Snip from Andrew Donoghue's ZDNet article today:
Google has been quizzed about rumours that its current quest to digitise books may be about more than simply making literature available online, but the search giant is being non-committal on the subject.
At a conference on Tuesday, organised by The Economist, Jeff Levick, Google's director of vertical markets, was questioned about comments concerning artificial intelligence made by historian George Dyson following a recent visit to the Googleplex. During his visit Dyson claimed that one Google staff member working on book digitisation told him that some of the material was destined for a non-human audience.
"'We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,' explained one of my hosts after my talk. 'We are scanning them to be read by an AI,'" Dyson wrote in a posting on Edge.org following a visit to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer.
Link to "Google side-steps AI rumours".
Previously: George Dyson's Google visit — "Turing's Cathedral"
