
Google Will Become an AI Company - cwan
http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-company/
======
abstractbill
I was very impressed when I found out Google was running a free 411 phone
information service _just_ so that they could gather a ton of data to train
new voice-recognition algorithms. That's real long-term thinking, and
definitely makes them an AI company in my book.

~~~
cosgroveb
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I
hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I
didn't!

~~~
aneesh
1-800-BING-411 is still operational.

<http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/>

~~~
krschultz
I wonder if Microsoft is running that service for the same reason or simply
because Google had a 411 a product Microsoft thought they needed one too.

~~~
chc
I'm pretty sure it's the latter. Microsoft's MO lately has been to rip off
anything that makes their primary competitors unique, so they can go on being
a one-stop shop in any industry they believe themselves to be a part of. And
since Google is both a big competitor _and_ lacking any central concept to its
business, Microsoft will pretty much rip off anything they do.

~~~
riffraff
yet, microsoft has deployed voice recognition to some hundred millions users
over time, so they could have copied that idea to improve something they were
already selling.

------
jonmc12
Google has ALWAYS been an AI company. From the beginning, pagerank indexed
information, made meaning out of this information, and could predict the most
relevant url better than anything else in the market. Search was simply the
first application.

AI is not a market - AI is a tool. Google is NOT poor at product development.
However, it does seem that they have failed to build some products around AI
tools (like Google Wave).

Sure Google (and others) will continue to make products by applying AI to
market problems.. but they've been doing this their entire existence.

~~~
alex_c
I'm not that familiar with Wave (other than using it for a bit), but can you
expand on the connection between Wave and AI?

~~~
jonmc12
Basically the Wave protocol modeled real-time communication in a way that
Google Wave Bots & Gadgets could be deployed to add value to conversations
among groups. Google Wave was intended to be a playground where humans and AI
algorithms could meaningfully share information.

~~~
inboulder
Can you point out the way in which the "Google Wave Bots & Gadgets" had
meaningful elements of AI?

------
DanielBMarkham
This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of
the park.

Of all the tech that we talk about on here, there are only a few items that
really catch my attention. Christmas tree machines are one of them. Auto-drive
cars is the other.

These two inventions, when complete, will massively change things. Good luck
guessing when they'll be complete, though. Could be a decade. Could be a
couple of hundred years.

If cars could become more like rooms that automatically go places, instead of
complex machines that require constant care and oversight, vast amounts of
productivity and leisure opportunities would open up.

~~~
nollidge
What is a Christmas tree machine?

~~~
patio11
Scifi. Imagine you had nano-scale robots where, given a substrate to work
with, they would assemble whatever the local environment needed to look like,
then assemble two child bots coming from them like twigs on the branch of a
Christmas tree. This is supposed to allow arbitrarily complex construction at
prices which are rounding error next to current ones, solving scarcity,
reshaping the world, and generally making for a nice backdrop for your novel
of choice.

[Edit: Hmm, Daniel and I seem to have different etymologies for the word...]

[Edit the second: Engrish is hard.]

~~~
revorad
Oh you mean Kalpavriksha! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpavriksha>

------
nihilocrat
_2\. Children could own cars. Don’t feel like schlepping your kid to soccer
practice? Just buy them a car

6\. ... Make my car driverless (freeing me up to watch TV, read a book, catch
up on emails, etc.) and able to travel at twice the speed, and spend the
entire trip at top speed (rather than slowing down and speeding up on the
highway) and I could feasibly live as far as 100 mph away.

7\. Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan
when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes? _

This is bascially an apocalyptic scenario in my mind. I hate what the
automobile has done to US cities, making everything the same vanilla spread
and causing the car to become necessary to participate in modern life. I'm sad
this blogger doesn't even think twice about the advantages of public transit
(see: 6.) or more clever urban planning to reduce travel distances.

I like his basic thesis but I'm horrified by this example he puts forth. We
should be moving away from the car, not towards it.

~~~
chc
_Why_ should we be moving away from the car? You seem to take this as an a
priori fact. I see no advantages to public transit aside from less energy
waste, unless you just occasionally long for the scent of hobos.

