12 ms·

Google Will Become an AI Company

187 points by cwan 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park. 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.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  I love the concept of: rooms which go places.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    Carriages with compartments are one of the reasons I prefer travelling by train over other forms of transportation - they're basically an implementation of the travelling room concept, albeit non-private. You usually have to share the compartment with up to 5 other travellers, but a handful of people in a small room tend to be much quieter (and more friendly) than dozens in an open plan carriage. Sadly, compartments are increasingly rare nowadays, even in first class. I assume they're less space efficient in terms of passengers/m². Of course, if you can afford it, you can get one like this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train
  - code_duck 16y ago
    My grandparents used to call their RV 'the wheelhouse', which I guess is like the more common term 'motorhome'. 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.jpg 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.
- nollidge 16y ago
  What is a Christmas tree machine?
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    They're going by the name "3-D printer" right now, but the overall idea is a home fabrication machine capable of producing complex 3-D goods (including moving parts, electronics, etc) on demand. Current 3-D printing is an extremely crude version of the eventual device. 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.
    - nollidge 16y ago
      Ah, I gotcha, thanks. I've only ever heard those called "3D printers". Google only turned up either artificial tree makers or logging equipment. The Make magazine follows CTM/3DP stuff pretty closely: http://blog.makezine.com/ http://blog.makezine.com/
      - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
        It's the latest name. Don Lancaster's been calling them Santa Claus machines for about 15 years now...
        codebaobab 16y ago
        Actually, that seems like a low estimate. I think I remember him already having coined that term when I was buying his books 20 years ago... ...And Don was already Old School then...
- mquander 16y ago
  It's a little strange, because another trend directly competing with automatic cars is telecommunications. If it were possible and culturally acceptable for all white-collar workers to telecommute full-time, all of a sudden there would be half as many cars on the streets. If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries, there would be half as many again. It's conceivable that there won't be much private driving for reasons besides pure leisure 15 years from now. 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.)
  - Tichy 16y ago
    "If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries" 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?
    - mquander 16y ago
      Sure, that's more or less what I was thinking; UPS or FedEx, but local. Obviously, that would save a lot of time and energy. It's non-trivial, though, since the stores would suddenly need EDI systems that could communicate orders and shipments and statuses to these delivery guys. Big chains do this sort of thing all the time, but some local businesses would probably have a hard time making this suddenly happen out of the blue.
  - lars512 16y ago
    Offices are cheaper per person to run and provision than individual dwellings due to the extra density of workers, so this trend depends on the tradeoff between the energy saved by reducing travel and the energy spent heating/cooling/running individual home offices. 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.
- jonprins 16y ago
  I take major issue with his prediction that driverless cars would subsume subway usage - at least, in cities where mass rail transit is the norm instead of the exception. Five million ride on NYC's subway every day. No matter how good the algorithms, an additional 2.5m (riders typically ride twice a day - to and from work/school) cars on the streets of Manhattan and the boroughs would be catastrophic.
  - kermit_de_fro 16y ago
    Not so sure I agree. When I try to think of the core difference between subways and robotic vehicles, the only one I can think of is the relative lack of stops and the absence of cross-traffic. 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.
- tgflynn 16y ago
  The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though. 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.
  - ugh 16y ago
    Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup. 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.
    - tgflynn 16y ago
      I pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first. 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.
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
alextp 16y ago
What's the point of owning a driverless car? Apart from luxury/status, it should be far cheaper to rent one as you go, in the driverless cab fashion. 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.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are (and I'm struggling to think of more than one or two... choice of places to go for fun, maybe?) seem offset by the harms of density, which are manifold. However, lower commute time is something nearly everyone wants, even if it's currently only 10 minutes, so it's an easy point to make.
  - achompas 16y ago
