/ News
Inside the Artificial Brain That’s Remaking the Google Empire
It was one of the most tedious jobs on the internet. A team of Googlers would spend day after day staring at computer screens, scrutinizing tiny snippets of street photographs, asking themselves the same question over and over again: “Am I looking at an address or not?’ Click. Yes. Click. Yes. Click. No.
This was a critical part of building the company’s Google Maps service. Knowing the precise address of a building is really helpful information for mapmakers. But that didn’t make life any easier for those poor Googlers who had to figure out whether a string of numbers captured by Google’s roving Street View cars was a phone number, a graffiti tag, or a legitimate address.
Then, a few months ago, they were relieved of their agony, after some Google engineers trained the company’s machines to handle this thankless task. Traditionally, computers have muffed this advanced kind of image recognition, and Google finally cracked the problem with its new artificial intelligence system, known as Google Brain. With Brain, Google can now transcribe all of the addresses that Street View has captured in France in less than an hour.
“GOOGLE IS NOT REALLY A SEARCH COMPANY. IT’S A MACHINE-LEARNING COMPANY.”
Since its birth in the company’s secretive X Labs three years ago, the Google Brain has flourished inside the company, giving its army of software engineers a way to apply cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to a growing array of problems. And in many ways, it seems likely to give Google an edge as it expands into new territory over the next decade, much in the way that its search algorithms and data center expertise helped build its massively successful advertising business during the last ten years.
“Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company,” says Matthew Zeiler, the CEO of visual search startup Clarifai, who worked on Google Brain during a pair of internships. He says that all of Google’s most-important projects—autonomous cars, advertising, Google Maps—stand to gain from this type of research. “Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning.”
In addition to the Google Maps work, there’s Android’s voice recognition software and Google+’s image search. But that’s just the beginning, according to Jeff Dean, one of primary thinkers behind the Brain project. He believes the Brain will help with the company’s search algorithms and boost Google Translate. “We now have probably 30 or 40 different teams at Google using our infrastructure,” says Dean. “Some in production ways, some are exploring it and comparing it to their existing systems, and generally getting pretty good results for a pretty broad set of problems.”
The project is part of a much larger shift towards a new form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning.” Facebook is exploring similar work, and so is Microsoft, IBM, and others. But it seems that Google has pushed this technology further—at least for the moment.
Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/google_brain/
/ About us
Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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