The H+ shift of Google (Part 4/4: Transhumanist shift)

As shown during the three last blog’s article (part 1 on Health, part 2 on Artificial Intelligence, part 3 on Robotics), Google is emancipating from its original core business.

Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet (its core business), either in the domain of pictures, or data processing, web analytics, map software, ads, blogging…

But till 2013, Google seems to have completely changed its purchasing policy, and companies bought by Google are now related to various domains in addition to robotics, such as neural networks (DNNResearch), natural language understanding (Wavii), renewable energy  (Makani Power), wearable computing (WIMM Labs), movement/facial recognition (Flutter, Viewdle), home automation (Nest Labs), etc…

Larry Page himself, one of the cofounders of Google with Sergey Brin, declared in its Google+ Page: “So you’re probably thinking wow!  That’s a lot different from what Google does today.  And you’re right.  But […] there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives.  So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.  And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.”

Google’s business is in mutation: this company is not focused on the IT domain only but also in the promising field of NBIC. The Nanotechnologies (N), Biology (B), Information technologies (I) and Cognitive sciences (artificial intelligence and brain-related sciences) (C) are improving and converging, in a sense that discoveries in a domain are serving the others domains, and this synergy allow fantastic advances.

Thanks to huge profits coming from its internet core business in which they are worldwide leaders, this war treasure allows Google to develop with strength many different activities which are all related to a transhumanism ideology.

As seen in part 1, transhumanism (often abbreviated as H+ or h+, as for Human+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with the goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, psychological and perhaps emotional capacities and capabilities, and thus reducing diseases and extending human life. Transhumanists do not consider diseases and death to be a fatality, and they believe that human beings should use all possible solutions offered by sciences and technologies to improve themselves.

Google is becoming one of the main architects of the NBIC revolution and actively supports transhumanism revolution. Some of the most famous Google members are openly and actively promoting this movement, such as Vinton Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist), or Raymond C. Kurzweil (appointed Director of Engineering at Google in 2012, and active member of Singularity University).

By applying Transhumanist ideology as an industrial dogma, Google today is a precursor to a strong trend: The underlying idea of Google is that each individual is an information system, or an ecosystem, of personal data. The advancements of Google are such in the field of IT that Google believes we can improve human beings through technical and technological ways, up to reducing death.

Beyond this Transhumanist ideology –whatever anyone can think of it–working in reducing death is the perfect way to answer to a global common fantasy, and for Google, to capture as large as the whole of humanity market.

This is the ultimate horizon and the ambition of Google in the coming years.