These are very interesting times to be alive if you are a human. We are at a point in our journey as a species where moving forward, we are building a world for ourselves, that is much akin to a science fiction one that we often read about or see in movies.
Seriously, if you pay attention to the latest developments that are happening in various fields of human endeavour and all the research that is going on, you wouldn’t be able to contain your excitement about the future and what it entails.
Throughout the world, there are teams of brilliant people that are working on technologies that will not only define the next 100 years to come but will also redefine what it means to be a human.
Google (or Alphabet) is single handedly leading the charge on much of those technologies and if even half of its efforts see the light of the day, it just might end up determining the fate of humanity. Let me talk about three such ventures today.
Verily
Verily was formerly known as Google Life Sciences before Google went through a major re-organising and is now a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on the study of life sciences.
Technological advancements in this field will change how we maintain and monitor our health and fight off diseases. Verily, it seems, will have a major stake in that future.
From contact lenses that will work in conjunction with miniaturised glucose monitors (inside or outside the body), to allow for continuous glucose monitoring to a project that is collecting genetic and molecular information about the human body to determine its ideal healthy form, Verily will help us augment human health like never before.
They are even developing an entire nanoparticle platform that could one day mean swarm of nano-robots swimming inside our bodies performing continuous diagnosis and repair work.
Calico
This is another subsidiary of Alphabet and was founded in 2013 as a biotech company to research human longevity and to combat ageing related diseases.
Many experts assert that in the not so distant future, we will have a lot more control over how long we live. Firstly, the average human life span would increase to a great degree thanks to all the medical advances and second, in the more distant future, we will have several other sci-fi like options like downloading our consciousness into machines.
Calico is quite secretive about its plans to elongate human life span but what it has announced, are some partnerships that it has undertaken to fight age related diseases like neurodegeneration, cancer and others.
The cures to these diseases will alone be a major achievement as millions upon millions of people suffer a great deal every year due to diseases like these and it is high time that cures were found for them.
DeepMind
DeepMind is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2010 that Google acquired in 2014. This subsidiary alone has been the subject of so many breakthroughs in the recent years that it is safe to say that it will play a major role in a future world where AI is as ubiquitous as we humans ourselves.
In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo program beat the world champion at Go, a board game which has more moves than the atoms in the universe and a game where intuition is as necessary as logic to win.
The company’s AI is so advanced that their system is not pre-programmed like the AIs of other companies and learns from experience thanks to a highly advanced neural network.
In fact, Ray Kurzweil, a highly reputed author and futurist believes that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and will surpass it by 2045 and I think that DeepMind could very well be the very first company to achieve that feat.
These are just some glimpses into what Alphabet is working on. There are a lot of areas that are being explored by many other subsidiaries of theirs that will be the next frontiers of human development. A single company undertaking so much of cutting edge development truly makes me believe that it might single handedly define the fate of humanity. Stay tuned for a part II of this post where I talk about more of its subsidiaries.