Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:36PM
I used to think that as well but became disillusioned after reading this [ieee.org] interview with Astro Teller. He's the head of "X" which is Alphabet/Google's innovation lab and the one which you're referencing whether or not you realize it. I'd recommend reading things in context but a telling quote or two from Teller is:
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The whole division is far more pragmatic than the moonshot reputation. What he's talking about in the first quote about trying to kill the project is that that's generally stage 1 of any idea at X. 'How can we kill this project?' If they can kill it, they do - and move on. And the reasons for a project being killed do include there being no crystal clear path to profit. When pressed on the value of such a system Teller ends up stumbling over his words trying to explain why Google isn't pursuing it without simply saying they're concerned it won't produce sufficient revenue. For a ctrl+f the question includes "Robots aren't the best solution, is that what you're saying?"
I still personally believe that Google is covertly cooking up some exciting progress intermingling between AI and robotics - e.g. DeepMind meet Boston Dynamics (or whatever was yielded from them before they moved on.) But logically, I think that belief is probably more emotional than rationally justified. They're just a big corporation trying to make lots of money. That's not where innovations come from. On the other hand Google is supporting initiatives like DeepMind but that's likely because that whole team is capable of likely operating on a budget of $1 million a year excluding extraneous costs like hardware which vertical integration ensures will have a price approaching $0. And their product is likely already being directly integrated into things such as Google's search.