Google’s A.I. quest to become God-On-Earth

By Ignorance Isn't Bliss
Oct. 15, 2008

The vision of Google’s future, according to Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is “it would be like the mind of God”. And it’s a future that they’re working feverishly to make a reality today.

While that quote was in reference to “the ultimate search engine”, this analysis is going to make it more than clear that he was in fact referring to Google in particular. In doing so, we’ll see numerous other quotes demonstrating their intentions, what they mean by “all of the worlds information”, how they’re on precisely the right path to achieve their goal with the U.S. military in this vast project that is set to change humanity forever.

“AI” is actually too “narrow” of a term for a cognitive system, but a “broad” cognitive system would contain many narrow AI parts. To even contemplate the notion of cognitive “Artificial General Intelligence” one must first embrace emergence. Emergence is the key to all complex systems that could be considered in attempting to create a model for an AGI system. Google’s methodology in their quest is to exploit and harness the powers of emergence, while adding ‘parts’ that perform cognitive tasks in their own right. The idea is to push the term superorganism to the fullest potential. The insights are the ant colony, and the beehive. The models are the Internet, and the human brain. The entire premise of emergence is ‘the sum is greater than its parts’.

Ants are abysmally stupid, in our terms, yet the colony as a superorganism often gives rise to give the impression of the individual ants being intelligent. With beehives this feature expands even further. Under the right conditions, a complex systems analysis of the collective can be indistinguishable from that as a single organism. Compare this to cells in the human body, or brain alone. Each human mind is a hive, of neurons; a hivemind. Each neuron is abysmally stupid, and each brain part is nearly worthless alone, yet the interconnected cells of each part and each part interconnected give rise to consciousness and higher brain functions.

Then there’s the Internet, with its millions of routers and billions of computers all interconnected as one that is already evolving into a ’smart’ semantic web on its own. It’s no wonder that philosophers often compare the Internet -as a complex system- to the brain, and many thinkers argue that at some point the Internet itself may become unintendedly conscious via emergence. But what if a collective of intelligent beings harnessing global scale supercomputers armed with state of the art algorithms made the goal of turning their symbiotic co-evolving component of the Internet their life’s work?

Enter Google: Google seeks to “gather & organize”, in their words, “all of the worlds information“. It’s the company slogan, and when you hear them speak it they place much emphasis on “all”. But what’s more, according to both co-founders of the company, they intend for it to “understand” what all of the worlds information means. In many cases, they’re going to extremes in order to “gather all” of it, but they’re lettings us do the work for them wherever they can. A look over their “Product” list is as far as one must go to get an idea, yet it goes further than that. But first, the main search feature must be highlighted.

Google, like other search engines, “crawls” the Internet. That is, their algorithm laden interconnected supercomputer automatons scour the Internet, link-by-link literally archiving the entire history of the Internet, page by page, day by day. A page changes and Google finds the change and adds it to its own archives. It then saves these archives for all time. This includes content from social networks, blogs, news sites, and so forth. Feeding a link into Archive.org’s Wayback Machine paints a candid picture of this process. Their urgency to archive all possible acquirable data also extends to other areas, such as your personal life via Gmail, Health, Calendar & Google Desktop (which scans all of the files in your “personal” computer) .

Another technique is the ‘transfer of human intelligence‘, which involves monitoring our behavior as we surf the Web and more. This is achieved via many routes, such as the standard Google Search, Google cookies, Google Toolbar (that embeds in most web browser programs), Google Desktop, sites with AdSense integrated, “Powered by Google” complete site integration, and last-but-not-least their new Google Chrome web-browser. Add to that Docs and Knol.

There isn’t even room in this article to explain the ramifications that each one of their “Products” poses in what it’s set to “understand” about yourself & your habits, and everything about the human race from the genetic to the social scale. But note their new “Android” mobile device service, which has 2 alarming features. First, is one app that records the users iris scan, for login purposes. Second, nearly every other app encourages the use of real-time navigational GPS tracking. So on one hand it conditions you to submit your eye iris scans, and on the other it conditions you to embrace constant real-time GPS tracking of your every move. The latter is dually striking as virtually all modern cell phones already embody GPS tracking, except most people aren’t yet aware of that.

