Google’s idea of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an obviously interesting topic, which also arises big questions: when will we have the opportunity to try personally all those inventions that sci-fi movies and TV serials always show us? Will Artificial Intelligence have a good impact on large scale in our society and in what will be the application fields?

Well, some of Artificial Intelligence inventions are already real or in testing at Google “secret” labs. Google X Labor simply Google X is a department of Google, which experiments with ambitious future technologies. The purpose of this lab is to develop technologies and products that have the potential to make a large positive impact on society.

As you can imagine, the full extent of the research is not public but it is thought to include projects related to Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Google founders always demonstrated interest in this technology. In fact, it is said that every time they discuss the future of Google, the CEO Larry Page argues that Google will eventually become a form of Artificial Intelligence. Starting from that idea, Google has developed several projects concerning AI:

• Google Glass is a research program born to build an augmented reality head-mounted display. The product testing began in April 2012 and in the same year was available to development communities. The product is compatible with Android, iOS and Windows smartphones through Bluetooth. It has a 5-megapixel camera and a battery life, which lasts one entire day.

• Google Car is the first example of driverless car. Developers and some engineers at Stanford University compose the research group. The Stanford team led by Sebastian Thrun, co-inventor of Google Street View, won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and a money prize from the United States Department of Defence, which helped the development and testing.

• Google Now, for the right info at the right moment. The vocal assistant, available on all Android phones and also for iOS systems, is a voice recognition and comprehension system, comparable to Apple’s Siri. Google Now allows you to stay in touch with news regarding your interests, manage the daily businesses and provide you with useful info. The project is still in progress because of the introduction of new languages and features to transform this virtual assistant in something like Iron Man’s Jarvis.

In order to keep all those projects operative, Google needs a great computational power. In January 2012, it was estimated that Google had around 1.8 million servers housed in its data centres worldwide. The incredible Google platform continues to grow year by year and thanks to this, in the future, Google platform should be sufficiently powerful to run a complete simulation of a human brain, including displays of intelligence and self-awareness.