Imagining the Google Future 197
Lester67 writes "Business 2 put a bunch of big brains together to give us a peek at Google from 2015 to 2105. "Will it succumb to hubris and flame out like so many of its predecessors? Or will it grow into an omnipresent, omnipotent force--not just on Wall Street or the Web, but in society? We put the question to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram. They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future." "
sure ... google will be around in 2015, right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:sure ... google will be around in 2015, right (Score:3, Interesting)
Google could bring about the Singularity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One Day Too Early (Score:4, Interesting)
Was it a mistake or are they "playing by their own rules"?
Of course playing by your own rules on Wall Street may be a mistake.From TFA:
Google will replace US Mail/Cell / Telephones/Maps (Score:4, Interesting)
They already offer tons of services for free, and eventually will branch out to mobile gadgetry.
In 2010 you will just carry around your own pocket Google Hand Unit and instantly communicate by voice or text with anyone anywhere, plot your map to find a route, and then read the news/web when you go to meet up with them.
Re:Um (Score:3, Interesting)
First, they could adapt to change, much like every always does. Or, they could be the change. If they define what is changing, it puts them in the same position of power that Microsoft has been in.
What I consider to be a distinct advantage for Google, if they can pull of the same thing, is that there is no explicit ownership of the Internet. Users are more likely to have a choice, and it is that choice that dictates the success of a business or an idea. If it is true, it just goes to show how good of a job Google really has done, already.
Re:Google could bring about the Singularity (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was reading "Age of Spiritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil gave an example of "evolution" AI that basically brute forces the stock market by creating simulations based off certain criteria that would determine whether or not to purchase a stock. The simulatons that picks stocks that raised in priced lived, and all the others died. Then those surviors would have their code replicated a couple billion times and then each of those new versions would have the code slightly replicated and the next round of evolution would happen.
It occurred to me that if one could build a machine that could have each of the programs check all pages on the internet for changes in criteria (as in CNN reported business made such a profit or bad comments on forums about certain companies), but then I realized this would take a search engine as big as google to do this...
But then it dawned on me that what if google is already doing this? I mean they basically have constant caching of the internet. If they wanted to, they could write an algorythim to look at all this data and determine what patterns cause certain stocks to rise and then once they've trained a box to do this then they could litterly consume all other companies.
Maybe a bit far fetched, but a company could do it... Google has the resources now to.
(disclaimer, I maybe a bit biased about the whole singularity thing)
Transcending search, etc. (Score:2, Interesting)
Further, we need to remember what Microsoft is: a marketing company. They buy other peoples' products then remarket them as their own after making it impossible to own or use one without the others. Who are we to say Google won't do likewise or better?
Speculation is futile. You either believe they're smart or you don't. After that, you still have no shot at pricing the stock...it's a pure Keynesian beauty contest.
Re:At least they didn't ask John C. Dvorak (Score:2, Interesting)
A lots been said on it I know, but just to conclude that they did not make that decision lightly. See the Google Blog [blogspot.com].
For all you know (and let's face it, neither of us has a clue), maybe it is the fastest way to globally uncensored speech. We'll see you eat your words if in 5-10 years, China accepts the uncensored Google. Oh, and one other thing, Yahoo or other search engines aren't THAT much worse than Google, so China wouldn't have been missing an awful lot. Thus they would not have cared, and kept their censoring policy anyway.
Google OS (Score:3, Interesting)
But while the need to display images will surely never go away, I do imagine a future in which GUIs are replaced by a renaissance in the CLI (command line). What goes around comes around. But in this paradigm, the CLI performs natural language processing, and also can understand spoken commands as well as typed. If Google ever does an "OS" I seriously believe it will be something like this.
The future is not so much in "operating systems" as in "artificial intelligence", which is really just a buzzword for search.
We'll see the first signs of this once Google Desktop starts being used in more robust ways, like as an application launcher.
Re:5000 Worthless PhDs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not at all, but I can understand how, in an environment couched in overly polite language, mannerisms rather than manners, "straight shooting" might come across that way.
Note that we're talking averages here
Exactly. Gaggle.
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I'm not at all sure you how you come to that conclusion, since, as you rightly point out I rightly point out that isn't case. In fact, it's about half my case in a nutshell.
However, what the *average* Ph.D. CAN do that the *average* Bucky Fuller CANNOT do is bridge the gap between academia and industry.
At the moment the bridges over the gap between academia and industry are almost entirely being built where they shouldn't be while the bridges going where they should are being burned. Industry is only too pleased to supply the gasoline and matches.
As a result there is starting to be quite little of value to be found in either place as academia regresses to the industrial mean and thus academia has less and less of value to give to industry other than labor.
I'm also getting a bit of amusement out of the idea of an "average" Buckey Fuller.
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Have you actually read a doctoral thesis lately? Originality does not imply value.
You understand, don't you, that the Google search engine itself is a purely accidental byproduct of some bright kids fooling around with something that interested them intensely?
5000 PhDs likely couldn't have accomplished the task.
KFG
No meaningful assets??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
So I was playing with the new Yahoo! maps beta. I wanted to send a map to a friend. There's no obvious way to get a linkable URL to a resultant map page. Google has that right at the top. Yahoo wants to hide everything in frames. Google use images and a nice javascript tiling engine. Yahoo publishes to flash. They have a 'mail a friend' feature that doesn't include the map information, at least in the plain text alternative.
So, somebody at Yahoo thinks these are good decisions. If Google can manage to not hire these kinds of bozos maybe they have a chance.
Re:2105 (Score:4, Interesting)
Haha, yeah, or standard oil. Oh wait, if it weren't split up into 34 different companies, several of which are the largest and most profitable companies in the world now (Exxon-mobile has the largest profit of any corporation in the world), it would be a freaking scary company. The daughter companies combined have an annual revenue of well over a trillion dollars. Can you imagine a world in which they'd been able to leverage their monopoly?
I think back then, a few people thought about the future, and that's why they decided to break it up.