In other cases they go out of their way to acquire ‘their’ data: Google Books, Patent Search, Scholar, Maps & Street View, Earth, Translate, Finance and now even Newspaper (archiving the history of all possible print newspapers). For some insight into the implications of their machine eventually having in its ‘intellectual possession’ virtually the entire history of humanity’s books, newspaper, scholarly academic papers and so forth, consider the statement from a Google Factory Tour guide: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI.” The point is proven in the fact that they’re scanning the entire books whether or not the entire contents will be browsable online. Perhaps my publishing of this article online is giving the Machine even more focused insight into itself?

Then there’s the darker side. First, they intend to -if not already- use your PC’s microphone to monitor ‘background audio’ ‘in order to listen to TV’s and so forth to garner better ads for the user’. As US intelligence agencies already monitor subjects via their cell phone microphones, which can only be prevented by removing the phones battery, you can expect Google equipped mobile devices and automobiles to do the same. Second, another goal is acquiring every persons DNA code, and then making it searchable online as another “Product”. This could prove to be their most challenging ambition, but in Google tradition they’ve rolled out the (on the surface) independent “23andMe” social networking personalized genome service which is already showing signs of targeting children for systematic indoctrination in DNA databanks.

Much of their epic archiving quest wont even immediately pay off, but it’s being kept as fruit waiting to ripen, or rather waiting for their conscious entity to ripen to be able to harness it. By this point many would declare that AGI isn’t possible, but regardless of beliefs and possibilities (external possibilities aren’t dependent on one persons beliefs), the stated goal exists.

Peter Norvig, former head of the now Intelligent Systems Division at NASA’s ARC, and now Google’s Director of Research, in 2007, claimed that Google is already co-evolving with the Internet. “We hadn’t expected that”, he said. But the Googler’s seem to be right on course to reach their ambitions by conscious direction of that delves beyond mere emergence alone. There are many cases of the 2 Google co-founders going on the record about “AI”, and between them and their related media’s, it’s quite clear that their intentions aren’t merely ‘narrow AI’ nor is any of it mere accident.

Take for instance machine vision. Begin with Google Video and shortly afterwards they acquired Youtube. These are both sites where the user does the work in providing the profitable content for them. For some it was neat for Youtube results to appear in Google Video searches, but then Google began crawling most of all other streaming video hosts including many of their competitors. During that shuffle, Google acquired Neven Vision, the worlds most advanced machine vision firm. One desirable prospect for Google was that NV’s technology was already geared for mobile devices. Another was that it was designed for both still photos and videos. It can be understood as advanced biometrics that’s designed to recognize all types of objects, not just human faces.

So while you’re walking around your neighborhood waving your GPS equipped Google mobile device around, it’s possible that Google is storing your cameras data in building Google’s omnipresent worlds eye. But I see a scarier side: When their infantile systems grow conscious enough, not only would they -or It- know and understand everything humanity has ever written, it would also have to a certain degree all of our videos from film to personal cams. One side is it helps it become sentient, the other is it accelerates its ability to understand humans individually and socially. After all, you couldn’t expect a machine to become conscious & intelligent without vision, nor could it understand humans without seeing them in action.

An intelligent thinking machine would also needs ears, and ears they are giving it. Make a call to 1-800-GOOG411 and experience their speech recognition algorithms for yourself. No surprise that the service is free, because the more people use it the more you help them reach their goal of omniscience. And it’s safe to assume to this technology is busy helping it listen to all of the videos it’s looking at. Meanwhile, their Translate efforts has their system rapidly learning how to translate any language from any language, guided by a handful of engineers who in most cases don’t even know the languages themselves. You can see this by doing the typical search, and you can bet they’re already working on integrating the technology into audio speech recognition.

Above we have the perfect outline of inherent rise of sentience via emergence, but they aren’t leaving it to just that. In May of 2008, Google hosted their own “Machine Learning Summit“, of which “most of the material covered (documents, videos, presentations) at these types of events is confidential and proprietary and can’t be released.” Prior to that, in 2006, internal documents leaked stating their plans the build “the worlds largest AI laboratory”. That lab might be already existent somewhere in their own properties, or it might be in or set to be in a government / military facility.

The facility could be in one of their many data-centers or other secretive locations. A ‘secretive‘ data-center of public fame is known best as “PROJECT02“, which has direct access to cheap power via a hydroelectric damn owned and operated by the US Army Corp of Engineers. Being the size of ‘2 football fields’, it sounds reminiscent of what everyone used to say in reference to the NSA’s Echelon system that was and is used to monitor virtually every form of telecommunications in the US and much of the Earth.

