Push hard in developing AI.
Seriously. Focus on ML and NLP, use their vast resources of data and computing power and really smart engineers. It'll take years, maybe decades but of course this goal is worth it.
I'd love to hear other HN thoughts on products we should be doing.
I know Google made Donations to Khan Academy. But in my view Khan Academy solves (at least in its current format) only somewhat partial problem. There is a huge potential on what can be achieved in Online Education.
Hypothetical Online Google University can:
- Liberate Higher Education from the grasp of the lucky few.
- Anyone can spend any amount of time to learn on a subject/class/course online, wake up the next morning walk up to an "Exam Center" and give exam to pass the course (with a reasonable fee).
- "Socialize" education in the sense that teachers and students from all over the world can communicate in "forum/chat/discussion" to help each other to study and learn.
- Ability to setup "meetups" to form study groups IRL.
- Study materials can be wiki-fied. With only verified expert on the field can contribute, with diffs to see what has been recently changed. No more waiting for book revisions.
I know there are some genuine limitations to this concept and some problems to be solved, before it can be viable replacement of what can only be classified as "clusterfuck" that is the present education system. But if any company can help the ball rolling, I honestly believe Google can be the only one. If I had the money I would drop everything I have today and jump in to this.
We need to liberate higher education from its artificial barriers.
Hopefully, you will read this and take this in to consideration and discuss it with whoever is concerned.
I think Google would be great at the first one. I'm not sure how good we'd be at the second part, but I totally agree this is an important problem. My dad was a physics professor for 30+ years, so I've seen a lot of issues with the current model. I have to think there are ways to educate people better than we do it now. You can't tell me that in 20 years we'll still be using the same practices to educate people that we do now.
The thing about education system is that everyone knows its a problem and everyone knows it needs to be fixed but no one wants to be the first to jump in to it (I don't think Khan Academy counts).
I think the first effort is important and whoever does it first needs to set an example for everyone else to follow.
How about an app that lets Google Books fans read on an iPad or on Android that doesn't involve looking at HTML rendering and/or converting files to ePub?
* The risk of interacting with the first AGI is even harder to put an upper bound on. You might destroy the human race.
* Statistical NLP and ML might be useful "addons" to an AGI but they're unlikely to lead to its creation on their own.
* Google has a lot of really smart engineers and computer scientists, but AGI is neither an engineering nor a CS problem.