fun. Perhaps stuff like YouTube will have more effect on society that internet-fridges and AI cars?
[+] [-] nosequel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshallp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilk|14 years ago|reply
http://ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/google-fou...
(Except, ignore the Moffett field thing. That has nothing to do with AI research as far as I know.)
Anyway, any Googler will confirm that Sergey Brin, in particular, keeps returning to this idea: that Google's ultimate destiny is to realize Strong AI.
I'm not saying they've achieved anything. But I would not be surprised if they were putting substantial resources into it. It's even directly related to their bottom line. It doesn't have to end in HAL 9000. They may come up with some technology that is just more insightful about search queries. But even that would be worth billions and billions.
[+] [-] noibl|14 years ago|reply
Clearly you're not aware of the CADIE incident a couple of years ago.
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/landing/cadie/
Be sure to check the blog.
(By far my favourite piece of Google whimsy, for the detail and number of teams involved) (You're right, muro)
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|14 years ago|reply
Those are shoot-for-the-stars ideas? I hope those are at the lowest end of the scale. They seem pretty boring to me.
[+] [-] JonnieCache|14 years ago|reply
It's the modern-day version of the Honeywell H316 Kitchen Computer: http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/2/163/F9.large.jpg
[+] [-] jforman|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/03/microsofts-home-of-the-fu...
[+] [-] Juha|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylvinus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donaq|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
"... Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space."
[+] [-] snowwrestler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ori_b|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshallp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adgar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|14 years ago|reply
And then I end up sharing. And there never ceases to be one or two or four perspectives shared that I never thought of before. And in the end, I think the idea flourishes because I was open and shared and iterated and shared those iterations.
Do these "top secret" labs ever make the big cognitive leaps that we hope for?
[+] [-] flyt|14 years ago|reply
It wasn't necessarily a "secret lab", but its distance from XEROX management on the east coast made it effectively an under the radar operation (to their detriment, of course)
[+] [-] Angostura|14 years ago|reply
the answer is "no". Of course that could just reflect a lack of imagination in NYT journalism, but really? I remember writing about that idea in early 1995 - about the same time that there was a fashion for universities to wire their Coke machines to the net, and about 5 years after Cambridge University frst wired its coffee pot to a network: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
Clifford Cocks discovered public key cryptography years before RSA, while he was working for Government Communications Head Quarter (GCHQ) which is an environment with (especially at the time he did it) a lot of secrecy, both from workers to the outside world but also amongst workers internally.
Who knows what else they've discovered that has not yet been released?
[+] [-] snprbob86|14 years ago|reply
In a right-sized enough top secret lab, you can keep the "that's just too crazy, it'll never work" attitude out, while affording the isolation from real-world concerns necessary for "too crazy" to become "just crazy enough".
[+] [-] treetrouble|14 years ago|reply
The stuff that could have been invented 5-10 years ago but was not interesting enough to warrant the effort
[+] [-] hugh3|14 years ago|reply
I suppose I wouldn't mind having a fridge which knew what was in it, so I could check what I needed to pick up on my way home before I left the office. But I doubt the system could be made smart enough that it actually saved me more mental effort than it consumed. The low-tech version is to simply put cameras in your fridge so that you can check its contents remotely... but even if I had this set up I doubt I'd use it all that often.
Maybe I'm being overly harsh on the smart-fridge idea. But I think it's representative of a huge class of dumb ideas: let's use fancy technology to save some minor effort for the consumer, at the cost of the consumer now having to go to the effort of acquiring, learning and maintaining yet another fancy piece of new technology. Screw it, I want my microwave with dials back.
[+] [-] skore|14 years ago|reply
To solve this, you'd need human interaction etc. etc. and you soon arrive at a point where you just stock the frigging thing yourself anyhow. For a one-household effort, this really doesn't warrant the effort.
A different story could be approaching it as some sort of communal effort, say the combined amount of fridges in one multi-story house or student dorm. If you could plan your meals /assisted/ by your fridge and it could tell you that the guy next door has eggs that are free, you wouldn't need to buy a whole carton just because you want to bake a cake, thus possibly reducing waste.
In the end, this puts us back to the old privacy implications versus efficiency problem that remains largely unsolved.
[+] [-] JakeSc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|14 years ago|reply
Oh, and they should start putting windows in the doors so that people don't stand there with the door open, thinking about what to eat.
I'm pretty sure all of that is trivial for a good engineer to wire up these days. Though if we ever had a 'smart' enough fridge, I could also see people integrating things with the various social dieting apps or whatever.
[+] [-] nadam|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattdeboard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ootachi|14 years ago|reply
“These moon-shot projects are a very Google-y thing for them to do,” said Colin W. Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “People don’t love it but they tolerate it because their core search business is firing away.” "
Is it just me or does this represent the worst of Wall Street short-term thinking? I mean, the first sentence could really be read as an indictment of venture capital as a whole.
[+] [-] badclient|14 years ago|reply
We already know the DoD already has tech that is years ahead. Google is one of the few companies who can not only afford to bring crazy breakthroughs like Google Street but to do so in a financially profitable or feasible manner.
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
You'd be amazed at the age of a lot of the tech involved in military technology.
Once a design gets approved there's very little opportunity to change it, and so years later people are having to try and source obsolete ICs or transistors. And if the designers are careless things get obsolete really quickly; I know a design that used a Bourns resistor network with a 1% tolerance. This package was once offered by Bourns, but the standard was 2% tolerance, and the 1% part was rare and thus very expensive. See the number of brokers offering new-old stock or obsolete components at expensive prices. (Obligatory "YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK" quote here.)
[+] [-] marshallp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 46Bit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keeran|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thadwoodman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suivix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balsam|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jopt|14 years ago|reply
The driverless cars are old news and space elevators are a niche at best. Whatever makes Google X interesting must truly be top secret.
[+] [-] wlievens|14 years ago|reply
What does that even mean?
[+] [-] civilian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _corbett|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roboprog|14 years ago|reply
Stuff like YouTube (as well as Netflix) is helping to kill broadcast TV (alright, reality TV and other low value cruft is also helping to kill broadcast, as well as fixed show schedules). Long term, internet video is more democratic, as well as flexible and fun. Perhaps stuff like YouTube will have more effect on society that internet-fridges and AI cars?