Google Wants to Get into Your Brain

"Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. 'When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information,' Google CEO Larry Page said in Steven Levy's book, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives. 'Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.' Google is a long way from inhabiting your brain, but the company is building wearable computers and investing heavily in artificial intelligence development to move closer to the brain. Currently, Google Glass is expensive, geeky, and forces you to look up and to the right. But it can make what your smartphone can do more hands-free. With Google Now, the company has a good idea of what comes out of your brain if you are a user of its products. It can tell you about your next appointment and how long it will take to get there, but the digital assistant can't book your family vacation. But Google has big plans for the two products, which are core to Page's long-term goal to automatically and instantly send people information as they are thinking about something. ... Google's high-profile promotion of Glass, including a spread in Vogue magazine, is paving the way for a transition from handheld to head-mounted device, which will eventually transform how humans interface with computers and the cloud. Making smart glasses isn't Google's primary goal, however. Glass is a vehicle for its software platform, turning the contextual data that it captures for each user, via 100 billion search queries per month as well as from more than half a billion e-mail and map users, into supersmart digital assistants that are as beloved as a favorite pet and as essential as food."

("What Google Glass aspires to be," CNet News, Aug. 30, 2013)

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