Google shoots for the moon with driverless cars and anti-ageing technology

The company more than tripled spending on deals in the first half of the year to $4.2 billion, according to a filing last month.

A Google driverless car at the company headquarters in Mountain View, California. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / AFP

Google’s acquisition of Jetpac, a software start-up that analyses digital pictures, is the latest addition to its portfolio of innovative concepts that range from driverless cars to hunting for the secret of eternal youth.

Google has been highly acquisitive. This month, it said it was acquiring the smartphone-messaging application Emu and video-creation service Directr, bolstering its mobile and advertising capabilities. The company more than tripled spending on deals in the first half of the year to US$4.2 billion, according to a filing last month.

A project announced last September by the Google chief executive Larry Page is aimed at addressing problems of health and ageing.

“We are tackling ageing, one of life’s greatest mysteries,” said the website of Calico.

Meanwhile, Google’s driverless car has been put through its paces during a test drive on the placid streets of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town where Google has its headquarters.

It's part of the company's Google X division, overseen directly by co-founder Sergey Brin and devoted to "moon shot" projects by the internet company, that might take years, if ever, to bear fruit.

Google has been building up its local and map offerings. Last year, it bought the mapping start-up Waze for about $1.1bn.

As more people upload photos and video to the internet, demand has increased for services that can parse through images without written cues. Facebook this year invested in an artificial intelligence lab, partially to improve its understanding of image and video content.

Jetpac, a San Francisco-based start-up, uses information gleaned from social media photos, such as Facebook's Instagram service, to create city guides.

By analysing pictures of food, decor and people, Jetpac’s software offers insight into city locales.

Jetpac was founded by Pete Warden and Julian Green, with Mr Green now chief executive and Mr Warden the chief technology officer. It has raised $2.4 million from venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures.

Jetpac’s three applications for smartphones, including a city guide, a photo analyser and picture detection tool, will no longer be offered as downloads and support for them will end on September 15, Jetpac said on its website.

Google’s Calico “is a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan. We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives”, according to its website.

The head of the company is Arthur Levinson, who was chief executive of Genentech from 1995 to 2009 and is now the chairman of the board of Apple.

The other members of the team include Hall Barron, the former chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical group Hoffmann-La Roche, David Botstein, a Princeton University genomics professor and Cynthia Kenyon, a researcher in biology and genetics who comes from the University of California at San Francisco.

The team also includes the former Genentech oncology researcher Robert Cohen and Jonathan Lewis, an executive from Brussels-based UCB Pharma.

“We are scientists from the fields of medicine, drug development, molecular biology and genetics,” the website said.

“Through our research we’re aiming to devise interventions that slow ageing and counteract related diseases.”

Announcing the new investment last year, Mr Page said: “Illness and ageing affect all our families. With some longer term, moon shot thinking around health care and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”

The driverless car used in the tests was a Lexus RX 450h, a petrol-electric hybrid crossover vehicle.

The engineers on hand were not high-powered “car guys” but soft-spoken Alpha Geeks of the sort that have emerged as the Valley’s dominant species. And there wasn’t any speeding even though, ironically, Google’s engineers have determined that speeding actually is safer than going the speed limit in some circumstances.

“Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year,” said Dmitri Dolgov, the project’s boyish Russian-born lead software engineer, who now is a US citizen, describing his sense of mission. “This could change that.”

Google publicly disclosed its driverless car programme in 2010, although it began the previous year. So if there’s a business plan for the driverless car, Google isn’t disclosing it. Mr Dolgov recently “drove” one of his autonomous creations the 725 kilometres or so from Silicon Valley to Tahoe and back for a short holiday.

Google also has built little bubble-shaped test cars that lack steering wheels, brakes and accelerator pedals. They run on electricity, seat two people and are limited to 40kph.

Google’s prototypes are not the only driverless cars in development. One of the others is just a few miles away at Stanford University.

Getting the cars to recognise unusual objects and to react properly in abnormal situations remain significant research challenges, said Professor J Christian Gerdes, faculty director of Stanford’s Revs Institute for Automotive Research.

Beyond that, there are “ethical issues”, as he terms them. “Should a car try to protect its occupants at the expense of hitting pedestrians?” Prof Gerdes asked. “And will we accept it when machines make mistakes, even if they make far fewer mistakes than humans? We can significantly reduce risk, but I don’t think we can drive it to zero.”

Self-driving cars could appear on roads by the end of the decade, predicted a report on the budding driverless industry issued late last year by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Other experts deem that forecast extremely optimistic, but like many of Google’s “moon shot” projects, that is the whole point.

* agencies

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