Spock’s Brain – now in production at Google

You remember that Star Trek episode even though maybe you wish you didn’t. You know, the one where Spock’s brain is stolen and installed to run a datacenter — eh planet space center. And it all made sense having one of the universe’s most powerful minds running everything.

Well, so it’s not Spock’s brain at Google, but perhaps it’s the best we have for now, namely the Deep Mind system that won at Go recently with much fanfare. And while not as fun to converse with as Spock, it appears to be working in a pretty high dimensional space (120 knobs to turn) to increase efficiency 15%.

Given how much is spent on running a data center, logically, Spock would be proud. But naturally this is just the beginning, begging the question how will this impact fields with other complex problems (with healthcare and biology being dear to my heart)?

As I see it, there still is low lying fruit for machine learning to go after, especially with ingesting large datasets to create new actions to help humanity. Freenome is a good example in the cancer testing space, but there are so many different types of data (images for radiology, dermatology, ophthalmology; genomic sequences; vitals from wearables; etc) that there will be several more “Spock’s brain” like opportunities to come.