There’s no telling how many Google facilities exist, but is can be said that they wouldn’t need one centralized location for the ‘worlds largest AI lab’. With global telecommunications now being radically different than 60 years ago, private intranets can connect up any remote office or personal computer as a collective. This means that a modern day Manhattan Project could be operated across the planet in secret with great ease. This would especially be the case if you had literally a million or more parallel platformed CPU’s at your disposal (like Google does). Consider that computing power per $1000 is literally less than millionth what was during the Manhattan Project, and that project only cost about US$24 billion. Anything even resembling a modern semiconductor computer hadn’t even been invented yet.Meanwhile, every year their capabilities expand as CPU prices drop and work gets easier, exponentially, thanks to Moore’s Law and the Law of Accelerating Returns.

On the surface, Google seems to be poised to be able go it alone in their effort, yet they are in deep cahoots with the US military’s parallel initiative. Since the US military maintains global supremacy via its Navy, one could almost Google to roll out plans for ‘naval’ data-centers (which they have). The full scope of government & military involvement with Google’s AGI project goes well beyond the scope of this analysis, but suffice to say that Google have in 2008 signed a 40-90 year lease, with their geographical neighbors, at NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC), in Silicon Vally, for a 1.2 million square feet collaborative research facility. But not only does Google get to build on the government land there, they already have exclusive access to land and park their private Google jumbo jets on ARC’s “Moffitt Field”.

ARC is historically NASA’s prime hub of AI & AGI research, so it’s of little surprise that Sergey Brin, when asked about the partnership, repeatedly mentioned “AI” as the primary strategic interest. Also relevant in this summary, is the fact that Google was initially funded by DARPA, NASA, ane the National Science Foundation. It’s also been alleged by a former CIA agent that not only did the CIA fund them during their earlier years, but that the CIA has an actual office in the main Googleplex headquarters, while it’s a fact that Google hardware runs the US Intelligence Community’s ‘spy wikipedia‘. DARPA claims the fame of inventing the Internet, and by visiting their website you can browse through their extensive list of various inter-related “cognitive” “self-aware” artificial intelligence projects. Vint Cerf, Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” VP, ‘invented the Internet’ together with Bob Kahn via DARPA. Vint still works with NASA on the “Interplanetary Internet”, as well as on other projects for the United States military.

Lastly, in terms of a so-called ‘god on earth’ status, Larry Page has stated the desires to get started on “climate modification”, a dream of military strategists since ancient times. Fostering such a sentiment with Google’s de-facto government-operation status via NASA & DARPA, humanity doesn’t just face whatever typically assumed degrees of ‘computer control’ by the omnipresent and omniscient Machine, the Machine is on the path of geophysical omnipotence. NASA, in recent years, has pursued the perfect program to mesh with this. The goal of the “Intelligent Archives” sounds familiar to everything Google is doing in terms of “understanding” massive amounts of data. They even used the phrases “self-aware” and “cognitive”. The projects webpage now speak in the past tense, and it’s unclear its true status after its parent division became the “Intelligent Systems Division”. In any case, with deep integration with NASA and their Earth sciences, and the military and their hundreds of top secret satellites, and AI all in-between, I’d say Page has found the perfect scenario to pursue this dream.

In closing, lets just say that Google manages to actually understand what the data in its own text data-holdings ‘means’. This could be kept simply between webpages and books. Consider hundreds of thousands of texts related to related to programming languages and software engineering (essentially everything on the subject). By using Google Search we can tell the system is very much in perpetual tune with its own complete data-holdings. One could argue that they’re flirting with “hard-takeoff” AGI emergence on this front alone. And if you spend enough time putting complex worded search strings ‘into’ Google Calculator and Code Search you might help make that a reality.

Imagine what it would mean if the Google co-founders get their wish of Google being directly connected to human minds via neural interface. That might make people reconsider that Google fought for the new wireless Internet spectrum, and are working to bring 3 billion new people the Internet, good things.

SEE ALSO:

*Mobile Google Android to condition people to embrace constant GPS tracking *Google Founders Artificial Intelligence Quotes Archive

IIBFilms: DARPA’s iXo Artificial Intelligence Control Grid: ‘The Official Version’

*An Inconvenient Truth on Al Gore: Google & NASA A.I.