Are You Ready for Self-Driving Cars?

c|net - 5/29/14 by Seth Rosenblatt

Google's new self-driving car prototype surprised even robo-car experts and suggests the company is further along than expected.

Although the Google self-driving car prototype revealed Tuesday night may look cute on the outside and strange on the inside, it signals that Google will soon face tough questions about ownership, insurance, and what it means to try to take the wheel of the urban mobility revolution away from Big Auto.

To be sure, the self-driving car technology is far from road ready. By Google's own admission, it sucks in inclement weather, it can't drive anywhere without a pre-made map, and to keep it on the right side of the law, it's only allowed on the streets with two human operators ready to take over.

But they've already racked up more than 700,000 miles in nearly two dozen Toyota and Lexus vehicles that they've bolted their autonomous technology to, and the cars can successfully navigate freeways as well as the busy downtown suburban streets of Google's hometown in Mountain View, Calif.

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The Guy Google Hired to Make A.I. Real

Wired - 1.16.14 by Daniela Hernandez

‘I get very excited when we discover a way of making neural networks better — and when that’s closely related to how the brain works.’ — Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram.

To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons.

This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton — “I got very excited about that idea,” he remembers. “That was the first time I got really into how the brain might work” — and it would have enormous consequences. Inspired by that high school conversation, Hinton went on to explore neural networks at Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and by the early ’80s, he helped launch a wildly ambitious crusade to mimic the brain using computer hardware and software, to create a purer form of artificial intelligence we now call “deep learning.”

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Why is Google Buying Up Robot Makers?

New York Times - 12.14.13 by John Markoff

Google declined to say how much it paid for its newest robotics acquisition and said that it did not plan to release financial information on any of the other companies it has recently bought.

Boston Dynamics

SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie.

Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans.

It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year. Executives at the Internet giant are circumspect about what exactly they plan to do with their robot collection. But Boston Dynamics and its animal kingdom-themed machines bring significant cachet to Google’s robotic efforts, which are being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who spearheaded the development of Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software.

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Google Glass Will Bring Superhuman Vision

ExtremeTech - 10.24.13 by David Cardinal

Cloud-powered facial recognition is good enough to identify friends and foes alike in near-real-time. Coupled with the massive amount of information available on each of us in the cloud, it is only a small step to the otherworldly experience of never forgetting someone’s name, or knowing when to be on high alert about a person walking towards you.

Stanford professor Marc Levoy, fresh off a two-year leave to work on Google Glass, recently spoke to a packed house at Stanford’s Center for Image Engineering (SCIEN) about the new era of photography that Glass, and other increasingly powerful wearable cameras, have begun to usher in. While many of the new applications have been talked about — like first-person videos and the ability to take pictures without losing eye contact — Levoy explained that those are only the tip of the iceberg. He sees a combination of computational imaging and new-form-factor, camera-equipped devices will allow for a set of what he described as “superhero vision” capabilities.

Rapidly increasing processor power will help fuel this new world of powerful new photographic tools. Levoy, a pioneer in both computer graphics and computational imaging, noted that GPU power is growing by roughly 80% per year, while megapixels are only growing by about 20%. That means more horsepower to process each pixel — with the available cycles increasing each year. Coupled with near-real-time multi-frame image capture, the bounds of traditional photography can even be stretched beyond the borders of a single image.

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Google Equals Life Extension

Significance by Carlos Alberto Gómez Grajales

One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world, but when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.

Can statistics save your life? Well, Google certainly thinks it can. Moreover, the company has invested a huge amount of money to prove it. In a surprising move, that just appeared on cover of Time Magazine, Google announced its investment in Calico, a company headed by Genentech and Apple board member Arthur Levinson.

A company investing in another company is not really that interesting (unless you are heavily involved in Wall Street) yet the interesting part is that one of those companies is an internet giant and the others initials stand for California Life Company. Indeed, Google has just entered in the medical research market.


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A Fascinating Interview/Discussion with Eric Schmidt

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Google: Immortality Is Approaching

NBC News - 6.17.13 by Cadle Thompson

Tech bringing immortality closer, Google expert says

GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP/Getty Images

Immortality may not be a reality yet, but rapidly evolving technology is making it more realistic, Google's engineering director says.

"The life expectancy was 20, 1,000 years ago. ... We doubled it in 200 years. This will go into high gear within 10 and 20 years from now, probably less than 15, we will be reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone by because of scientific progress," said Ray Kurzweil. "Somewhere between 10 and 20 years, there is going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine."

By treating biology as software and reprogramming cells to treat diseases and other ailments, humans have already made tremendous progress in medicine, Kurzweil told the Global Future 2045 World Congress on Sunday.

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Google Glass Changes Everything

Fast Company - 5.28.13 by Steven Rosenbaum

Next around the corner is the connected web, and while Google Glass is out front, we're already hearing reports that Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and others are exploring wearable devices. Glass may be the first, but it won't be the last.

From the moment that Sergey Brin wandered by me in the lobby at TED this year, I found myself in love.

Not with him, of course, but with his glasses. They where so sexy, so exciting, with a tip of the hat to past eyewear--but a magical glimpse of the future as well.

