It seems a lot is happening in the structuring of the world of robotics and artificial intelligence those days ...
Google and Facebook seems to be playing a game of "who will acquire more ressources" on these two connected fields. Google for instance just got "Boston Dynamics", a well-known (military) quadruped robots, which become the 8th major acquisition of Google in this field, while Facebook is hiring key scientists from the academic world in order to boost its research groups on artificial intelligence.
Why the big players of the Internet world want to invest in artificial intelligence and robots ?
Well, first obvisouly for economic reasons: social network platforms need to diversify their activities, obviously. And artificial intelligence may be a good way to do so, capitilizing on an expertise in algorythms they already have, with important research teams working on such subjects. But not only direct economic outcomes could be foresee. Developping more powerful artificial intelligence paradigms would allow a more efficient use of the data and meta-data these companies are gathering, and therefore, targeting adds more efficiently and ultimately generating more money. Also, it is something to be considered in the light of the Editorial on CHB, where social networks may be a step before the rise of technology-enhanced human group cognition. Same for robotics, it goes in the same line than augmented reality for Internet application.
Interestingly, with the economical power such major companies have, they may well succeed were university researcher failed due to ressources limitations. In any case, it will be interesting to follow ...
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