Inside the Artificial Brain That’s Remaking the Google Empire

www.wired.com...

Since its birth in the company’s secretive X Labs three years ago, the Google Brain has flourished inside the company, giving its army of software engineers a way to apply cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to a growing array of problems. And in many ways, it seems likely to give Google an edge as it expands into new territory over the next decade, much in the way that its search algorithms and data center expertise helped build its massively successful advertising business during the last ten years. “Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company,” says Matthew Zeiler, the CEO of visual search startup Clarifai, who worked on Google Brain during a pair of internships. He says that all of Google’s most-important projects—autonomous cars, advertising, Google Maps—stand to gain from this type of research. “Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning.”

There has been a really interesting set of articles about this stuff the past few days. I remember reading about this project a few years ago, but at the time it was envisioned as research where the payoff will be a long time in coming. I had no idea they were already this far along. The article also goes on to discuss how some stuff has already made it into the public realm.

a reply to: Vdogg

Link the source please.

originally posted by: ChefSlug
a reply to: Vdogg

Link the source please.

Man, you're quick. Realized I forgot to include the link as soon as I posted but I guess I didn't edit it quick enough. It's there now.

a reply to: Vdogg

Yeah. This is a good article. About the time voice recognition came out I heard about "deep learning". I went out of the loop and forgot the terminology. Awesome refresher for that. This technology is gonna lead to the movie scenes you see where the person is just having a conversation with the computer. HAL style.

S + F

Machines tend to do our physical work. Over time, they seem to do more and more.

Will the same hold true for computers? Will they do more and more mental work?

So if we do less and less physical and mental work... what will we be reduced to? Gamers? Oblivious and useless like in Wall-E? Will our physical body and mind become shriveled up and unused?

However, that kind of thinking is too generalize. We still do physical work. We've just given over to machines some of it. We will do the same with computers for our mental work. What's really happening is we're moving our focus from one set of things to another. So rather than tilling a field all day we have time do more mentally challenging tasks. And rather than spending our time spotting defected product on an assembly line or piecing it together by hand (something traditionally only humans can do reliably), we can spend our time doing more rich and engaging things.

And even as computers do more and more mental work, we will be using them to improve our own brain and productivity. We won't sit idly as computers become better and better and overcome is, we will continually improve ourselves. We will in hte long run probably combine ourselves to some extent with the machines and computers to keep ourselves useful. Sort of like how we wear glasses or use a machine like an extension of our body.

I think one day there'll be a form of biosynthetics for our body that's a combination of biological and synthetic material systems. We will combine the best of both worlds in our pursuit of a better circumstance. It won't just appear in prosthetic devices for the disabled, but will increasingly become commonplace as these augmentations become more modular and also enhance what we do. The division between what we wear and what's inside us will blue somewhat, but it's really just a meeting between the biological and the manmade.

It's a mistake to think humankind cannot improve on nature. We already do in numerous occasions, we just don't label it that way. When a bone breaks and nature would fail to heal it steadily and properly, we hand over the some of the control to our doctors. This is not improving on nature by replacing it but by working with it when cooperation is beneficial. And neither can one completely replace nature because one cannot be a closed system. One must always cooperate with nature in some way.