What You'd Better Know About the Concentrating Power of Technology (GOOG)

We dropped in on one of the Davos bigwigs last week:

“The race is between computers and people and the people need to win ... In this fight, it is very important that we find the things that humans are really good at,”

-Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google

as quoted in the FT editorial "Automation and the threat to jobs" on the Davos gang and their public comments.

And I started laughing.

And laughing.

Because this is the same guy who conspired with Apple's Steve Jobs to suppress wages in Silicon Valley, see, if interested, "Collusion: How Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe Agreed to Suppress Employee Pay" from last October.

So I don't take what he says about people as people very seriously.
This, on the other hand, looks very serious...
From FT Alphaville:

Google, defender of the universe

From Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker this week regarding Google’s acquisition of DeepMind, with regards to the latter’s concern that artificial intelligence poses an extinction level threat for humanity:

Google’s acquisition of DeepMind came with an estimated $400 million price tag and an unusual stipulation that adds extra gravity — and a dose of reality — to Legg’s warning: Google agreed to create an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure this technology is developed safely, as The Information first reported and The Huffington Post confirmed. (A Google spokesman said that DeepMind had been acquired, but declined to comment further.)

Though, as Bosker points out, what’s really interesting is that Google seems so much more concerned about Asimovian AI morality than about the ethics of reading your email. Never mind.

That Google is also developing a robot (killer?) army on the side does have a certain Star Wars “Attack of the Clones” feel about it, though — especially in the context of Eric Schimdt’s own warning at Davos about the general automation threat to ever more jobs. What exactly are they planning?

Which leads to another point. We’ve discussed the tendency for technology companies (and all companies, for that matter) to trend towards monopolisation and how generally all free-market roads do — unless intercepted by evil socialist government — lead to a “there can be only one” type monopoly winner. That or the most disciplined of disciplined cartels.

That was scary back in the days of John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil and Ida Tarbell.

But what we’re dealing with now is arguably a new level of scary entirely. Google has transcendentalists like Ray Kurzweil on their payrolls openly pursuing eternal “cloud-based” life, robot armies and AI — most of it, if not all, facilitated by their exclusive ownership and access to an ever growing global organic dataset (G.O.D.), that one day has the capacity to be all-knowing not only about the here and now, but about the probability of your consuming a cheese sandwich at tea-time next Thursday.

Google has plenty of cash to play with, and bored cash-rich companies that don’t really care about returns can invest in the craziest of things. This is especially so if they have the power to mint their own cash in the form of overly inflated stock prices...MORE

Now all they need are some Rhine castles to extract tolls on the commerce going by....