What is technology about? Well obviously that question can have several answers, none of which would be incorrect, but at its heart it’s there as a whole to solve problems. To make our lives easier than they would be if we were sat around a camp fire sharpening spears and grunting at one another, right?
Well somewhere along the way a lot of that essence was lost, and ever since we’ve been having products that are more or less clones of the last generation being forced upon us from various vendors and very little innovation.
According to reports, though, Google is going back to those roots at its top secret projects lab, mysteriously named Google X. This lab is said to be where the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin work on all sorts of weird and wonderful things that could help transform the way we live our lives. The exact location of Google X is obviously unknown to us mere mortals, but according to the reports in the New York Times, it’s somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Search-engine giant Google has a secret product lab called Google X feverishly developing blue-sky projects such as space elevators, driverless cars and internet-enabled household devices which will use Android at Home technology, The New York Times reports.
The labs are reportedly run “as mysteriously as the CIA,” according to unnamed sources familiar with the project, and housed in two facilities – one in California at the company’s headquarters and one in an undisclosed location elsewhere in the country.
“They’re pretty far out in front right now,” Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics, told theTimes. “But Google’s not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies.”
But don’t get your hopes up: The types of projects cited aren’t the sort of thing the company will be releasing anytime soon.
Space elevators, for example, are a concept common in science fiction stories and movies. The idea is simple: Ditch the expensive, dangerous rockets for a giant platform that tows anything and everything up a tremendous cable to a platform orbiting at a fixed location around the planet.