Google Will Become an AI Company
mattmaroon.com
mattmaroon.com
They're Ad-funded, so they should in theory be independent of a larger company's whim to shut down sluggish divisions.
I don't know about you, but I haven't thought of Google as being anything other than an AI company for a while now. It has actually surprised me for a while now how little AI most of their products have, which I guess might be evidence that I was wrong.
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.
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.
Of course, if you can afford it, you can get one like this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train
When someone else is driving, for you it certainly functions like a room that goes places.
I mean, isn't this a room that goes places? http://www.prevostcar.com/DB/markets/market_motorhome_4high....
Major changes would have to made to cars so they could function like that for everyone safely, though. Even with robot drivers, I still wouldn't trust that I could be walking around cooking and playing ping pong while we're moving.
So if you wanted a new microwave, go online and download the design. Then go to the Christmas Tree machine and have it print one up for you. Just like presents under a Christmas Tree, you ask for something, say the magic words, then it appears with a little bow on it. (It occurs to me they should have been named Santa Claus machines, but I don't make this stuff up, I simply repeat it)
Of course, we're starting off with extremely simple implementations. I think the current technology does stuff like figurines. Adding moving parts is probably a next logical step, then printable simple electronics.
There's a long way to go, but once realized, Christmas Tree machines will change everything.
The Make magazine follows CTM/3DP stuff pretty closely: http://blog.makezine.com/
...And Don was already Old School then...
Seriously, it is amazing how way ahead of the curve he was. ISMM was originally published when Tim Ferriss was only 1 year old, but the only real difference between it and 4 Hour Work Week is the scale that the Internet makes available. Every time some hungry hacker blogs about supplementing his income by selling photos on some stock photography site--man, it's deja vu all over again.
[Edit: Hmm, Daniel and I seem to have different etymologies for the word...]
[Edit the second: Engrish is hard.]
I saw it in a nice book called Indistinguishable From Magic by Robert L. Forward. It is half sci-fi, and half hard science fact. The format is that he first describes a hard science idea that could allow future technology to do something that looks like magic. And then he has a short story showing a world with that technology. Then he moves on to the next idea.
Christmas Tree robots were one of the ideas he considered.
So it's not clear to me whether automatic cars or "rooms that go places" will always remain as useful as they sound today.
(Practically speaking, though, I'd bet on it, since cars are pretty ingrained into American culture and since the auto industry is large and very committed to keeping individuals on the road.)
Wouldn't trucks work? It sounds crazy at first, but I suspect one truck making the rounds every day, like the postman, would still be more energy efficient than hundreds of cars going back and forth to the supermarket?
On the other hand, many countries are dealing with ageing populations. Self-driving cars will give the elderly and the disabled a level of autonomy that we take for granted. That's my bet on the big win.
With a serious and reliable driverless car system, stops could be integrated in a way which made them minimally impede traffic flow and the cross traffic optimized to maximize the flow over the whole road network.
Keep in mind we are talking about (in the limit at least) a network of driverless cars which can communicate. If traffic signals are in on the deal, I see no reason we shouldn't be able to do far, far better than a subway system.
My prediction is that robotic servants will be common place in homes by the 2020's and that almost all manual occupations will be replaced with automation during that decade. I have no idea how society and the economy are going to adapt to that reality however.
Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are controlled by the driver, the car steers).
All of this is a far cry from a truly self-driving car but all of this has been implemented without much fuss. All the imaginable horror scenarios did not scare citizens or politicians. I think that’s good sign and I also think that many debates about potential social problems of the introductions of self-driving cars are driven by overly negative stereotypes of political systems.
I also think that it doesn’t really matter all that much if the US doesn’t want to do it. There are more than enough other rich nations out there.
It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.
Unions will just go quietly into the night?
Well, at least not yet.
Technical obstacles, financial obstacles - sure. Government obstacles - maybe. But unions ?
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what the repercussions of the self driving car will be though. SDC's, along with robotics, will eliminate the need to drive to the grocery store, or any store at all. And telecommunications surely will be pushing back against the need for central offices.
My hope is that SDCs will allow us to form more human-scale communities outside of the city, where we can live largely on foot, with local necessities (restaurants, bars, parks) within walking distance. All the crap that clogs up our cities and forces us to drive (stores, mostly) will be distributed to a network of warehouses that we will never visit.
We may take cabs more often from place to place, but I think overall SDCs could help us drive less.
It's all wild speculation at this point, but I think it's very interesting to see what will happen.
As for 'clever urban planning', that's not possible without getting people used to living in smaller houses or on top of each other.
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.
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
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.
Misanthropy often comes down to a matter of quality rather than quantity. I've lived almost my entire life in small towns, and I'm not inclined to speak highly of the people I shared those towns with. For one, while small town folk are probably friendlier and less suspicious towards their own kind, you're also more likely to find various forms of bigotry. It's no coincidence that everyone I know of from my high school who happened to be black, gay, bisexual, or otherwise a minority desperately wanted out and for the most part have moved to denser areas.
Now keep in mind that I'm 22. Maybe as you get older, small towns with only a Waffle House and Jimbos Sports Bar (which closes @ 9pm) become more appealing. In most of rural America, the people are incredibly nice, but the poverty, lack of education, jobs, healthcare, and public services is appalling (theres a reason rural Tea Partiers are so angry). With that said, every place is what you make of it.
Better availability of private services due to economies of scale
Psychological sense of community (vs. isolation)
With human drivers, there's a social norm to prevent misbehavior, and in extreme cases the driver can stop and insist that the passenger get out.
Even if the cab companies put human toll collectors in driverless cabs, although that could work, there would be less respect for cabbies who are not driving. I fear that bad behavior would still flourish.