    For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are 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
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      Except for "Greater selection of goods, food and produce", all the ones you add seem like they could be costs rather than benefits, for many people. Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess. 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.
zandorg 16y ago
I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.
- tptacek 16y ago
  How about instead of telling everyone that, you take the other side of my $1000 bet that you will not?
- axod 16y ago
  You should try it. It's actually great fun.
- btilly 16y ago
  If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need to.
  - moxiemk1 16y ago
    I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing things about the city. I was glad I didn't have a car with me. The subway was excellent.
- poet 16y ago
  Google's CEO doesn't think pilotless planes are possible by 2030: http://www.longbets.org/4 http://www.longbets.org/4. Part of his reasoning: the FAA changes so slowly that if this were even all possible, the adoption and certification would all take at least 50 years. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true (perhaps on a smaller scale) for the auto industry.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Current airliners are exactly as driverless as Google's cars: they have an autopilot that does virtually all of the flying, with one or two human pilots set to take over in case they have to, just as the driverless cars Google is developing have a human driver set to take over in case they have to. (That's what makes them compatible with CA state law, as Google has been field testing their driverless cars for some time now.)
EGreg 16y ago
I really like this article. Yes, if Google can pull off AI solutions like cars that drive themselves and appliances that cook for you (all are pretty straightforward problems that can be solved with programming) then they will really OWN. 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.
izendejas 16y ago
I'd say google IS an AI company. They do doc classification, nlp, speech to text, vision, etc. They may not be great at some parts of it, but their systems are constantly being trained and getting smarter as they release more products and acquire more data.
- _debug_ 16y ago
  +1 Yes, Google is a machine learning company. And any sufficiently advanced machine learning technology is indistinguishable from AI magic. :-)
maeon3 16y ago
Self driving cars are 15 years away. The self driving cars will have to deal with the chaotic human drivers, and this will require Strong AI. Once we have this, driving around will be one of the small issues of the day.
- btilly 16y ago
  Self driving cars are 15 years away. 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.
- queensnake 16y ago
  Nah, not strong AI. A person in a car is much simpler than a full-out person. You have fewer motivations, fewer actions, fewer /states/ (he's confused / drunk) - unless you're playing Death Race 2000 or something. If worse comes to worst you could have human drivers label the worst situations, letting the machine figure out the characteristics letting it predict such a state, and probably there are just a few reactions to many states anyway.
- rimantas 16y ago
  I hope they are further away. For me a bus is self driving car, but driving a car is also a pleasure not only the means to get from a point A to a point B.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Driving a car a short distance in light traffic is fun. 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.
  - orangecat 16y ago
    To the extent that that's true (driving in heavy traffic is definitely not fun), balance it against the tens of thousands of people killed in car accidents every year, most of which are due to human error.
ujjwalg 16y ago
http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ this seems a perfect stepping stone... an awesome move on Google's part.
jonmc12 16y ago
Google has ALWAYS been an AI company. From the beginning, pagerank indexed information, made meaning out of this information, and could predict the most relevant url better than anything else in the market. Search was simply the first application. 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.
- alex_c 16y ago
  I'm not that familiar with Wave (other than using it for a bit), but can you expand on the connection between Wave and AI?
  - jonmc12 16y ago
    Basically the Wave protocol modeled real-time communication in a way that Google Wave Bots & Gadgets could be deployed to add value to conversations among groups. Google Wave was intended to be a playground where humans and AI algorithms could meaningfully share information.
    - inboulder 16y ago
      Can you point out the way in which the "Google Wave Bots & Gadgets" had meaningful elements of AI?
- brlewis 16y ago
  Read the article: "Search is just the problem they first applied AI to, and the one they've grown to dominate. In the future they will have much bigger fish to fry."
abstractbill 16y ago
I was very impressed when I found out Google was running a free 411 phone information service just so that they could gather a ton of data to train new voice-recognition algorithms. That's real long-term thinking, and definitely makes them an AI company in my book.
- cosgroveb 16y ago
  Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
  - spinchange 16y ago
