Google: Rise of the Machines?

Does Google have an “artificial intelligence agenda”? According to this ZDNet article, that was the conclusion arrived at by George Dyson during a visit to the Googleplex:

“‘We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,’ explained one of my hosts after my talk. ‘We are scanning them to be read by an AI,’” Dyson wrote in a posting on Edge.org following a visit to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer.

The problem with the term artificial intelligence is that it alternately conjures up images of scores of failed research projects from the 1950s onward, or the popular vision of marauding machines decimating humanity. Either way, it’s hard to fault Google for “side-stepping” the issue.

My definition of artificial intelligence is anything that serves as a effort-saving replacement for some cognitive activity. This gives us a basis for discussion while we wait for “true” machine intelligence (as defined by the Turing Test thought experiment). Seen in this light, Google is the first example of a major commercial success driven by AI technologies. The most fruitful AI projects to date have been based on statistical techniques, of which PageRank is a perfect example. The same type of approach helps Google to target advertisements, as well as enabling computers to detect credit card fraud, play excellent backgammon and so forth.

So artificial intelligence has snuck up on us without us even noticing. I’m sure that Dyson’s quote is accurate, but “read by an AI” doesn’t mean C3PO curled up on the couch in front of a roaring fireplace with a good e-book. It means that the scanned texts will be used to feed the statistical model of a future text analysis engine. What does this mean for end users? Probably much more accurate search, as well as non-laughable machine translation from one human language to another.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we won’t be decimated by marauding machines eventually, but at least in the meantime we can look forward to better and better internet search.

Bookmark to:

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>