Eliezed specifically mentioned Google in his Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics paper as the only named organization that could potentially start an intelligence explosion.
Larry Page has publicly said that he is specifically interested in “real AI” (Artificial General Intelligence), and some of the researchers in the field are funded by Google. So far as I know, this is still at the level of blue-sky work on basic algorithms and not an attempt to birth The Google in the next five years, but it still seems worth mentioning Google specifically.
In these interviews Larry Page gave years ago he constantly said that he wanted Google to become "the ultimate search engine" that would be able to understand all the information in the world. And to do that, Larry Page said, it would need to be 'true' artificial intelligence (he didn't say 'true', but it comes clear what he means in the context).
Here's a quote by Larry Page from the year 2007:
We have some people at Google who are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale and so on, and in fact, to make search better, to do the perfect job of search you could ask any query and it would give you the perfect answer and that would be artificial intelligence based on everything being on the web, which is a pretty close approximation. We're lucky enough to be working incrementally closer to that, but again, very, very few people are working on this, and I don't think it's as far off as people think.
I doubt it would be very Friendly if you use MIRI's definition, but it doesn't seem like they have something 'evil' in their mind. Peter Norvig is the co-author of AI: A Modern Approach, which is currently the dominant textbook in the field. The 3rd edition had several mentions about AGI and Friendly AI. So at least some people in Google have heard about this Friendliness thing and paid attention to it. But the projects run by Google X are quite secretive, so it's hard to know exactly how seriously they take the dangers of AGI and how much effort they put into these matters. It could be, like lukeprog said in October 2012, that Google doesn't even have "an AGI team".
It could be, like lukeprog said in October 2012, that Google doesn't even have "an AGI team".
Not that I know of, anyway. Kurzweil's team is probably part of Page's long-term AGI ambitions, but right now they're focusing on NLP (last I heard). And Deep Mind, which also has long-term AGI ambitions, has been working on game AI as an intermediate step. But then again, that kind of work is probably more relevant progress toward AGI than, say, OpenCog.
IIRC the Deep Mind folks were considering setting up an ethics board before Google acquired them, s...
So I know we've already seen them buying a bunch of ML and robotics companies, but now they're purchasing Shane Legg's AGI startup. This is after they've acquired Boston Dynamics, several smaller robotics and ML firms, and started their own life-extension firm.
Is it just me, or are they trying to make Accelerando or something closely related actually happen? Given that they're buying up real experts and not just "AI is inevitable" prediction geeks (who shall remain politely unnamed out of respect for their real, original expertise in machine learning), has someone had a polite word with them about not killing all humans by sheer accident?