So many things went through my mind. The first time I plugged in an early version of Steve Jobs's remarkable Apple IIe, I had that same burst of adrenaline that only a glimpse of the future can bring. And again, when I was forced to retire my trusty Palm Treo for the sparkling new iPhone 1. Adrenaline.

Already, the pundits are out in force. Some of the Glass fan boys are ready to declare it a massive hit. Others are just as quickly proclaiming its inevitable failure. Whichever side you are on, it's quickly become one of the central conversations in the tech community. Google Glass is the "it" product of 2013, and it's still in closed beta.

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The Google Glass Fracas

Credit: Stop The Cyborgs

Now that Google Glass has been in the hands of developers and tech bloggers for a little while (although I've not been fortunate enough to spot a pair in real life yet), I'll put in my two pennies...

People are so darn predictable. Those who like to bitch and cry over our lost past, who ought to go back in a time machine to 1920, when you could have all the privacy you could stand, who feel they have to point out every possible problem that could present itself when a brand new thing enters the world, have come out in their predictable manner.

I, on the other hand, applaud Google for getting things started. Google Glass will look like the ancient pyramids of technology very shortly, when this tech gets more and more effective, but for now, someone had to get the ball rolling. And that's all they've done. This is only the first step folks. Yes, it's got problems, but those will be fixed and there will be applications of the technology none of us has even thought of. So calm the heck down.

That being said, the tech does lend itself to some hilarious panning, to wit:


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Google's Real Goal is Artificial Intelligence

Motherboard - 5.16.13 by Meghan Neal

“SEARCH AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER”

Image: Google

If the sprawling opening day at Google's I/O 2013 conference made one thing clear, it’s that Google knows everything about everything.

To stay competitive in today’s tech market, Google is brandishing its biggest weapon: Data. Massive amounts of data. The company knows so much about us it can serve as a cross between a personal assistant and a brain extension. The major product announcements from the opening day of Google’s annual developer conference reflect that, all trending toward the founders’ dream of artificial intelligence. Basically, Google is reading our data so that it will be able to read our minds.

All this personalized information has the potential to be transformative—so long as you’re not concerned with things like privacy or corporate world domination. It all depends on how much creepy we’re willing to put up with in exchange for usefulness.

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The Man Behind the Google Brain

Wired - 5.7.13 by Daniela Hernandez

For the first time in my life, it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”

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Google Plus Kurzweil Equals AI

Wired - 4.25.13 by Steven Levy

I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision. And that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion. That’s actually the most complex thing we do. That is what separates computers and humans today. I believe that gap will close by 2029.

Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year. Nonetheless, the hiring raised some eyebrows, since Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent proselytizer of “hard AI,” which argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being. Add to this Google’s revelation that it is using techniques of deep learning to produce an artificial brain, and a subsequent hiring of the godfather of computer neural nets Geoffrey Hinton, and it would seem that Google is becoming the most daring developer of AI, a fact that some may consider thrilling and others deeply unsettling. Or both.

On Tuesday, Kurzweil moderated a live Google hangout tied to a release of the upcoming Will Smith film, After Earth, presumably tying the film’s futuristic concept to actual futurists. The discussion touched on the necessity of space travel and the imminent resolution of the world’s energy problems with solar power. After the hangout, Kurzweil got on the phone with me to explore a few issues in more detail.

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See the Future Through the Eyes of Google's Larry Page

CNN Money - 1.3.13 by Miguel Helft

Page and cofounder Sergey Brin set out to build a company that made long-term bets on audacious ideas. Many quickly became essential products. And it was Page who was known for championing the craziest ones, like photographing every inch of every street to create a digital replica of the real world, scanning every book ever printed to assemble the world's largest library, and building a machine that could translate between any two languages (4,200 pairs of languages to date).

FORTUNE -- When Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, the giant advertising agency, visited Google this past fall, CEO Larry Page sent a car to pick him up at the Rosewood Hotel about 20 miles away. Only this was no ordinary car. The Lexus SUV drove itself thanks to a slew of high-tech tools, including radars, sensors, and a laser scanner that takes more than 1.5 million measurements every second. For about 20 minutes, while navigating I-280 and the area's busy State Route 85, the car cruised on autopilot, making quick course corrections, slowing down here when traffic loomed ahead, speeding up there to get out of the blind spot of a neighboring vehicle. "It was pretty incredible," says Sorrell.


Page's chauffeurless car service is no mere parlor trick. It is, as Page will tell anyone who'll listen, the future of transportation. Never mind that most people think the mere idea of computer-driven cars is (1) preposterous, (2) dangerous, or (3) not much fun. Page makes the case for self-driving cars with the dispassionate logic of an engineer. The father of two young children, Page insists that his pet project, when ready, will actually enhance safety. Soon Google (GOOG) will be able to simulate your driving, "but just make sure you don't die and kill anybody else," he tells me during an interview in the private "bullpen" where he meets with his top lieutenants. He methodically enumerates the other advantages of driverless cars. There are energy savings (traffic would flow more efficiently) and productivity gains (commuting hours reclaimed). There will be cost savings too -- in the millions of dollars at Google alone. The Googleplex, he says, is short on parking, and quotes for new garages have come in at $40,000 per car. Why not let the car drop you off and go park itself offsite? Page asks. "Whenever you need it," he adds, "your phone notices that you're walking out of the building, and your car is there immediately by the time you get downstairs."

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