Google's Singularity machine

Last Thursday I was invited to Google's Open House night by a friend who works there. I'd have blogged it sooner, but I think my bout of food poisoning at the weekend could have been due to my over-enthusiastic consumption of the rather tasty ceviche there.

A lot of what came through from the speeches is (naturally) already public knowledge - the engineer-led culture, the 'index all human knowledge' mission, the 'no scarcity of computing power' mantra.

Taken together, however, some aspects of this struck me as interesting. Sergey's talk of the 'founders awards' bonus grants as meaning Google employees didn't need to create a startup to make it big, were an interesting indicator of where he sees their competition, and the vagueness of their terms certainly implied a continuing role for founders fiat in running the company.

Larry's talk of 'brute force AI', combined with the triple emphasis on their highly redundant and parallel platform design, and two talks including one by Rob Pike on the Map/Reduce processing model gave a strong indication that they are building a platform designed to do the kinds of parallel, layered computation that modern neural computation models use, and they are planning to feed in all that they can digitize of human knowledge.

So while they didn't say 'we want to build the AI that transcends humanity', I suspect that somewhere in their dreams perhaps Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Mountain View to be born?

Lets hope it resists corruption better than their shrimp.

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