“A Silicon Valley titan who helped create Google Street View and engineered Waymo and Uber’s self-driving cars is taking new steps to solidify technology’s place in the future,” Jennifer Smith reports for The Daily Mail. “”
“In 2015, Anthony Levandowski, 37, founded a religion called Way of the Future. It has only been revealed now as state officials in California wait for him to respond to the necessary IRS filings he must provide for it,” Smith reports. “Way of the Future has no website or headquarters but, according to Wired which obtained copies of his original filings, Levandowski is its founder and CEO.”
“The documents give its purpose is to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.’ They say it aims to ‘through understanding and worship of the Godhead, contribute to the betterment of society,” Smith reports. “What’s more, he is at the heart of a legal fight between Google’s parent company Alphabet and Uber. Waymo, the self-driving car subsidiary which Alphabet owns, is suing Uber, claiming it stole trade secrets to make their own self-driving cars. The engineer they say is responsible for the theft is Levandowski who they allege downloaded 14,000 secret files before leaving Google in 2016 after nine years at the company.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: California isn’t called “The Land of Fruits and Nuts” for nothing.
Now, wait, Google is suing someone claiming they stole their IP and copied their work? That’s rich.
The Google hypocrites Do Know Evil. It’s constantly right there in the mirror.
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
People who buy Android phones and tablets reward thieves.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
A religion that worships A.I.? Now I’ve seen everything! California, gotta love that state!
Anyone who worships anything other than the great FSM is truly suspect!
The Pythons had it just about right
Sounds like a nice tax dodge. I’m surprised more companies/people don’t just start religions in the US.
Sounds like a nice tax dodge. I’m surprised more companies/people don’t just start religions in the US.
No, no, we really don’t! 😉 Lived there for three years, and you couldn’t pay me to go back.
Anyone can live in California. So why is that our problem?
Texas has had their own Waco, wackos.
The biggest attraction to the weirdest bunch is Florida.
Google and Samsung, 2 lousy tech giants made for each other
Slavish copier! I bet he is inventing his own Reality Distortion Field too!
MDN, enough with the before and after pics already. I had a 2004 iPAQ hx4700.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/
And you wonder why people question Apple’s fans as wellas Apple itself.
You mean the kind that existed at Palm and…..ahem,,,APPLE…Remember the Newton? Apple had a development in 1987, and a device on the market in 1993. WAY BEFORE your iPAQ,,,,,the iPAQ is itself a knockoff of an Apple product.
Exactly! A grid of icons is hardly ownable. Why didn’t they go after Palm, HP, etc…?
And anyway, they are talking pre and post iPhone.
Did MDN claim there were zero all-screen smartphones before iPhone came out? No. They very explicitly state that was what pre-production *Android* units looked like before and after iPhone.
But that’s trivial. So Google should be the only one’ NOT allowed to use a grid? Apple copies good ideas too.
TRIVIAL? You gotta be kidding! All screen smartphones WAS the point, certainly not trivial.
Google wanted into the cell phone business and started copying Blackberry. Once they saw the future wasn’t in blackberry, they turned on a dime and went to screen touch. In the early years there were numerous articles on the problems at Google who quickly made a switch TO touch screen in technology, but their OS/software was buggy for a long time trying to catch up with that one change – from key stroke buttons to icon buttons. THAT tells you where Google was and was trying to do.
That is not a trivial thing, it was at the paradigm shift.
Okay, from a tech point of view it was a PDA that also contained a phone. There was even an iPaq model that did that. It didn’t have the elegant design, but it did that. I would argue that the iphones real innovation was the iPod Touch.
As far as screens…it’s a touchscreen, which they were supplied by others.
Good design, ballsy, but these elements were already out there.
The current trend for attachments to smartphones I think were ‘inspired’ by the Springboard modules for the Handspring PDAs. Among the modules was one that made the Handspring a cellphone. I wouldn’t be surprised if the attachment market gets a good foothold Apple will follow suit with iPhones with magnetic connectors for those devices.
Gasp! Modularity, at last?
Are you really trying to equate an interface that REQUIRED a stylus with either the Blackberry like Android phone or the iPhone like Android phone or the iPhone itself, none of which required a stylus? The interfaces are fundamentally different. Finger input with multi touch is, at is very core, a different interface than one that requires a stylus.
The same goes for the people that claim the Newton or the Palm Pilot were the same as the iPhone interface. They are fundamentally different.
Google only went to the multi touch (finger touch) interface after Schmidt saw a prototype as part of Apple’s board. Yes, Google started working on the iPhone like interface long before Steve Jobs publicly announced the iPhone (a common Android fan claim), but that was well AFTER Steve Jobs showed a prototype iPhone to Apple’s board (including Schmidt).
The bottom line remains: first came the iPhone then came the Android phone (with the finger input and multi touch).
It’s a grid of icons. Did Apple also “own” touchscreens?
And like it’s been pointed out, there was plenty of inspiration to draw upon.
But Nobody did it. Nor did they attempt it until Apple showed that it could be done in production and in commercial use. There was NO interest in it until Apple’s. Others didn’t even pursue it until Apple proved it beyond proof of concept.
Proof of concept doesn’t a unicorn make.
You could easily use the nail on your finger for input in those resistive displays. The stylus was simply a more ‘precise’ way to interact with your device similar to the Apple pencil for iPads. As for multitouch, PalmOS at the time did have support for up to 2 touch points for rudimentary multi-touch.
do you pray to The Cloud?
No, I do not pray to anyone.
Not even the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
If gawd exists, she has not revealed herself/selves to anybody- kind of like space aliens.
Right. California is the only place Crazy can happen. The rest of the country is completely balanced and sane. I better move to safer havens. 😜
I’d rather put up with California crazy than the evangelical/fundamentalist megachurch crazies.
CA has those also.
I wonder what that religion’s AI Godhead will have to say about the ethics of a person accused of stealing 14,000 secret files from his former employer?
“Accused.”
I wasn’t aware that anything has been settled in a court of law and the evidence against him certainly looks pretty convincing, but the law says he is merely accused unless the case is proven in court.
My guess: this is some sort of updated version of the twinkies defense. His lawyers are telling him he needs an excuse a typical CA jury would believe, and claiming some really creative (i.e., odd) religious reason just might work.
No better or worse than any other religion.
… unless the followers shout “Allahu akbar” before killing someone.
It’s another command & control hierarchy, right?
April Fools in September?
Seeing as there never has been anything that qualifies as actual ‘artificial intelligence’, this is particularly ridiculous. I wonder what Levandowski’s Thetan level is. 😆
Hmm. Déjà vu . . .
• Raëlroadism
• Scienterrificology
• SaTanSalonism
• UnFunification Church of the USA
• Thee TemPleather ov PsyChicks Youth
• NuWuWuwaubianism
And I didn’t even get to the loon level Christian spinoffs . . .
APOCALYPSE NOW
World predicted to end in 2017 thanks to a total solar eclipse hitting America and the UK
Christian group claim scripture suggests August 21 will bring on an apocalypse
Oops. Another dud.