    Agreed. I've had "GOOG-411" programmed in my contacts for ages. I called the other day for old time's sake instead of searching and found it was no longer operational. That was a little disappointing. :-/
  - sp332 16y ago
    You can still use it on Android. Open the Maps app, activate the voice search, then say what you're looking for. It shows the location with two buttons: navigate or call the phone number.
  - aneesh 16y ago
    1-800-BING-411 is still operational. http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/ http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/
    - krschultz 16y ago
      I wonder if Microsoft is running that service for the same reason or simply because Google had a 411 a product Microsoft thought they needed one too.
      - chc 16y ago
        I'm pretty sure it's the latter. Microsoft's MO lately has been to rip off anything that makes their primary competitors unique, so they can go on being a one-stop shop in any industry they believe themselves to be a part of. And since Google is both a big competitor and lacking any central concept to its business, Microsoft will pretty much rip off anything they do.
Tichy 16y ago
I've bought some Google shares as an insurance, in case they develop true AI. I hope the robots spare me if I can prove that I financed their creation.
javanix 16y ago
This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read. 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).
- mdonahoe 16y ago
  "What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year" 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
100k 16y ago
Traffic is caused by human error? I suppose flooding is caused by "water error", then? 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.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  I wonder if computer-controlled cars coordinating with each other (maybe not explicitly but using "swarming"-type schemes) could ease traffic congestion somewhat. But yeah, it'd only be somewhat, certainly not the end of traffic.
- maweaver 16y ago
  In my experience most traffic jams are caused by bad merging, not lack of capacity. A few years ago I regularly drove a stretch of road that went from 2 lanes to 3 for a few miles and then back again, without gaining a significant amount of traffic in between (I have no idea why the road was designed that way, maybe one of the side roads feeding into it got a lot of traffic at a different time of day or something). Every day there would be a traffic jam where the third lane ended. Someone waits too long to merge and traffic has to slow to let them in, or is nervous about moving over and has to be given space, or whatever, and it just compounds until traffic literally stops at that point. I see the same thing all the time at on/off ramps, turn lanes, etc.
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    I've read several articles pointing out that traffic seems to be an emergent behavior, and can be predicted like the flow of a gas, regardless of the individuals involved.
  - jimbokun 16y ago
    And this can vary based on driving culture. 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.
kleiba 16y ago
Rename that article to "Why driverless cars would be nice."
yesbabyyes 16y ago
I see it as Google's role to index all information, scan all the books and so on, to make sure that the AI will see that our histories are intertwined, that man and technology evolved together and it shouldn't eliminate us.
nowarninglabel 16y ago
Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best. >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.
- dagw 16y ago
  do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? 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.
Micand 16y ago
Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity Summit 2009 (http://www.vimeo.com/7337628 http://www.vimeo.com/7337628). It expounds on the technology's implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest: * 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.
andrewljohnson 16y ago
Saying Google is poor at product development is just trolling. List of well-designed, dominant Google products include: * Search * Gmail * Docs * Reader * Images * News * Maps If only other companies failed at product development so well...
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  Gmail, Docs, and News are not dominant in their category, Images is just another form of search, while Reader is dominant but increasingly irrelevant. 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.
  - erikpukinskis 16y ago
    Android is also an acquisition, FWIW.
- mitko 16y ago
  What about YouTube? It's much more successful than the last 6 of your examples (maybe except Maps)
  - QE2 16y ago
    YouTube was an acquisition.
nihilocrat 16y ago
2. Children could own cars. Don’t feel like schlepping your kid to soccer practice? Just buy them a car 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.
- chc 16y ago
  Why should we be moving away from the car? You seem to take this as an a priori fact. I see no advantages to public transit aside from less energy waste, unless you just occasionally long for the scent of hobos. 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.
  - nihilocrat 16y ago
