Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks soâ€¦

J Thoendell stashed this in Tech

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/20...

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it boughtÂ Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like militaryÂ robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (Â£1.9bn) on smart thermostat makerÂ Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for Â£242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also boughtÂ Bot & Dolly,Â Meka Robotics, Holomni,Â Redwood RoboticsÂ and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publicationÂ Re/codeÂ two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's.

....

And it's the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google ever single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global "brain". Can it learn? Can it think? It's what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, "consciousness".

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Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it boughtÂ <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/29/google-robotics-us-military-boston-dynamics" title="">Boston Dynamics</a>, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like militaryÂ <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/robots" title="More from the Guardian on Robots">robots</a>, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (Â£1.9bn) on smart thermostat makerÂ <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/13/google-nest-labs-3bn-bid-smart-home-devices-market" title="">Nest Labs</a>. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for Â£242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also boughtÂ <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.botndolly.com/" title="">Bot & Dolly</a>,Â <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/04/google-robots-andy-rubin-amazon" title="">Meka Robotics</a>, Holomni,Â <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/robots-artificialintelligenceai" title="">Redwood Robotics</a>Â and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publicationÂ <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://recode.net/" title="">Re/code</a>Â two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's.

....

And it's the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google ever single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global "brain". Can it learn? Can it think? It's what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, "consciousness".