YEAH, YEAH, NO BIG DEAL

Interesting interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

First: The internet is not the same as Google!

Why do you think some people are complaining about Google’s power?
Try to understand the motivations of the complainers. Google is one of the companies where advertising is moving to us and from other forms of media. The fact of the matter is, that’s about the Internet, not about Google. We are one of the companies, but we are certainly by no means the only one.

The next question is one I wanted to ask Vint Cerf last week when he visited campus, but I thought it would sound silly in the context of his talk. Schmidt is a business man, not a tech geek, so I’m interested to see if their answers differ:

Is Google creating a real artificial intelligence?
A lot of people have speculated that. If we’re doing AI, we’re not doing it the way AI researchers do it, because they do real cognition. Our spelling correction (on misspelled search queries) is an example of AI. But if you talk of that in an AI class in computer science, they’ll say, Oh yeah, yeah, no big deal. On the other hand, spelling correction applies to millions of people every day.

But Larry and Sergey talk about doing a real AI, and there’s the idea that you’re scanning all this stuff on the Web to be read and understood by an AI. That gives a lot of people the willies, because there’s any number of movies such as The Terminator that show the negative aspect.
Yeah, but again that’s because they’re using broad and imprecise terms. It’s true that we read the stuff, but in the next few years, cognition, or real understanding, remains a research dream.

I’m not sure how to take this answer. On the one hand, he clearly acknowledges the kinds of AI used in developing certain aspects of Google; but he is absolutely right that Google isn’t trying to be a cognitive system, and any view of AI along those lines will make Google fall well short.

Still, he leaves open the possibility that Google is trying to develop a non-standard AI system, which has been my argument all along.

Damn it, I should have asked Vint this question.