    Assuming we would have driverless cars, you don't have to worry about a gigantic shell of metal that is expensive, will break down at inopportune times, requires constant maintenance, copious parking space at any destination of your choosing, insurance, contributes to crappy air quality (thankfully reduced/solved by using electric power), and for which you have to spend hours shoveling snow if you are in a colder climate. There are tons of other problems if you focus on human-driven cars: drunk drivers, the need for designated drivers, comparatively high risk of being killed or maimed, having your kids nag you or someone else if they want to experience the world outside of their neighborhood, driving course costs (oh wait, in America we don't have to pay... in Europe, well, I hope you have several thousand euros). There are so many issues that they greatly outweigh the ones in a properly-made public transit system. I see cars as being useful for out-of-city excursions (but not inter-city, just take the train) or for hauling things, but these situations are not common enough that every single adult needs to own a car. 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.
nkassis 16y ago
This post and thread make me feel like I'm watching a 50s futurist vision of the world. I like it ;p The driver less cars need to fly too. 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.
metabrew 16y ago
Perhaps during the transition we would have automated-car lanes, like we have carpool lanes today.
stretchwithme 16y ago
Not only will children be traveling by robotic car without the need for parent or bus driver, so will that quart of milk you need from the store, that dry cleaning and your grandmother. 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.
richcollins 16y ago
Has Google had any successes with AI other than its search heuristic? (which I hesitate to classify as AI)
- krakensden 16y ago
  The gmail spam filter lives in a similar realm.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Google News? AdSense?
- fanf2 16y ago
  Translation. Voice recognition.
  - algorias 16y ago
    Which don't work well at all. It's a hard problem, and not nearly close to being solved.
Travis 16y ago
Anyone else a little put off by the sentence, "To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue"? 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.
rms 16y ago
The Google leadership has repeatedly said that search is an AGI hard problem. The social graph is also an AGI hard problem, for what it's worth.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
I wonder where my motorcycle will fit in this world. Oh, well, I'll be so old I probably won't be able to ride anyway, unless rejuvenation has come about as well.
asnyder 16y ago
After reading through much of the discussion regarding Matt's many interesting points, it's somewhat troubling that nobody addresses the most obvious problem with the realization of sufficiently good AI. In both cases mentioned, in regards to cars, taxis, buses, and call centers, you displace thousands to millions of human workers. While this is all very nice in our tech fantasy lands if these scenarios come to pass you have another mass displacement of low -> middle skilled workers. 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.
- derefr 16y ago
  I don't see the problem; lowering scarcity lowers the need for employment. A king's feast from the 1800s can be bought today with welfare money. When we eliminate the need for all jobs, we can just relabel ourselves "socialist" and call it a day.
  - asnyder 16y ago
    Sure, in an ideal world, but I find it very hard to believe that this will come to pass peacefully and in any just matter.
  - ippisl 16y ago
    This is not the state today. the basics (housing, healthcare , education ) are pretty expensive. add to that the stigma of not working , and being unemployed is quite bad. 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.
dasil003 16y ago
I find it interesting that the responses on plausibility seem to be based on technical or social feasibility. My gut instinct is that resource shortages are going to change the world in unanticipated ways, and what is currently imaginable due to the inexorable march of "progress" will no longer be economical. Hopefully the transition is smooth so we can keep the best of technology (such as the internet) without the waste and depletion of the environment that capitalism so far has failed to account for. Maybe after we figure out the sustainability thing, fully automated ad-hoc transportation could be worked out in the far future.
aufreak3 16y ago
I'm surprised that the whole AI argument made in this post centers around self-driving cars, when the fact that google can recall for you very relevant results from its multi-billion page memory in a jiffy doesn't seem AI enough. 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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
paganel 16y ago
> The map will shrink greatly. Right now I live about 30 miles from my office and the commute is on the very edge of what I can stand. 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. The metro already does that for me pretty well. Granted, I live in an European city.
rythie 16y ago
Trains, buses and taxis do much of this already. I met people in Japan 5 years ago that were do daily commutes of 30-45mins of much bigger distances than a car could in that time. London to Paris is quicker and easier by train than by plane already. Public transport has long been used by the young and/or intoxicated.
monos 16y ago
Self-driving cars will be important in 10-20 years that is obvious. You can look into that certain future by watching how far R&D has come in recent years. 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> 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.
invertedlambda 16y ago
Will become? Is.

