Google Founders Eye 'Fully Reasoning' AI

Google hopes to one day develop "fully reasoning" artificial intelligence, but despite its acquisition of robot, satellite, and AI firms, the real-life Skynet is still a few years off, co-founder Sergey Brin said recently.

Computer scientists have been promising AI "for decades," and have not yet delivered, so it would be "foolish" for Google to put a hard date on when Google Now might become self aware, Brin said during a joint fireside chat with Google CEO Larry Page hosted by Khosla Ventures.

Still, advances have been made, so "you should presume that some day we will be able to make machines that can reason and think and do things better than we can," Brin said.

For now, however, a big area of focus for Brin and his Google X team is the self-driving car. Ideally, the idea of individual car ownership will one day be a thing of the past, he said.

"You don't need one car per person; they just come get you when you need them," Brin said. And once they're on the road, these cars can "make more efficient use of the space and peoples' time."

When asked by moderator Vinod Khosla what car makers might think of this scenario, Brin suggested that manufacturers that produce self-driving cars would be quite pleased. Though Google recently showed off its own self-driving car prototype, Brin speculated that Google will eventually work with "multiple partners or companies" - some car makers, some service providers.

But, "this is all pretty speculative," he warned, since Google is still very focused on getting the basics of the self-driving tech in order.

A self-driving car might seem like an odd project for a company's whose bread and butter is Internet search. But Brin and Page said that the role of a large company is to take on these projects that go outside the main purpose of the firm.

"I always thought it was stupid if you had this big company and you could only do five things," Page said. If you have 30,000 employees and they're all doing the same thing, that isn't very exciting for them. "Ideally, a company would scale the number of things it does with the number of people, [but] as far as I can tell, that never happens."

Brin chimed in to say that he has actually removed certain projects from Google X if they are too in line with Google's core mission.

One person who did not agree with this approach? Steve Jobs. "He'd say, 'you guys are doing too much,'" Page recalled. "And he was right, in a sense," but the approach is working for Google for now. "If you do something less related, you can actually handle more things."

Meanwhile, in a discussion about the effects of tech on the workforce, Page suggested that shifting work schedules might help alleviate unemployment: an extra week of vacation here, or a shorter work week there.

When asked about the protests in San Francisco regarding income disparity and high-tech workers leading to an increase in rent and housing prices, Page said it was largely a "governance issue," and the city failing to provide enough housing.

Check out their full discussion in the video below.