Google's Knowledge Vault already contains 1.6 billion facts

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The automated, fact-harvesting bot will build up
a collection of all human knowledge.
Google has decided to create the largest store of
knowledge in human history and it is going to
create it without using human brainpower.
Google's Knowledge Vault is a massive database
of facts, built up by an algorithm
that autonomously trawls the web and
transforms data into useable, bite-sized pieces of
information.
The predecessor of Knowlege Vault, known
as Knowledge Graph, used crowdsourcing
techniques but Google realised that humans
could only take the project so far; computers
could drastically speed up the process.
To date the Knowledge Vault contains over 1.6
billion facts. This huge fact reservoir will be the
basis of future search engines. Google is
currently racing Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon
and IBM, who are all attempting to build the
same kind of database.
The Knowledge Vault will be the foundation for
smartphone and robot intelligence. Siri is going
to get a lot better at interpreting what you mean
when you ask her questions in the future.
The algorithm is indiscriminate and will build
information equally on places, people, history,
science and popular culture. This has raised
some privacy concerns as the program can
access "backstage" information such as data
hidden behind websites like Amazon, YouTube
and Google+.
In the future, virtual assistants will be able to
use the database to make decisions about what
does and does not matter to us. Our computers
will get better at finding the information we are
looking for and anticipating our needs.
The Knowledge Vault is also going to be able to
find correlations that humans would miss by
sifting through enormous amounts of
information. This could provide the means for
massive medical breakthroughs, discovery of
trends in human history and the prediction of the
future.
IBM's Watson is already playing a role in cancer
research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in
New York.
Once the Knowledge Vault can interpret objects
on sight, it will become integral to real-time
information generation. One day you might be
able to walk around, point your phone at an
object, ask a question about it and recieve an
intelligent response.
At the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and
Data Mining in New York on 25 August Kevin
Murphy and his team will present a paper on the
Knowledge