Other tech companies should be very worried about Google. The future of tech will only work with lots of data (emails, contacts, calls, location etc.). Google is best placed to take advantage of this. People have been giving Google this info for years. Even if Apple or Microsoft came up with a great new email system and people started switching it's only one part of the puzzle. If ordinary users like this contextual future Microsoft and Apple look screwed (unless Apple is working on something secretly). And I say this as a Mac user and an iPhone user/developer.
It seems that Mr. Kurzweil has become very influential at Google. This is indeed the future that he predicts, and i can understand why google want's to be a part of that !
The overlap in the core competencies of Google and the US military seem so small that I'm not sure that's a meaningful question to ask.
Google is ahead in technology that it needs (search engines, advertising, web applications at massive scale) and the US military is ahead in the technology that it needs (generally things that ultimately involve the threat or application of violence).
Apples to oranges, isn't it? I'm sure the military is far ahead of Google, in terms of building weapons. But I'm sure Google is much better at building search engines.
You think the military is ahead? In what respect? The air force has advanced aircraft, the NRO has high-resolution satellites, and the navy has powerful ships; but none of this puts them "ahead" of Google's specialized computers, or data processing capabilities.
It depends on what you mean, but as a general rule? A very long way. There is far more to military tech than the speculative lab and consumer goods startups that Google has acquired. There is a good reason that the latest fighter jets run software that is ancient by Google's standards: it has to be a 100% rock solid in a deeply hostile environment, it is tightly integrated into other systems, and it builds on many years of practical war fighting experience.
A company like Google would theoretically have the resources and expertise to begin the process of militarizing their acquisitions, but it would be many years before they could come close to the operational capability.
>>it has to be a 100% rock solid in a deeply hostile environment, it is tightly integrated into other systems, and it builds on many years of practical war fighting experience.
This sounds too good to be true. In a perfect world maybe, but we are speaking of people who love to cut corners to save few bucks, and who price very little the life of a person/soldier. If federal contractors can't do a website right ( healtcare.gov anyone?) what are the chances things are as rock-solid as you say? I honestly can't say from the outside, but I am skeptical.
It's not just the human cost: in a billion dollar nuclear bomber you have powerful economic and political motivations on making sure it doesn't fail at an inopportune time.
But if it does, you will always be able to blame things on user error so long as a user is in the loop. I'm sure the crash diagnostics output from a billion dollar bomber is only available to the manufacturer and if it is available to an independent third party investigating a crash, it's probably only parseable/understandable by the engineers who wrote the code in the first place.
If there is only place where corners definitely get cut, it's on returning diagnostic for functions/processes that didn't need to be debugged/logged in order for the product to make it not just out of the lab but into production.
Production bugs are the hardest to diagnose, because they are the least likely to have their causes instrumented/measured/logged.
