ErikJonker

Recently I red an interview with Demis Hassabis from Deepmind , a company that Google acquired.  The co-founder mentioned in that interview his main focus, " It’s also called unsupervised learning— you just give it data and it learns by itself what to do with it, what the structure is, what the insights are. We are only interested in that kind of AI. ". The progress that has been made is published in Nature , read The Verge for the non-scientific version. The exciting thing as described in the mentioned articles is that the system does not "know" what a certain Atari game was. It let itself be trained by playing where a high(er) score was a reward. Just as with humans. In that way the system learned itself to play and win most old Atari games. With technology things becoming exciting when they become "general-purpose" , when you can use one system for different tasks and assignments. The PC is the ultimate example but also the smartphone. In software ...

The dominant company in search is further developing it's product it's famous for. In the beginning it was the possibility to search with keywords on the web. You would get the "best" results based on algorithms such as  Pagerank  among others. Also we would receive some advertising/commercial links with our query. But time has passed and what started as something relatively simple may be evolving into something we could call a digital assistant with "artificial intelligence". In human terms an entity I can talk with, ask questions in normal language, who knows what I like, who I have met, where I have been etcetera . Google is quite open that this is their goal. People like Kurzweil and others have been hired , companies with AI technology have been  acquired to accomplish this. If you observe Google you can see that they are getting there. With Google Now, improvements in Google Translate, added intelligence to Google Hangouts and so on. With normal sear...

A  not very well known initiative within Google is the so-called Data Liberation Front . Their mission statement:, " Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products.  Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out .". A worthy goal which has led to better possibilities to remove your data from Google's services. Also know as Google Take Out . In my view their mission could be expanded to not only controlling your data in Google products but also to be in more control about your privacy and how your data is used. If you use google services all your data is used to improve those services and predict/anticipate your desires, actions and purchases. People get more and more uncomfortable about that lately. Including their parliaments, at least in Europe. This is reinforced by all the Snowden/NSA fall-out which make clear that data inside Google is not that safe and well protected as it could be. Google has clear business ...