With over-the-inter­net remote con­trol of fin­ger move­ments on the hori­zon, some­thing tells me there’s going to be a lot more peo­ple in the future typ­ing into search engines things like “Why should I only buy Google’s prod­ucts and how is it that com­pa­ny can be so awe­some?”. It’s just a hunch:

The Inde­pen­dent
Inside Google HQ: What does the future hold for the com­pa­ny whose vision­ary plans include implant­i­ng a chip in our brains?

Ian Bur­rel­l’s vis­it to the leg­endary “Google­plex” at Moun­tain View comes at an awk­ward time for the com­pa­ny

Ian Bur­rell Author Biog­ra­phy, Sat­ur­day 20 July 2013

The pow­er of com­put­ing, and the thrill of its appar­ent­ly infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, has also long been a source of fear.

Going into a San Fran­cis­co sec­ond-hand book shop, short­ly before a vis­it to Google’s head­quar­ters in Cal­i­for­nia, I hap­pened upon a copy of Dick Tra­cy, an old nov­el based on Chester Gould’s car­toon strip star­ring Amer­i­ca’s favourite detec­tive.

For a 1970 pub­li­ca­tion, the plot seemed remark­ably top­i­cal. Dick, and his side­kick Sam Catchem, find them­selves bat­tling a sin­is­ter char­ac­ter known as “Mr Com­put­er” who wants to con­trol the world. His strange pow­ers enable him to remem­ber every­thing he hears or sees and recall it instant­ly. This is a bad guy who can store data, analyse voice pat­terns and read pri­vate thoughts.

My vis­it to the leg­endary “Google­plex” at Moun­tain View comes at an awk­ward time for the com­pa­ny. Edward Snow­den’s rev­e­la­tions about the snoop­ing of the US Gov­ern­men­t’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency (NSA) in its clan­des­tine elec­tron­ic-sur­veil­lance pro­gramme PRISM have pro­voked a cri­sis of trust in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Lar­ry Page, Google co-founder and CEO, rushed out a blog to deny claims in leaked NSA doc­u­ments that it – in par­al­lel with oth­er Amer­i­can inter­net giants – had been co-oper­at­ing with the spy­ing pro­gramme since 2009. “Any sug­ges­tion that Google is dis­clos­ing infor­ma­tion about our users’ inter­net activ­i­ty on such a scale is com­plete­ly false,” he said.

Trust is every­thing to Google. It stands on the verge of a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through that can trans­form its rela­tion­ship with us. Already, it is uni­ver­sal­ly recog­nised as the world leader in search­ing for infor­ma­tion. It han­dles around 90 per cent of inter­net search­es in the UK: when we want to know some­thing, most of us turn to Google. But it wants more – it wants to become our con­stant com­pan­ion.

The rapid evo­lu­tion of mobile tech­nol­o­gy has brought new oppor­tu­ni­ties to a busi­ness gen­er­at­ing annu­al rev­enue in excess of $50bn (£33.7bn). It began, just 15 years ago, as a ser­vice that enabled you to type a request into a per­son­al com­put­er and be giv­en links to asso­ci­at­ed web­sites. Things have rather moved on. Soon Google hopes to have the ubiq­ui­tous pres­ence of a per­son­al assis­tant that nev­er stops work­ing, capa­ble of con­vers­ing nat­u­ral­ly in any lan­guage. Ulti­mate­ly, as Page and co-founder Sergey Brin have assert­ed, the goal is to insert a chip inside your head for the most effort­less search engine imag­in­able. Some will find this prospect excit­ing. Oth­ers might want to call for Dick Tra­cy.

The first stage of this new lev­el of inti­ma­cy is Google Glass, which I am invit­ed to tri­al as part of a brief­ing on the com­pa­ny’s future plans.

My first impres­sion is that this rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­trap­tion is remark­ably unob­tru­sive. It looks like a pair of glass­es and, at 36 grams, weighs about the same as a typ­i­cal pair of sun­glass­es due to its large­ly tita­ni­um frame. Despite the chunk­i­ness of the right tem­ple – made from plas­tic and where all the tech­nol­o­gy is stored – there is no sense of imbal­ance.

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Google Glass is part of a wider ecosys­tem and is not cur­rent­ly intend­ed as an alter­na­tive to a mobile phone but as a com­ple­ment to it. Glass needs the mobile in your pock­et to locate your posi­tion and con­nect to your con­tacts via 4G and Blue­tooth. Rather than encour­ag­ing users to be con­stant­ly gib­ber­ing in pub­lic, the default posi­tion for this device is “off”, I am told. The screen has been posi­tioned above the eye line and at two o’clock on a clock face to ensure that the peo­ple f you are with know from your squint when you are con­sult­ing Glass.

But none of these caveats can con­ceal the scale of Google’s ambi­tion. It is stak­ing its future on a vast store of infor­ma­tion called the Knowl­edge Graph, which is grow­ing at an expo­nen­tial rate. When it launched in May 2012, Knowl­edge Graph was a pool of 3.5 bil­lion facts on 500 mil­lion of the world’s most searched sub­jects. In a lit­tle over a year the knowl­edge held on the Google servers has grown to 18 bil­lion facts on around 570 mil­lion sub­jects.

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“If you look back 10 years there was a com­put­er on my desk and today there’s a com­put­er in my pock­et and it still has a screen and a key­board,” says Huff­man.

“But fast for­ward a bit and… I think there is going to be a device in the ceil­ing with micro­phones, and it will be in my glass­es or my wrist­watch or my shirt. And like the Google Glass it won’t have a key­board… you just say ‘OK Google, blah-blah-blah’ and you get what you want.”

Where will it end? Gomes agrees that a chip embed­ded in the brain is far from a sci-fi fan­ta­sy. “Already peo­ple are begin­ning to exper­i­ment with hand­i­capped peo­ple for manoeu­vring their wheel­chairs,” he says. “They are get­ting a few sens­es of direc­tion with the wheel­chair but get­ting from there to actu­al words is a long ways off. We have to do this in the brain a lot bet­ter to make that inter­ac­tion pos­si­ble. We have impa­tience for that to hap­pen but the pieces of tech­nol­o­gy have to devel­op.”

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