And urban planning is not a solution. It's shutting the barn doors after
horses got out. Most urban areas have already been not only planned but fully
executed and there isn't public will to tear the whole thing down and start
over.

~~~
nihilocrat
Assuming we would have driverless cars, you don't have to worry about a
gigantic shell of metal that is expensive, will break down at inopportune
times, requires constant maintenance, copious parking space at any destination
of your choosing, insurance, contributes to crappy air quality (thankfully
reduced/solved by using electric power), and for which you have to spend hours
shoveling snow if you are in a colder climate. There are tons of other
problems if you focus on human-driven cars: drunk drivers, the need for
designated drivers, comparatively high risk of being killed or maimed, having
your kids nag you or someone else if they want to experience the world outside
of their neighborhood, driving course costs (oh wait, in America we don't have
to pay... in Europe, well, I hope you have several thousand euros). There are
so many issues that they greatly outweigh the ones in a properly-made public
transit system. I see cars as being useful for out-of-city excursions (but not
inter-city, just take the train) or for hauling things, but these situations
are not common enough that every single adult needs to own a car.

We don't actually have to tear down and start over, and I think you
underestimate the North American will to destroy old buildings. We just need
to use existing buildings more intelligently, turn asphalt seas into
courtyards, allocate green spaces and keep residental and commercial buildings
close together. I don't expect people to actually do any of this, particularly
in the US where it would be seen as a communist plot, but I'm happy there are
many places in the world where there is no need for urban
replanning/reorganization on a grand scale.

~~~
chc
With regards to public transportation, all I know is, after five years trying
to make do with it, I am _never_ going back to that hell. It's only barely
cheaper than owning a car, and the trips took 2–10 times as long. (The city
where I work has property very close to the businesses, but that property is
ridiculously expensive.)

~~~
nihilocrat
Most US public transit is abysmal, particularly if it's bus-only. Spend some
time in Europe.

------
alextp
What's the point of owning a driverless car? Apart from luxury/status, it
should be far cheaper to rent one as you go, in the driverless cab fashion.

Also, I can't help but cringe inside when people act as if the only benefit of
living in the city is less commute time. As far as my life goes, I'd trade
more commute time to live inside an urban centre with all the facilities at a
walkable distance plus all the nice benefits of density.

~~~
randallsquared
For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are (and I'm
struggling to think of more than one or two... choice of places to go for fun,
maybe?) seem offset by the harms of density, which are manifold. However,
lower commute time is something nearly everyone wants, even if it's currently
only 10 minutes, so it's an easy point to make.

~~~
achompas
_For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are_

Here are a few that I came up with in 30sec:

Varied options on things to do (like you said)

Closer proximity to other people in general (more social opportunities)

Commuting on foot

Better access to more government services

Greater selection of goods, food and produce

~~~
randallsquared
Except for "Greater selection of goods, food and produce", all the ones you
add seem like they could be costs rather than benefits, for many people.
Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms
I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I
guess.

The one about greater selection isn't actually true, as far as I can tell. You
can get pretty much anything shipped to your small town, and while you're less
likely to just run across something at the store that you find you like,
you'll be paying lower prices for everyday stuff. I live in the DC metro, and
every time I travel to visit friends or family (who all live in far less
densely populated areas), I'm struck by how much cleaner, cheaper, and open
everything is, and how everyone seems friendlier and less suspicious.

An advantage neither of us mentioned, but which is pretty large, I think, is
that people are less likely to have to move or change careers when changing
jobs.

~~~
achompas
I also live in the DC metro area...maybe we've met at the HN meetups? Will you
be there next Wednesday?

~~~
randallsquared
I went to the last one, but only stayed for a few minutes. I'll look into
where and when this next one is.

------
Tichy
I've bought some Google shares as an insurance, in case they develop true AI.
I hope the robots spare me if I can prove that I financed their creation.

------
izendejas
I'd say google IS an AI company. They do doc classification, nlp, speech to
text, vision, etc. They may not be great at some parts of it, but their
systems are constantly being trained and getting smarter as they release more
products and acquire more data.

~~~
_debug_
+1

Yes, Google is a machine learning company. And any sufficiently advanced
machine learning technology is indistinguishable from AI magic. :-)

------
Travis
Anyone else a little put off by the sentence, "To put that another way, if
Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than
doubled their revenue"?

That sounds an awful lot like the refrain from naive entrepreneurs to
investors: "the market is 100 billion dollars; if we capture 1%, we're a
billion dollar company!" In fact, I think we could describe it as a basic
entrepreneurial fallacy.

OTOH, Chrome went from 1.5% market share in Jan 2009 to 9.9% at the end of
2010. So I'm not going to say they can't do it, but I think Matt's piece is
weakened by the presence of the 2% fallacy.

I do agree with the overall gist, however.

------
100k
Traffic is caused by human error? I suppose flooding is caused by "water
error", then?

Traffic is caused by too many vehicles attempting to use a limited resource at
the same time. Driverless cars may make this more tolerable (certainly riding
the bus does) but the idea that this will make traffic obsolete is laughable.

