It involves meetings with the head of Google Translate, Barak Turovsky, who places a phone on a table and has it talk to me in English directly from his spoken Russian the cartographer-in-chief of Google Maps, Manik Gupta, who is excited about current efforts to map the unmappable ' Indian villages, the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef ' using backpackers and local knowledge.I listen to one of the two or three key brains behind the Search algorithm itself, Ben Gomes, who speaks 10 to the dozen of 'natural language generation' and 'deep learning networks' (and, inevitably, of the 'holy grail' of answering users' questions before they have been asked). It is, I suppose, the latest expression of that now vintage and troublingly prophetic bumper sticker: In Google we trust.The car takes me for a ride on the second morning of a three-day quest to discover in which direction the all-powerful search engine (now 16 years old, ready to spread its wings) is currently motoring what territory ' virtual, actual, economic ' it is planning to stake out next where it is taking us.Related: Google Maps: a decade of transforming the mapping landscapeMy campus tour has something of the quality of a west coast Tomorrow's World. Now they are calculating from memory what the dad and his toddler passenger on a bike on the right are likely to do next, now processing the probabilities that the car approaching the stop sign at some speed is actually going to stop.Even so, pausing for a cautionary second and a half at a green light, driver's impatience being so ingrained, I don't think, 'Wow!' but 'Come on'' Not for a moment do I imagine that the car ' or the complex digital intelligence that fuels its decisions ' will fail to do the right thing.
They can monitor unexpected movements two football pitches away.
Its sensors, bolt-on radar and lasers and cameras, are twitchily hyperactive. Approaching a complicated four-way junction, every nearby moving or stationary object ' lorries, wheelie bins, birds, trees, pedestrians ' mapped and colour-coded instant-by-instant on the car's computer console, I find myself thinking not, 'Look out!' but rather, 'Speed up!'The car, one of 24 that have now done a collective million miles on the roads around Google's campus in the city of Mountain View, and further afield on freeways, and even out in San Francisco, behaves ' not surprisingly ' somewhat like a cautious learner driver. After 10 minutes cruising Californian streets in the rear seat of one of Google's 'autonomous' Lexus 4x4s, the 'look, no hands!' miracle of the Google 'driver' in the front already feels old hat.
Whatever happened to wonder'The most unnerving thing about sitting in the back of a driverless car is how quickly you get used to it.
0 kommentar(er)
