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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

> an advertising company

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligen...

> Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google's brilliant cofounder, who became the company's CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don't get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long.

> But Page's reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we're really making an AI.”

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Except, the real answer to that question is: “Oh, keyword advertising will be the single most profitable business model on the Internet.”

That's fairly condescending.

Seeing projects like this only affirm what I've generally felt about Google. They don't build stuff to sell ads. They sell ads to do cool stuff like this.

I think this is the key to understand google. They are building the "skynet" of terminator. They won't turn evil before they succeed.

Most likely you and your kids are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines just in a few decades.

More realistically, they will make your life easier as many machines before them have.

I'm more worried about intelligent humans

I worry more about the other side of the bell curve.

>> But Page's reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we're really making an AI.”

Well, I burst out laughing when I read this. They've been trying for 12 years and haven't managed major publishable advancements in AGI?

I mean, they did establish the annual AGI conference in 2005... so that's something.

[Edit: Downvotes, why?]

Which of these actions are about making an AI?

Most of the Google search page area is now occupied by ads, or ads disguised as content

http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-1662...

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...

Tracking the emails in the free Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business to build ad profiles, making misleading statements to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to having to make statements to federal court, having to tell the truth about it and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Paid inclusion for shopping search results

http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...

Conspiring to kill SkyHook(and succeeding) with its 500lb outsized influence like Microsoft used to.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Getting fined by FTC for violating Gmail users privacy by exposing their friends lists in Google Buzz in order to compete with Twitter http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why-ftcs-22-5m-googl...

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.

http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

Google employee accesses personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?

http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-...

Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threate...

Making people literally cry with the forced Google+ integration into Youtube and making confusing UX to make people share more than they want to, in order to compete with Facebook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs (warning, NSFW language)

Extracting petty revenge on CNET for googling(!) information on its CEO

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/

Convicted in the courts for colluding with other tech firms in illegal non-poaching agreements

http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...

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