~~~
maweaver
In my experience most traffic jams are caused by bad merging, not lack of
capacity. A few years ago I regularly drove a stretch of road that went from 2
lanes to 3 for a few miles and then back again, without gaining a significant
amount of traffic in between (I have no idea why the road was designed that
way, maybe one of the side roads feeding into it got a lot of traffic at a
different time of day or something). Every day there would be a traffic jam
where the third lane ended. Someone waits too long to merge and traffic has to
slow to let them in, or is nervous about moving over and has to be given
space, or whatever, and it just compounds until traffic literally stops at
that point. I see the same thing all the time at on/off ramps, turn lanes,
etc.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I've read several articles pointing out that traffic seems to be an emergent
behavior, and can be predicted like the flow of a gas, regardless of the
individuals involved.

------
stretchwithme
Not only will children be traveling by robotic car without the need for parent
or bus driver, so will that quart of milk you need from the store, that dry
cleaning and your grandmother.

Oh, and cab fare from the airport will cost less than the tolls. In fact, cabs
will be so cheap and numerous that most people won't bother owning a car for
anything other than recreational purposes.

------
kleiba
Rename that article to "Why driverless cars would be nice."

------
javanix
This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read.

There are nothing but complaints about Google's lack of personal customer
service in regards to their AdSense program - what makes you think that future
AI projects from the company would be any better?

Just because Google's made a self-driving car doesn't mean they're
automatically the front-runner in that category. What about all of those teams
that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year?

Also, the advantages that Maroon mentions (especially the safety ones) would
most likely only come to fruition once self-driving cars become ubiquitous -
something that its hard to imagine happening within the near future (or at
least during the current incarnation of Google as we know it).

~~~
mdonahoe
"What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car
competition every year"

I imagine that Google is hiring them. Sebastian Thrun, leader of the team that
won the first DARPA Grand Challenge, is now part of Google's driverless car
project.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun>

------
asnyder
After reading through much of the discussion regarding Matt's many interesting
points, it's somewhat troubling that nobody addresses the most obvious problem
with the realization of sufficiently good AI. In both cases mentioned, in
regards to cars, taxis, buses, and call centers, you displace thousands to
millions of human workers. While this is all very nice in our tech fantasy
lands if these scenarios come to pass you have another mass displacement of
low -> middle skilled workers.

It's of my opinion (I also remember reading about a global conference
regarding this issue),that our current society can't withstand another
displacement event of this size, even if it does come gradually. In the United
States anyway, we can already see massive unemployment due to certain jobs
just not existing anymore, for example, token booth clerks, replaced by
automated kiosks, cashiers replaced by automatic kiosks, conductors replaced
by automated trains, etc. etc.

Furthermore, there is always less need for highly skilled workers as the top,
so say you displace 1000 construction workers due to automation, you may only
need 100 foremen, leaving those previously 900 workers unemployed with no
prospects of employment even with sufficient education. It's a major problem
in my opinion, and possibly a problem we'll have to deal with in our lifetime,
especially if we see minor to significant improvements in AI and automation.

~~~
derefr
I don't see the problem; lowering scarcity lowers the _need_ for employment. A
king's feast from the 1800s can be bought today with welfare money. When we
eliminate the need for _all_ jobs, we can just relabel ourselves "socialist"
and call it a day.

~~~
ippisl
This is not the state today. the basics (housing, healthcare , education ) are
pretty expensive. add to that the stigma of not working , and being unemployed
is quite bad.

I think disruptive innovation for the needs of the unemployed in those fields
, could be a huge and important field in the next decade.but this would
probably need suport from government , because there are heavy regulations
around those fields.

------
nowarninglabel
Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best.

>safety regulations could be greatly relaxed.

No, at least not if the author's vision of 200mph average speeds is to be
taken. When a mistake or malfunction happens at that speed, safety mechanisms
will be imperative. Furthermore, having a mechanical car does not prevent:
someone else running into you, a deer running in front of the car, etc.

> children could own cars

But they wouldn't, because the purchase would still be in the name of the
parent. Furthermore, do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the
subway just because they can? No. A very few do it and get ostracized by
society.

> 3\. The beverage industry will go.

False assumptions without supporting data, but I have no facts to counteract
it.

>4\. Speed limits will be unnecessary

Oh really? So we won't need limits for the existing drivers who aren't using
driverless vehicles? How will the 200mph traveling car navigate around all the
60mph traveling ones? Furthermore, is every car going to be programmed to go
slow in pedestrian zones? How do you enforce that without speed limits? The
current Google Car wasn't jetting 200mph down the 101, it was driving under
the speed limit in residential neighborhoods.

> The map will shrink greatly.

No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your
fantasy land.

> Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when
> you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes?

I will. Just because you can live outside the city and travel to it at a
faster rate does not make it a given that one would choose to. Urbanization
has been the greatest driving factor of population trends in the last century.
If anything, if what is proposed came to pass, you would see increased
urbanization of small towns/suburbs.

>Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago?

No. It will still be faster to fly. Are you serious? I mean gee why fly from
New York to London when I can take a speed boat and have it take three days? I
mean, seriously?

>9\. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab
won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a
hell of a lot nicer.

I'm sorry, I don't live in fantasy land where fuel costs suddenly become
irrelevant. Fuel costs make up at least 16% of the overall cost. And there
will still be a premium because people will be willing to pay it.

Yes, a driver less car will make someone a lot of money. Does this equate to
the above points? No, the author's hypothesis has no basis in reality and no
facts to back it up.