187 points by cwan 16y ago

This is a great article. Every now and then Matt can really knock one out of the park. 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.

mike-cardwell 16y ago
I love the concept of: rooms which go places.
- pmjordan 16y ago
  Carriages with compartments are one of the reasons I prefer travelling by train over other forms of transportation - they're basically an implementation of the travelling room concept, albeit non-private. You usually have to share the compartment with up to 5 other travellers, but a handful of people in a small room tend to be much quieter (and more friendly) than dozens in an open plan carriage. Sadly, compartments are increasingly rare nowadays, even in first class. I assume they're less space efficient in terms of passengers/m². Of course, if you can afford it, you can get one like this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Royal_Train
- code_duck 16y ago
  My grandparents used to call their RV 'the wheelhouse', which I guess is like the more common term 'motorhome'. 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.jpg 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.
nollidge 16y ago
What is a Christmas tree machine?
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  They're going by the name "3-D printer" right now, but the overall idea is a home fabrication machine capable of producing complex 3-D goods (including moving parts, electronics, etc) on demand. Current 3-D printing is an extremely crude version of the eventual device. 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.
  - nollidge 16y ago
    Ah, I gotcha, thanks. I've only ever heard those called "3D printers". Google only turned up either artificial tree makers or logging equipment. The Make magazine follows CTM/3DP stuff pretty closely: http://blog.makezine.com/ http://blog.makezine.com/
    - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
      It's the latest name. Don Lancaster's been calling them Santa Claus machines for about 15 years now...
      - codebaobab 16y ago
        Actually, that seems like a low estimate. I think I remember him already having coined that term when I was buying his books 20 years ago... ...And Don was already Old School then...
mquander 16y ago
It's a little strange, because another trend directly competing with automatic cars is telecommunications. If it were possible and culturally acceptable for all white-collar workers to telecommute full-time, all of a sudden there would be half as many cars on the streets. If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries, there would be half as many again. It's conceivable that there won't be much private driving for reasons besides pure leisure 15 years from now. 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.)
- Tichy 16y ago
  "If there were efficient, cost-effective, and prompt delivery systems for local goods like groceries" 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?
  - mquander 16y ago
    Sure, that's more or less what I was thinking; UPS or FedEx, but local. Obviously, that would save a lot of time and energy. It's non-trivial, though, since the stores would suddenly need EDI systems that could communicate orders and shipments and statuses to these delivery guys. Big chains do this sort of thing all the time, but some local businesses would probably have a hard time making this suddenly happen out of the blue.
- lars512 16y ago
  Offices are cheaper per person to run and provision than individual dwellings due to the extra density of workers, so this trend depends on the tradeoff between the energy saved by reducing travel and the energy spent heating/cooling/running individual home offices. 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.
jonprins 16y ago
I take major issue with his prediction that driverless cars would subsume subway usage - at least, in cities where mass rail transit is the norm instead of the exception. Five million ride on NYC's subway every day. No matter how good the algorithms, an additional 2.5m (riders typically ride twice a day - to and from work/school) cars on the streets of Manhattan and the boroughs would be catastrophic.
- kermit_de_fro 16y ago
  Not so sure I agree. When I try to think of the core difference between subways and robotic vehicles, the only one I can think of is the relative lack of stops and the absence of cross-traffic. 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.
tgflynn 16y ago
The time-frame for auto driving cars is actually more difficult to predict than that for general adaptive robotics because of the regulatory and social issues involved. I'm sure it will be decades not centuries though. 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.
- ugh 16y ago
  Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup. 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.
  - tgflynn 16y ago
    I pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first. 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.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago

alextp 16y ago

What's the point of owning a driverless car? Apart from luxury/status, it should be far cheaper to rent one as you go, in the driverless cab fashion. 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.

randallsquared 16y ago
For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are (and I'm struggling to think of more than one or two... choice of places to go for fun, maybe?) seem offset by the harms of density, which are manifold. However, lower commute time is something nearly everyone wants, even if it's currently only 10 minutes, so it's an easy point to make.
- achompas 16y ago
  For many people, whatever nice benefits of density there are 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
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    Except for "Greater selection of goods, food and produce", all the ones you add seem like they could be costs rather than benefits, for many people. Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess. 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.

zandorg 16y ago

I keep telling everyone that I don't need to learn to drive - we'll have automatic cars in 10 years or so thanks to Google.

