Google It

At the time of this writing, Google is trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange for $903.32 per share. By comparison, Apple is currently trading at $464.68  per share, Amazon at $312.03, Microsoft $$33.32, Facebook $45.23, and Yahoo at a paltry $30.43  per share.

Every morning, as regular as clockwork, coffee, and sitting on the commode, I scroll down to the bottom left of my laptop and click on the red, green, and yellow circle that instantly connects me to the digital universe.

Google Inc. was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Google was incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible."

To accomplish that goal, Google provides Internet access through Chrome which holds a 65% worldwide market share. Google offers cloud computing, software applications and online advertising technologies.

Google owns YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, and the Android mobile operating system. Google has effectively mapped the entire planet in three-dimensional real time, is in active testing of driverless vehicles, is in development of vocal interfaces, is designing wearable computers, and is rapidly approaching the breakthrough to Artificial Intelligence.

Google offers an office suite (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), desktop product applications for Web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware including production of its high-end Nexus devices. Google is installing a fiber-optic infrastructure  to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.

The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world and to process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes (2 to the 50th power (1,125,899,906,842,624) bytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes) of user-generated data each day.

In 2006 Google moved its headquarters to Mountain View, California. The sprawling business and research site is nicknamed the Googleplex. The company name originating from a misspelling of the word "googol," the number one followed by one hundred zeros. In January 2013, Google announced it had earned $50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. On Fortune magazine's list of best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students. Google has a designated Chief Culture Officer, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on.

In 2003, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as "to use a search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

Google has partnered with other organizations for research, advertising, and other activities. In 2005, Google partnered with NASA Ames Research Center to build 1,000,000 square feet of office space to be used for research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry.

In 2007, Google began sponsoring NORAD Tracks Santa, following Santa Claus' progress on Christmas Eve, using Google Earth to "track Santa" in 3-D for the first time. Google-owned YouTube gave NORAD Tracks Santa its own channel.

Google launched its own satellite in 2008, providing the company with high-resolution imagery for Google Earth. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to-date when announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies to help protect it in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies. One of the more controversial services Google hosts is Google Books. The company began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into its new book search engine.

In May 2013, Google's Amit Singhal commented on the future of search, explaining that a search engine's three primary functions will need to evolve and that search will need to: 1. Answer, 2. Converse, and 3. Anticipate. Concurrently, the company instituted Google Translate, a  translation service, which can translate between 35 different languages. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques, where the program "learns" from professionally translated documents. Additionally, Google launched its Google News service in 2002. The "highly unusual" site "offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention," presenting topically selected links to news and opinion pieces along with story leads, and photographs.

In 2006, against strong opposition from large telecommunications companies, Google offered free wireless broadband access in San Francisco. Google's stated objective is to offer free Internet access worldwide, breaking the backs of ISP monopolies.

Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality. According to Google's Guide to Net Neutrality:

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to control activity online.

On February 7, 2006, Vint Cerf, current Vice President and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google, testified before Congress that "allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."

So what does all this mean? The overarching project that ties everything together is the development of a set of artificial intelligence systems that use machine learning techniques to automatically classify and deal with vast amounts of web information. To oversee this eventuality, Google  hired Singularity-obsessed AI-booster Ray Kurzweil in December 2012 to help run its AI and machine learning schemes.

At research.google.com/pubs/ArtificialIntelligenceandMachineLearning.html, under the heading Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the site references 330 Publications dealing with Artificial Intelligence. Some of the titles (none of which I've read) are:

A Generic Technique for Synthesizing Bounded Finite-State Controllers; A Semantic Matching Energy Function for Learning with Multi-relational Data; An Empirical Study of Learning Rates in Deep Neural Networks for Speech Recognition; Comparative Study of Classifiers to Mitigate Intersymbol Interference in Diffuse Indoor Optical Wireless Communication Links; Fastfood - Approximating Kernel Expansions in Loglinear Time; The Dataminer Guide to Scalable Mixed-Membership and Nonparametric Bayesian Models; and Probabilistic Initial 3D Model Generation for Single-Particle Cryo-Electron Microscopy.

And that's just from the first ten percent of the list!

When asked how soon Google would pass the Turing Test (a concept first introduced in 1950 by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing which measures a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior equivalent to a real human being), Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded that "Google could do it in five to ten years.”

Google’s primary vehicle for its Artificial Intelligence technology is Google Now, the voice-recognizing search product which is a tool that will eventually be able to manage almost every aspect of our lives.

But not to be outdone, Google is also tackling AI from a completely different approach. Quantum computing took a giant leap forward in May of this year when Google announced that NASA and Google, in partnership with a consortium of universities, was breaking ground on the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab which will employ the D-Wave Two. The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and is expected to be available for government, industrial, and university research later this year.

Quantum computers exploit the bizarre quantum-mechanical properties of atoms and other building blocks of the cosmos. While regular computers symbolize data in bits, 1s and 0s expressed by flicking tiny switch-like transistors on or off, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, that can essentially be both on and off, enabling them to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. A quantum computer with 300 qubits could run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe. Sponsors of the project include the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel.

Stepping from the virtual world into the real world, Google has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver. Computer drivering systems react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated. The technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. The system would utilize Google Earth for the vehicle's GPS navigation system.

Even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away, but organizations with a vested interest in the project include DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Pentagon's research arm.

Google acknowledges that such technologies are ahead of the law in many areas, and that AI raises many moral and ethical issues. If a machine becomes self aware do we need to treat it as a lifeform with inherent rights?

Just today Google said it plans to set up a new company called Calico, to develop technologies to tackle health issues, with a focus on life-threatening diseases and problems affecting mental and physical agility due to aging. The new company will be headed by Apple Inc and Genentech Chairman Art Levinson. Google offered no further details other than to say that Google's investment in Calico is "significant."

Google co-founder and Chief Executive Larry Page wrote on his Google+ profile: "Don't be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses."

Soon we will all be wearing Google computers, linked by Google servers, riding in Google operated cars on Google controlled transportation grids, powered by Google energy. We will live longer through Google health services, and our entire lives will be recorded and displayed on YouTube. All human communication will be filtered through Google networks and devices, and we will be tracked in real time by Google GPS maps and hi-res satellites. The sum of human knowledge will reside in Google data storage centers. And all this will be directed from the AI Googlesphere .

Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil." Can Google take over the world? Yes. Will Google take over the world? Yes, if it is in their corporate interests to do so. Should Google take over the world? I leave that up to you.