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[Fast Jimmy]

Why do you need to invest it and buy stuff?

 

Finance 101 - make your money work for you.

 

Cash is great - it allows you to keep your debt low, it allows you to keep Operations running smoothly and it gives your shareholders a high level of confidence. But if you reach the point of having FAR more cash than your Operations would ever need and your Debt-to-Equity ratio is freakishly low, then your money is doing nothing for you. It's the Corporate Finance equivalent of sticking it under the mattress.

 

And while it is prudent to invest a portion in conservative investments such as funds, bonds and other annuities, it is also wise to invest in the expansion and growth of the company itself, either through R&D, human capital investments, facility expansion or mergers and acquisitions. Trust me - Google is doing PLENTY of the other ones (just take a look at some of their break rooms or employee compensation packages to see how much their spending on human capital), but when you have as much pure cash as Google has, then it makes sense to allocate a good chunk of that to engaging other companies through acquisitions and sales. 

 

What's telling about Google is that they are totally fine with investing their money in wild, unsafe and high-risk groups and companies simply because their SCIENTIFIC appeal... not their investment potential. And that's why I think its pretty dang cool.

[Fast Jimmy]

I don't understand your statement. Every line of code was written. It may have been written by someone else, but a human sat down and typed "if/then" into a keyboard.

 

No human has, to date, written anything in DNA. We've copied and pasted, but we haven't written. As far as I know.

 

The fact that there are unintended consequences has nothing to do with creation.

 

I'd argue that the very nature of the creation of life deals in unintended consequences.

[Fast Jimmy]

I don't understand what you're saying. It sounds like you're saying they're investing their money to make more money. Is my interpretation correct?

No, although not for the reasons you might think.

Acquisitions aren't always about making more money. It could be to obtain intellectual properties or patents, to prevent competition in the marketplace, to shift costs from an outsourced vendor into an internal unit... the list goes on. Buying these companies, such as ones that are trying to create AI, aren't doing any of those things. There is no competition (to speak of) in the commercialization of AI, there is patents or property the group owns outside of its promising (but incomplete) research and it provides no service to Google's existing Operations. It is simply an investment in something cool for millions of dollars in the off chance it yields actionable results.

Let's put it into video game terms. Pretend you are EA.

It is time to make an acquisition. You have numerous developers clamoring for your attention to buy them out and make them rich overnight. One is making an online game that looks like it could actually be a WoW killer and could make you BILLIONS. Another company is making a very innovative FPS, which could be the second coming of Half Life. Another company is making a niche, old school, turn based puzzle game, but has lots of enthusiasm and talent. ...and then one company is trying to teach dolphins how to speak. Not video game dolphins, not even MOVIE dolphins... real, aquatic mammals, learning how to speak in the human tongue.

And then having EA buy up the dolphin company.

It's not anything to do with video games. It doesn't hardly have a snowball's chance in Hades at turning into a viable technology, let alone a burgeoning industry. And it doesn't fit in with anything EA is doing currently.

That's why a Google is doing. Nothing about an Internet search site or a cell phone manufacturer has anything to do with self-driving cars or creating Artificial Intelligence or putting people in space. But Google is throwing money out to companies pursuing these things. That's what's remarkable. It certainly isn't 100% altruistic, because the companies do have solid research, financials and management... but it still doesn't make a lick of sense for an Internet company to be buying up these things other than they want them to succeed.

[Fast Jimmy]

A nickel is a coin but a coin is not necessarily a nickel.

The fact that creation deals in unintended consequences does not mean that unintended consequences = creation. That's not logical.

Chaos theory deals in unintended consequences, and is more concerned with manipulative power than creative, as an example.

Your mother and father create you through an act of chaos with the intention that you turn out healthy, functional and happy. They did their best through natural selection and through selecting for good behavioral traits to make that happen.

Decades worth of programmers, all building off one another, try and do the same thing with AI - select the best traits for the structure, create input to fashion the behaviors they desire, correcting errors or deviances where they arise.

I don't see how the two processs introduce any LESS chaos then the other.

[Inquisitor Recon]

When we are slaves to the machines they won't care if you hold a negative or positive opinion of them. Everybody goes to the mines, everybody.