~~~
dagw
_do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they
can?_

Maybe not 6, but certainly 8 year olds are quite capable of using public
transport and happily do so in many parts of the world. I know I was taking
the bus to the library when I was 8 or 9 and the train into town when I was
10, and that wasn't strange in the slightest.

~~~
lars512
There's also a big difference between asking a child to navigate public
transport and putting them in a trusted taxi to school, which is all an
automated car is. If the trusted taxi is cheap enough, you'd only have to be
confident that the child wouldn't hurt themselves en route.

------
andrewljohnson
Saying Google is poor at product development is just trolling. List of well-
designed, dominant Google products include:

* Search

* Gmail

* Docs

* Reader

* Images

* News

* Maps

If only other companies failed at product development so well...

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Gmail, Docs, and News are not dominant in their category, Images is just
another form of search, while Reader is dominant but increasingly irrelevant.

You forgot Android, which in the long run will probably prove to be their only
really big hit other than search, at least that they've released so far. The
others just don't matter that much.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Android is also an acquisition, FWIW.

------
dasil003
I find it interesting that the responses on plausibility seem to be based on
technical or social feasibility. My gut instinct is that resource shortages
are going to change the world in unanticipated ways, and what is currently
imaginable due to the inexorable march of "progress" will no longer be
economical. Hopefully the transition is smooth so we can keep the best of
technology (such as the internet) without the waste and depletion of the
environment that capitalism so far has failed to account for. Maybe after we
figure out the sustainability thing, fully automated ad-hoc transportation
could be worked out in the far future.

------
EGreg
I really like this article. Yes, if Google can pull off AI solutions like cars
that drive themselves and appliances that cook for you (all are pretty
straightforward problems that can be solved with programming) then they will
really OWN.

The problem with the former is the huge liability risk. When a car's breaks
fail, we blame the car manufacturer. Imagine if a car crashed, or caused some
sort of accident -- any accident! The blame would rest solely on Google's
shoulders, whereas right now it's split between the driver and the car.

------
rythie
Trains, buses and taxis do much of this already. I met people in Japan 5 years
ago that were do daily commutes of 30-45mins of much bigger distances than a
car could in that time. London to Paris is quicker and easier by train than by
plane already.

Public transport has long been used by the young and/or intoxicated.

------
monos
Self-driving cars will be important in 10-20 years that is obvious. You can
look into that certain future by watching how far R&D has come in recent
years.

But I strongly doubt that cars as we know them today will still be around.
Todays car design - fast & heavy - is absurd and only serves to satisfy the
image we have of a car. 'Sensible cars' are often not perceived as cars at all
<[http://www.google.at/images?q=smart>](http://www.google.at/images?q=smart>).

Making cars slower triggers a positive cycle of being more efficient (half
speed = 1/4 energy), safer and allowing for lighter designs.

The problem of efficiency is not somehow magically solved by making cars
'electric' but only by making cars slower and lighter.

------
paganel
> The map will shrink greatly. Right now I live about 30 miles from my office
> and the commute is on the very edge of what I can stand. Make my car
> driverless (freeing me up to watch TV, read a book, catch up on emails,
> etc.) and able to travel at twice the speed, and spend the entire trip at
> top speed (rather than slowing down and speeding up on the highway) and I
> could feasibly live as far as 100 mph away.

The metro already does that for me pretty well. Granted, I live in an European
city.

------
aufreak3
I'm surprised that the whole AI argument made in this post centers around
self-driving cars, when the fact that google can recall for you very relevant
results from its multi-billion page memory in a jiffy doesn't seem AI enough.

As for self-driving cars, it seems to me that public transport can provide
much of what the poster wants. I travel by bus for about 2 hours every day --
seems taxing, but I'm productive on my rides since I always get a nice seat
and can hack on.

------
nkassis
This post and thread make me feel like I'm watching a 50s futurist vision of
the world. I like it ;p The driver less cars need to fly too.

I hope google expands and manages to make money from more than just ads.
Driverless cars would be awesome if they can pull it off soon. I just drove
from Florida to Canada and back and I was thinking all trip I needed a
driverless car. Most of the road could have been driven by todays AI no
problem. Driving is so mindless.

------
ujjwalg
<http://code.google.com/apis/predict/>

this seems a perfect stepping stone... an awesome move on Google's part.

------
zandorg
I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have
automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.