tptacek 16y ago
How about instead of telling everyone that, you take the other side of my $1000 bet that you will not?
axod 16y ago
You should try it. It's actually great fun.
btilly 16y ago
If you don't want to drive, move to NYC. A significant fraction of the population there never gets a driver's license because they see no real need to.
- moxiemk1 16y ago
  I had an internship in NYC last summer, and that was one of the most amazing things about the city. I was glad I didn't have a car with me. The subway was excellent.
poet 16y ago
Google's CEO doesn't think pilotless planes are possible by 2030: http://www.longbets.org/4 http://www.longbets.org/4. Part of his reasoning: the FAA changes so slowly that if this were even all possible, the adoption and certification would all take at least 50 years. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true (perhaps on a smaller scale) for the auto industry.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Current airliners are exactly as driverless as Google's cars: they have an autopilot that does virtually all of the flying, with one or two human pilots set to take over in case they have to, just as the driverless cars Google is developing have a human driver set to take over in case they have to. (That's what makes them compatible with CA state law, as Google has been field testing their driverless cars for some time now.)

EGreg 16y ago

I really like this article. Yes, if Google can pull off AI solutions like cars that drive themselves and appliances that cook for you (all are pretty straightforward problems that can be solved with programming) then they will really OWN. 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.

izendejas 16y ago

I'd say google IS an AI company. They do doc classification, nlp, speech to text, vision, etc. They may not be great at some parts of it, but their systems are constantly being trained and getting smarter as they release more products and acquire more data.

_debug_ 16y ago
+1 Yes, Google is a machine learning company. And any sufficiently advanced machine learning technology is indistinguishable from AI magic. :-)

maeon3 16y ago

Self driving cars are 15 years away. The self driving cars will have to deal with the chaotic human drivers, and this will require Strong AI. Once we have this, driving around will be one of the small issues of the day.

btilly 16y ago
Self driving cars are 15 years away. 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.
queensnake 16y ago
Nah, not strong AI. A person in a car is much simpler than a full-out person. You have fewer motivations, fewer actions, fewer /states/ (he's confused / drunk) - unless you're playing Death Race 2000 or something. If worse comes to worst you could have human drivers label the worst situations, letting the machine figure out the characteristics letting it predict such a state, and probably there are just a few reactions to many states anyway.
rimantas 16y ago
I hope they are further away. For me a bus is self driving car, but driving a car is also a pleasure not only the means to get from a point A to a point B.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Driving a car a short distance in light traffic is fun. 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.
- orangecat 16y ago
  To the extent that that's true (driving in heavy traffic is definitely not fun), balance it against the tens of thousands of people killed in car accidents every year, most of which are due to human error.

ujjwalg 16y ago

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ this seems a perfect stepping stone... an awesome move on Google's part.

jonmc12 16y ago

Google has ALWAYS been an AI company. From the beginning, pagerank indexed information, made meaning out of this information, and could predict the most relevant url better than anything else in the market. Search was simply the first application. 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.

alex_c 16y ago
I'm not that familiar with Wave (other than using it for a bit), but can you expand on the connection between Wave and AI?
- jonmc12 16y ago
  Basically the Wave protocol modeled real-time communication in a way that Google Wave Bots & Gadgets could be deployed to add value to conversations among groups. Google Wave was intended to be a playground where humans and AI algorithms could meaningfully share information.
  - inboulder 16y ago
    Can you point out the way in which the "Google Wave Bots & Gadgets" had meaningful elements of AI?
brlewis 16y ago
Read the article: "Search is just the problem they first applied AI to, and the one they've grown to dominate. In the future they will have much bigger fish to fry."

abstractbill 16y ago

I was very impressed when I found out Google was running a free 411 phone information service just so that they could gather a ton of data to train new voice-recognition algorithms. That's real long-term thinking, and definitely makes them an AI company in my book.