Yes, Google is a machine learning company. And any sufficiently advanced machine learning technology is indistinguishable from AI magic. :-)
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.
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.
I commuted from NYC to NJ for a while (by circumstance, not choice) and traffic wouldn't slow much at all at merge points.
Driving back in Pennsylvania, state of my birth, I was gob-smacked when people all tried to merge into one lane a mile before the merge point, bringing traffic to almost a complete halt. Of course, I was probably one of those people before driving in New York, and never thought much of it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
http://www.blogher.com/9-year-old-rides-subway-alone-mom-her... http://www.nysun.com/news/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subwa... (also check out the comments on the original source http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/why-i-let-my-9... )
Parental attitudes have changed since you were a child.
Remember that people mocked the Wright brothers. The ideas in this link may be very relevant to this discussion: http://amasci.com/freenrg/arrhenus.html
"Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. iii) this is true but quite unimportant. iv) I always said so." - J.B.S. Haldane, 1963
"All great truths began as blasphemies" - George Bernard Shaw
Yeah, but how would you drive a driver-less car on a Somalian road, for example? Or through Cairo, or Istanbul, cities not known for their tight traffic regulations? After all we've had the Prius for ~10 years and it has failed to take over the world.
>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.
One would presume eventually there would be heavily monitored dedicated freeways for automated vehicles to travel. You could build a single lane tunnel between major cities even, since a single lane is all you need since accidents will become exceedingly rare.
Once you have a dedicated, single lane enclosed highway, a monitoring system can be aware of deer and outside complications and you can surely get up to high speeds.
>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.
You do realize how many school children take a school bus every day?
>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 OP is basically looking on a 25-50 year timeline not a 10 one. Think dedicated automated smart roadways and situations where "manual" driving is as rare as a VHS VCR today.
>No. Fuel costs and traffic don't just magically disappear because of your fantasy land.
You're assuming today's fuel costs. Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well. Also note automated drivers will be able to use the transmission much more effectively, since they'll be able to be aware of the layout of the roadway and adjust gears accordingly.
> 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.
He never said nobody will want to live in the city. He said that "commuting" as we know it will be a thing of the past, as you won't be actually losing any time to transportation. So, many people that currently would dread living so far away (but would love to for better scenery, access to schools, etc.) due to the horrific commute may reconsider it once they can actually be productive during the trip. (Not to mention the trip will be a lot faster than it is today for the reasons above.)
Edit: Oh, and to his point about flying. If you do the math, I think you'll find at 200mph door-to-door time between many cities is close to what you'd expect for a flight if you take into account time traveling to and from the airport and time in the airport. This, combined with the fact that traveling by automated luxury car will certainly be more enjoyable than traveling by coach, even if the trip is slightly longer, will make an interesting tradeoff between air and road appear.
However, the refuting facts should really come from a scientific study, not from me. I'm sure Google is studying such things right now. I'd of course be glad to do some research for some more factual assertations and put it into a blog post if I thought I was going to have a top-voted HN link to it.
> since a single lane is all you need since accidents will
> become exceedingly rare.
> Future cars will be much more efficient, and will be electric so
> the delivery mechanism will be more efficient as well.
I never consider flying from edinburgh to london, a journey I make fairly regularly. the flight takes 3/4 hours less, but door to door ends up around the same time, and is far far less comfortable than the train.
> 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.
I dont think he was trying to say every single person would move out of the city, just that it would be an attractive option for more people, which isnt really arguable in the hypothetical situation that commutes are fast and comfortable
Yes, all the time in Japan. Also commonly seen in Europe.
And as a bonus tidbit---in small town America, people still hitchhike.
* Search
* Gmail
* Docs
* Reader
* Images
* News
* Maps
If only other companies failed at product development so well...
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.
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.
Public transport has long been used by the young and/or intoxicated.
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>.
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.
The metro already does that for me pretty well. Granted, I live in an European city.
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.
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.
this seems a perfect stepping stone... an awesome move on Google's part.
Schmidt and Matt address this in their arguments. For example, Matt mentions that the beverage industry will skyrocket because people can now "drive" home drunk. The human can't take over in an emergency in that situation. Pretty much every advantage of driverless cars that Matt listed are not possible if the human is required to be alert enough to take over. Further, the person I was responding to claimed he would never have to learn how to drive. If a human is going to take over in an emergency, s/he will still have to learn. Point being, the discussion at hand is about driverless vehicles without using a human as a backup.
An airliner is a vehicle with federally-mandated maintenance and inspection periods, operating in a tightly controlled space in which new vehicles entering and exiting are known and managed by controllers and in which the transport medium (air) by and large doesn't change characteristics much for the duration of the flight.
Versus an automobile with a robot driver that has to handle crazy pedestrians, dogs, motorcycles, cyclists and other cars randomly entering its area of travel, wide variations in road widths, speed limits, road surface texture (dry, sandy, wet, ice covered can all be encountered in less than 1/4 mile of travel), random road construction and other non-robotic drivers.
This doesn't mean that a solution is impossible, but to point to airliners to say "see, it can happen" is a bit of a stretch.
* 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.
Google already has them. Seriously.
They have been driving on real streets with real people. The only serious incidents that have happened with them is that one got rear-ended by a human while it was stopped, and a journalist noticed them so Google had to admit that they exist.
Driving a car long distances, or in heavy traffic, or in dangerous conditions (snow and ice or heavy rain) is some combination of tedious, exhausting, and stressful.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/sartre-project-ready-to-roa...
I'm not saying its impossible, but that's pretty ludicrous to state as fact. Even many enthusiastic Strong AI proponents would hesitate to give such an aggressive bound.