February 17, 2007 12:05 PM PST
Google's Page urges scientists to market themselves
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"We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. "It's not as far off as people think."
Page, the director of products at the 8-year-old search giant, described several of his areas of interest in science and technology during the hour-long talk, which was a rare engagement for the nerdy billionaire. But the common thread in the lecture seemed to be enthusiasm for what Page (and co-founder Sergey Brin) managed to do well with Google: good old-fashioned entrepreneurialism while solving a single problem.
Video:
Google's Larry Page talks science
Co-founder of Google at AAAS gathering
Page gave the example of Steven Chu, professor of physics and Nobel Prize winner. Chu was a failed grad student who decided to "get good at building lasers" and then he later won the Nobel Prize for his work with the technology. "When you have basic technology you find interesting things to do with them, and if you're lucky they'll turn into something big," he said.
And that was his main advice to the scientists in the room: take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance at solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change.
"Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we're not really paying attention to that," Page said. "Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."
To that end, Page urged the group to take on more leadership roles in society, i.e., politics, so that they could control more funding for research and development. He also said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research.
Entrepreneurialism should also be more ingrained in university culture, Page said, much like it is at his alma mater Stanford University and Google's home base, Silicon Valley.
Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.
"Most of the works you guys have done are not represented in those searches. We have to unlock the wealth of scientific knowledge and get it to everyone. I don't care what we do, but we need to do something," he said.
Page said he hopes Internet video, like Youtube and Google Video, will evolve to include scientific lectures. He said he would like to see a "box in the back of every classroom," where professors could push a button and "whatever you said would go on Net. It's important to get all that out there."
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Such a step would push the expectations of online services to a new level. We're approaching a type of intuitive internet by perfecting interactivity (e.g. Client side coding i.e. JavaScript) and accelerating online development (Ruby on Rails, PHP and competitive frameworks, MySQL). Yet none have taken the 'net to the 'next level'. Artificial Intelligence, DNA storing; they all seemed like science fiction in the early 90s. Today, they could only be the product of the online collaboration.
Such innovations would bring about change that we can only imagine. Personally, i look froward to the day when written text could be translated into any language.
(Proper spelling courtesy of Firefox 2.0)
Such a step would push the expectations of online services to a new level. We're approaching a type of intuitive internet by perfecting interactivity (e.g. Client side coding i.e. JavaScript) and accelerating online development (Ruby on Rails, PHP and competitive frameworks, MySQL). Yet none have taken the 'net to the 'next level'. Artificial Intelligence, DNA storing; they all seemed like science fiction in the early 90s. Today, they could only be the product of the online collaboration.
Such innovations would bring about change that we can only imagine. Personally, i look froward to the day when written text could be translated into any language.
(Proper spelling courtesy of Firefox 2.0)
Developments in various areas of present day computer design, physics and neurobiology point to this assertion. Eg. Computers are capable of crunching massive amounts of numbers, yet many classes of problems are exceedingly difficult for computers to process because of the sheer amount of computation required to solve them. Quantum Computation looks to the "connections" between storage elements to solve these types of problems in the form of massive arrays of atoms, collectively tuned to be fed problems and then read out to extract solutions to those problems. At least that is the dream, currently the simplest quantum computers are only capable of processing low bit and therefor simple problems relative to even todays computers but the technology will scale. I think that biological intelligence is more like a quantum computer and less like a binary computer, though it may be possible in theory to through computation at the AI problem , it is possible that all the computers in all the world could not working together achieve the connectedness needed to span the problem space spanned by an intelligent brain and emerge a similar "intelligence".
As an engineer my guess is AI will emerge not from current traditional silicon computers but instead from a combination of quantum computers and silicon computers once commercial quantum computers are available. So I guess not for another 15 - 20 years.
Developments in various areas of present day computer design, physics and neurobiology point to this assertion. Eg. Computers are capable of crunching massive amounts of numbers, yet many classes of problems are exceedingly difficult for computers to process because of the sheer amount of computation required to solve them. Quantum Computation looks to the "connections" between storage elements to solve these types of problems in the form of massive arrays of atoms, collectively tuned to be fed problems and then read out to extract solutions to those problems. At least that is the dream, currently the simplest quantum computers are only capable of processing low bit and therefor simple problems relative to even todays computers but the technology will scale. I think that biological intelligence is more like a quantum computer and less like a binary computer, though it may be possible in theory to through computation at the AI problem , it is possible that all the computers in all the world could not working together achieve the connectedness needed to span the problem space spanned by an intelligent brain and emerge a similar "intelligence".
As an engineer my guess is AI will emerge not from current traditional silicon computers but instead from a combination of quantum computers and silicon computers once commercial quantum computers are available. So I guess not for another 15 - 20 years.
I must disagree...I posit that (nearly) all economic growth is due to market conditions, not technological conditions. Please disabuse me of my skeptisism, but I ask someone to show me one instance of a technological breakthrough that survived on it's own. Us sheep only buy what is actively marketed to us, not what is actually good for us.
Case-in-point...the Pet Rock. I rest my case.
- This guy is SO WRONG!!!
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by unc_tarheels
February 19, 2007 5:49 PM PST
- Is this guy an idiot??? The amount of information contained in one's DNA has absolutely NOTHING to do with the amount of information contained in a human brain. Brain "information" or "intelligence" is related to the number of neural connections which is approximately 10^50. That is way, way more than 600 Megabytes (10^6). Inorder to duplicate the processing capability of the human brain, you would need a million, million petabytes. Although not impossible to simulate, I think that we are a few hundred years away.
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