It started with search. In 1998. The company had come a long way since then. The early garage days, the investment hassles, the IPO and finally to this date: 9th January, 2015. Nobody would have ever imagined something of this magnitude to occur in a short span of seventeen years.
The 9/1/15 conference was, for the first time, held at Rose Bowl stadium. With the capacity of 93,600, it was the largest tech event in the world. Some 80,000 tickets were sold out within a week of the event launch. Google invited people from all fields. It invited celebrities from Hollywood, sports personalities, politicians from Washington, academia from all the top research institutes in the world. It was a mix of the Academy Award night, the Nobel Prize ceremony, the Olympics and the State of the Union address.
According to Google, it was the most game-changing event in human history. The official word from the company was that it had created something which would change the course of humankind. It was the next best invention in human history after the wheel.
Google Inc’s value had been skyrocketing since the past week. Intense speculation by the media, fuelled by public frenzy had seen its valuation jump to $600 billion dollars, a 40% jump from its valuation two weeks earlier.
The techblogs were as clueless as the public itself.
Wired ran an article claiming that Google had made a significant breakthrough in the field of super conductance, and it was releasing electronic products based on it, which were 50 times faster than the current ones.
TechCrunch on the other hand, wrote that Google had created and perfected the fastest Quantum Computer to date and had make ground-breaking progresses in the field of Cryptography, Cryptocurrency, Genome sequencing, etc. The article went on to say that the company planned to launch some products which will be using principles of quantum computing during the event.
The Verge, instead focussed on Calico, a company founded by Google in 2013, focussed on increasing the lifespan of humans. According to the article published by them, Google now had a very extensive, gene level understanding of human body and they were able to run stem cell experiments and find cures for diseases previously thought to be incurable.
Each magazine swore by its story, arguing the information that had been obtained from a high profile source was one-hundred-percent true.
Finally the day came, 9th January, 2015.
The event was supposed to last for 2 hours. It was distributed in three parts, with a 20 minute break after every one hour. The last part, surprisingly, lasted only five minutes.
The first part was called ‘Biology’.
Sergey Brin stood on the centre podium. Over him, about 50 feet into the air, was a gigantic LED screen. The digits ‘$621.6B’ were displayed on it. The screen had four faces, each one displaying the digits ‘$621.6B’, positioned in such a way that anyone in the stadium could read the screen easily.
He spoke clearly. ‘The Verge had been right. We’ve finally found the cure for—’ he paused for a while. ‘—Cancer, AIDS, Ebola, Asthama,’ he said, counting them using his fingers. ‘Diabetes, Influenza, Polio, and over 100 perviously incurable diseases.’
‘We’ve created the first lab grown human organs,’ he said. ‘Google has grown heart, kidney, liver, and even lungs at our bio-research lab. We have the knowhow to create the first human clone, to create artificial blood. We can even create and clone human brain.’
The the numbers on the LED screen increased as investors frantically bought Google stocks. The company now surpassed Apple as the most valued company on the planet.
The second part was called ‘Technology’.
Sergey looked overhead. Google was now valued at $900 billion. From $100,000 of first funding round by Andy, seventeen years earlier to this day: 9th of January, 2015, we’ve come a long long way, he thought.
‘On the technology front,’ he said. ‘Google has made breakthroughs which were not even heard of in Science fiction. The technologies and products you are about to see, would’ve put Asimov to shame.’
‘We’ve created the first quantum super-computer in the world. And, you can see it is extremely—’ he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a mobile phone ‘—comfortable.’
‘The XS-001 phone currently outperforms Tiache-2, the fastest conventional super-computer in the world today, and by a large margin. The price of this device could be comparable to a brand new MacBook.’
Stunned reactions from the audience were his cue to continue.
‘Using this technology, we can currently break every encryption method, whether practical or theoretical. We can run operations which the entire NSA data centre at Ohio takes hours to complete on this smartphone, as a background application.’
The number rose to ‘$1,204B’ before the entire screen became blank. NASDAQ’s servers were down. Google could now buy Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba and still be left with cash to spend.
He was on the stage for another 30 minutes, briefly speaking about Cryptocurrency, Genome Sequencing, Super-conductance, climate models, internet systems, and a couple of other things. He ended his address with a note that Wired and TechCrunch were right as well.
The third part was called ‘The Future’.
Larry Page, stood on the centre podium, his entire body eerily still. He clutched the microphone hard as spoke—
‘None of the inventions announced today had been made by humans, except this one.’
Murmurs ran through the audience. People shifted uneasily in their seats. Not sure what they had just heard.
‘We’d created Artificially Intelligent supercomputer at our research facility in North Carolina. It had intelligence of about 240 IQ points. We programmed it in such a way that it self-improves itself.’
Larry paused for a second.
‘Within two hours, it became Super-Intelligent. Having the combined intelligence of every animal, every bird, every extinct species, every man, woman, child ever born on this planet.’
The stadium had never been so quiet.
‘That was over a month ago.’