ending. What will replace it?
It is significant that Google is instrumental in changing the metaphor. In one sense the company began as the quintessential intelligence augmentation, or IA, company. The PageRank algorithm Larry Page developed to improve Internet search results essentially mined human intelligence by using the crowd-sourced accumulation of human decisions about valuable information sources. Google initially began by collecting and organizing human knowledge and then making it available to humans as part of a glorified Memex, the original global information retrieval system first proposed by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. 11
As the company has evolved, however, it has started to push heavily toward systems that replace rather than extend humans. Google’s executives have obviously thought to some degree about the societal consequences of the systems they are creating. Their corporate motto remains “Don’t be evil.” Of course, that is nebulous enough to be construed to mean almost anything. Yet it does suggest that as a company Google is concerned with more than simply maximizing shareholder value. For example, Peter Norvig, a veteran AI scientist who has been director of research at Google since 2001, points to partnerships between human and computer as the way out of the conundrum presented by the emergence of increasingly intelligent machines. A partnership between human chess experts and a chess-playing computer program can outplay even the best AI chess program, he notes. “As a society that’s what we’re going to have to do. Computers are going to be more flexible and they’re going to do more, and the people who are going to thrive are probably the ones who work in a partnership with machines,” he told a NASA conference in 2014. 12
What will the partnerships between humans and intelligent cars of the future look like? What began as a military plan to automate battlefield logistics, lowering costs and keeping soldiers out of harm’s way, is now on the verge of reframing modern transportation. The world is plunging ahead and automating transportation systems, but the consequences are only dimly understood today. There will be huge positive consequences in safety, efficiency, and environmental quality. But what about the millions of people now employed driving throughout the world? What will they do when they become the twenty-first-century equivalent of the blacksmith or buggy-whip maker?
4 | THE RISE, FALL, AND RESURRECTION OF AI
S itting among musty boxes in an archive at Stanford University in the fall of 2010, David Brock felt his heart stop. A detail-oriented historian specializing in the semiconductor industry, Brock was painstakingly poring over the papers of William Shockley for his research project on the life of Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore. After leading the team that coinvented the transistor at Bell Labs, Shockley had moved back to Santa Clara County in 1955, founding a start-up company to make a new type of more manufacturable transistor. What had been lost, until Brock found it hidden among Shockley’s papers, was a bold proposal the scientist had made in an effort to persuade Bell Labs, in 1951 the nation’s premier scientific research institution, to build an “automatic trainable robot.”
For decades there have been heated debates about what led to the creation of Silicon Valley, and one of the breezier explanations is that Shockley, who had grown up near downtown Palo Alto, decided to return to the region that was once the nation’s fruit capital because his mother was then in ill health. He located Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto and across the freeway from where Google’s sprawling corporate campus is today. Moore was one of the first employees at the fledgling transistor company and would later become a member of the “traitorous eight,” the group of engineers
It is significant that Google is instrumental in changing the metaphor. In one sense the company began as the quintessential intelligence augmentation, or IA, company. The PageRank algorithm Larry Page developed to improve Internet search results essentially mined human intelligence by using the crowd-sourced accumulation of human decisions about valuable information sources. Google initially began by collecting and organizing human knowledge and then making it available to humans as part of a glorified Memex, the original global information retrieval system first proposed by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. 11
As the company has evolved, however, it has started to push heavily toward systems that replace rather than extend humans. Google’s executives have obviously thought to some degree about the societal consequences of the systems they are creating. Their corporate motto remains “Don’t be evil.” Of course, that is nebulous enough to be construed to mean almost anything. Yet it does suggest that as a company Google is concerned with more than simply maximizing shareholder value. For example, Peter Norvig, a veteran AI scientist who has been director of research at Google since 2001, points to partnerships between human and computer as the way out of the conundrum presented by the emergence of increasingly intelligent machines. A partnership between human chess experts and a chess-playing computer program can outplay even the best AI chess program, he notes. “As a society that’s what we’re going to have to do. Computers are going to be more flexible and they’re going to do more, and the people who are going to thrive are probably the ones who work in a partnership with machines,” he told a NASA conference in 2014. 12
What will the partnerships between humans and intelligent cars of the future look like? What began as a military plan to automate battlefield logistics, lowering costs and keeping soldiers out of harm’s way, is now on the verge of reframing modern transportation. The world is plunging ahead and automating transportation systems, but the consequences are only dimly understood today. There will be huge positive consequences in safety, efficiency, and environmental quality. But what about the millions of people now employed driving throughout the world? What will they do when they become the twenty-first-century equivalent of the blacksmith or buggy-whip maker?
4 | THE RISE, FALL, AND RESURRECTION OF AI
S itting among musty boxes in an archive at Stanford University in the fall of 2010, David Brock felt his heart stop. A detail-oriented historian specializing in the semiconductor industry, Brock was painstakingly poring over the papers of William Shockley for his research project on the life of Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore. After leading the team that coinvented the transistor at Bell Labs, Shockley had moved back to Santa Clara County in 1955, founding a start-up company to make a new type of more manufacturable transistor. What had been lost, until Brock found it hidden among Shockley’s papers, was a bold proposal the scientist had made in an effort to persuade Bell Labs, in 1951 the nation’s premier scientific research institution, to build an “automatic trainable robot.”
For decades there have been heated debates about what led to the creation of Silicon Valley, and one of the breezier explanations is that Shockley, who had grown up near downtown Palo Alto, decided to return to the region that was once the nation’s fruit capital because his mother was then in ill health. He located Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto and across the freeway from where Google’s sprawling corporate campus is today. Moore was one of the first employees at the fledgling transistor company and would later become a member of the “traitorous eight,” the group of engineers
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