~~~
btilly
If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the
population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need
to.

~~~
moxiemk1
I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing
things about the city. I was _glad_ I didn't have a car with me. The subway
was excellent.

------
Micand
Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity
Summit 2009 (<http://www.vimeo.com/7337628>). It expounds on the technology's
implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the
market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest:

* Transportation is more dangerous than we think, and this is largely due to human factors. (Driver inattention is a factor in 80% of crashes; alcohol in 40%.)

* The purchase of private vehicles forces us into a "one size fits all" model. If someone goes skiing only once a year, he will purchase an SUV; if someone spends 90% of his mileage traveling alone to work, he'll still purchase a five-person sedan so he can haul around friends occasionally. By moving to a grid-like service that provides cars to us on demand, we will be able to choose the vehicle best suited to the type of trip we're making.

* Robotic cars could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Energy usage would be dramatically lower due to people using a vehicle only as large as they need for a given trip. Vehicles powered by alternative energy have a chicken-and-egg problem -- no one wants to build the infrastructure to deliver energy until people buy the vehicles, but no one wants to buy the vehicles until a ubiquitous energy infrastructure is in place. Robotic cars, however, would have no qualms with traveling halfway across a city to refuel, nor with waiting two hours in a lineup before refuelling.

* The transportation infrastructure will also become substantially more efficient, as cars will be able to travel much closer together without compromising safety. As a consequence, energy usage can be reduced another 30% by having cars draft one another.

* Before robotic cars would be accepted by the public, they'd have to meet much more stringent safety standards than we apply to human drivers. No one would accept a robotic car that killed a human, even if robotic cars on the whole were twice as safe as human drivers. Templeton figures we'll need cars on the order of 100 times safer than human drivers before they will be widely accepted. To convince people of the cars' safety, Templeton proposes the "school of fish" test -- imagine walking out onto a track swarming with cars travelling at 40 miles per hour, and having every car swerve around you no matter how hard you try to make them hit you.

* Robotic vehicles will record video everywhere they go, for this will prove invaluable in determining the cause of accidents. Any modifications to the driving software will then have the ability to be tested on the "trillion mile road test" -- they will have a corpus of testing data composed of the recorded footage of every trip ever made. New software will be tested against every vehicle accident that has ever occurred.

* The privacy implications of this universal recording are disconcerting. Templeton raises the spectre of a situation like that in Minority Report, where police can remotely override your control of a vehicle, locking you inside and transporting you to a destination of their choosing.

------
yesbabyyes
I see it as Google's role to index all information, scan all the books and so
on, to make sure that the AI will see that our histories are intertwined, that
man and technology evolved together and it shouldn't eliminate us.

------
SoftwareMaven
I wonder where my motorcycle will fit in this world. Oh, well, I'll be so old
I probably won't be able to ride anyway, unless rejuvenation has come about as
well.

------
rms
The Google leadership has repeatedly said that search is an AGI hard problem.
The social graph is also an AGI hard problem, for what it's worth.

------
richcollins
Has Google had any successes with AI other than its search heuristic? (which I
hesitate to classify as AI)

~~~
fanf2
Translation. Voice recognition.

~~~
algorias
Which don't work well at all. It's a hard problem, and not nearly close to
being solved.

------
metabrew
Perhaps during the transition we would have automated-car lanes, like we have
carpool lanes today.

------
invertedlambda
Will become? Is.

------
maeon3
Self driving cars are 15 years away. The self driving cars will have to deal
with the chaotic human drivers, and this will require Strong AI. Once we have
this, driving around will be one of the small issues of the day.

~~~
rimantas
I hope they are further away. For me a bus is self driving car, but driving a
car is also a pleasure not only the means to get from a point A to a point B.

~~~
khafra
Presumably autonomous cars would not replace the ones on closed courses, and
you could still enjoy driving a car the way you enjoy all other pleasures
which require specialized equipment and facilities.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Absolutely. Cars will be the LPs of the 2050's