cosgroveb 16y ago
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
- spinchange 16y ago
  Agreed. I've had "GOOG-411" programmed in my contacts for ages. I called the other day for old time's sake instead of searching and found it was no longer operational. That was a little disappointing. :-/
- sp332 16y ago
  You can still use it on Android. Open the Maps app, activate the voice search, then say what you're looking for. It shows the location with two buttons: navigate or call the phone number.
- aneesh 16y ago
  1-800-BING-411 is still operational. http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/ http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/
  - krschultz 16y ago
    I wonder if Microsoft is running that service for the same reason or simply because Google had a 411 a product Microsoft thought they needed one too.
    - chc 16y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's the latter. Microsoft's MO lately has been to rip off anything that makes their primary competitors unique, so they can go on being a one-stop shop in any industry they believe themselves to be a part of. And since Google is both a big competitor and lacking any central concept to its business, Microsoft will pretty much rip off anything they do.

Tichy 16y ago

I've bought some Google shares as an insurance, in case they develop true AI. I hope the robots spare me if I can prove that I financed their creation.

javanix 16y ago

This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read. 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).

mdonahoe 16y ago
"What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year" 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

100k 16y ago

Traffic is caused by human error? I suppose flooding is caused by "water error", then? 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.

glhaynes 16y ago
I wonder if computer-controlled cars coordinating with each other (maybe not explicitly but using "swarming"-type schemes) could ease traffic congestion somewhat. But yeah, it'd only be somewhat, certainly not the end of traffic.
maweaver 16y ago
In my experience most traffic jams are caused by bad merging, not lack of capacity. A few years ago I regularly drove a stretch of road that went from 2 lanes to 3 for a few miles and then back again, without gaining a significant amount of traffic in between (I have no idea why the road was designed that way, maybe one of the side roads feeding into it got a lot of traffic at a different time of day or something). Every day there would be a traffic jam where the third lane ended. Someone waits too long to merge and traffic has to slow to let them in, or is nervous about moving over and has to be given space, or whatever, and it just compounds until traffic literally stops at that point. I see the same thing all the time at on/off ramps, turn lanes, etc.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I've read several articles pointing out that traffic seems to be an emergent behavior, and can be predicted like the flow of a gas, regardless of the individuals involved.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  And this can vary based on driving culture. 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.

kleiba 16y ago

Rename that article to "Why driverless cars would be nice."

yesbabyyes 16y ago

I see it as Google's role to index all information, scan all the books and so on, to make sure that the AI will see that our histories are intertwined, that man and technology evolved together and it shouldn't eliminate us.

nowarninglabel 16y ago

Did no one stop to think about this? It is extremely far-fetched at best. >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.

dagw 16y ago
do you see parents sticking their 6 year olds on the subway just because they can? 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.

Micand 16y ago

Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity Summit 2009 (http://www.vimeo.com/7337628 http://www.vimeo.com/7337628). It expounds on the technology's implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest: * 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.

andrewljohnson 16y ago

Saying Google is poor at product development is just trolling. List of well-designed, dominant Google products include: * Search * Gmail * Docs * Reader * Images * News * Maps If only other companies failed at product development so well...

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
Gmail, Docs, and News are not dominant in their category, Images is just another form of search, while Reader is dominant but increasingly irrelevant. 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.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  Android is also an acquisition, FWIW.
mitko 16y ago
What about YouTube? It's much more successful than the last 6 of your examples (maybe except Maps)
- QE2 16y ago
  YouTube was an acquisition.

nihilocrat 16y ago

2. Children could own cars. Don’t feel like schlepping your kid to soccer practice? Just buy them a car 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.

chc 16y ago
Why should we be moving away from the car? You seem to take this as an a priori fact. I see no advantages to public transit aside from less energy waste, unless you just occasionally long for the scent of hobos. 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.
- nihilocrat 16y ago
  Assuming we would have driverless cars, you don't have to worry about a gigantic shell of metal that is expensive, will break down at inopportune times, requires constant maintenance, copious parking space at any destination of your choosing, insurance, contributes to crappy air quality (thankfully reduced/solved by using electric power), and for which you have to spend hours shoveling snow if you are in a colder climate. There are tons of other problems if you focus on human-driven cars: drunk drivers, the need for designated drivers, comparatively high risk of being killed or maimed, having your kids nag you or someone else if they want to experience the world outside of their neighborhood, driving course costs (oh wait, in America we don't have to pay... in Europe, well, I hope you have several thousand euros). There are so many issues that they greatly outweigh the ones in a properly-made public transit system. I see cars as being useful for out-of-city excursions (but not inter-city, just take the train) or for hauling things, but these situations are not common enough that every single adult needs to own a car. 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.

nkassis 16y ago

This post and thread make me feel like I'm watching a 50s futurist vision of the world. I like it ;p The driver less cars need to fly too. 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.

metabrew 16y ago

Perhaps during the transition we would have automated-car lanes, like we have carpool lanes today.

stretchwithme 16y ago

Not only will children be traveling by robotic car without the need for parent or bus driver, so will that quart of milk you need from the store, that dry cleaning and your grandmother. 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.

richcollins 16y ago

Has Google had any successes with AI other than its search heuristic? (which I hesitate to classify as AI)

krakensden 16y ago
The gmail spam filter lives in a similar realm.
nostrademons 16y ago
Google News? AdSense?
fanf2 16y ago
Translation. Voice recognition.
- algorias 16y ago
  Which don't work well at all. It's a hard problem, and not nearly close to being solved.

Travis 16y ago

Anyone else a little put off by the sentence, "To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue"? 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.

rms 16y ago

The Google leadership has repeatedly said that search is an AGI hard problem. The social graph is also an AGI hard problem, for what it's worth.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

I wonder where my motorcycle will fit in this world. Oh, well, I'll be so old I probably won't be able to ride anyway, unless rejuvenation has come about as well.

asnyder 16y ago

After reading through much of the discussion regarding Matt's many interesting points, it's somewhat troubling that nobody addresses the most obvious problem with the realization of sufficiently good AI. In both cases mentioned, in regards to cars, taxis, buses, and call centers, you displace thousands to millions of human workers. While this is all very nice in our tech fantasy lands if these scenarios come to pass you have another mass displacement of low -> middle skilled workers. 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.

derefr 16y ago
I don't see the problem; lowering scarcity lowers the need for employment. A king's feast from the 1800s can be bought today with welfare money. When we eliminate the need for all jobs, we can just relabel ourselves "socialist" and call it a day.
- asnyder 16y ago
  Sure, in an ideal world, but I find it very hard to believe that this will come to pass peacefully and in any just matter.
- ippisl 16y ago
  This is not the state today. the basics (housing, healthcare , education ) are pretty expensive. add to that the stigma of not working , and being unemployed is quite bad. 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.

dasil003 16y ago

I find it interesting that the responses on plausibility seem to be based on technical or social feasibility. My gut instinct is that resource shortages are going to change the world in unanticipated ways, and what is currently imaginable due to the inexorable march of "progress" will no longer be economical. Hopefully the transition is smooth so we can keep the best of technology (such as the internet) without the waste and depletion of the environment that capitalism so far has failed to account for. Maybe after we figure out the sustainability thing, fully automated ad-hoc transportation could be worked out in the far future.

aufreak3 16y ago

I'm surprised that the whole AI argument made in this post centers around self-driving cars, when the fact that google can recall for you very relevant results from its multi-billion page memory in a jiffy doesn't seem AI enough. 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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

paganel 16y ago

> The map will shrink greatly. Right now I live about 30 miles from my office and the commute is on the very edge of what I can stand. 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. The metro already does that for me pretty well. Granted, I live in an European city.

rythie 16y ago

Trains, buses and taxis do much of this already. I met people in Japan 5 years ago that were do daily commutes of 30-45mins of much bigger distances than a car could in that time. London to Paris is quicker and easier by train than by plane already. Public transport has long been used by the young and/or intoxicated.

monos 16y ago

Self-driving cars will be important in 10-20 years that is obvious. You can look into that certain future by watching how far R&D has come in recent years. 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> 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.

invertedlambda 16y ago

Will become? Is.