Google Secret Research Lab Tackles 'Shoot-for-the-Stars Ideas'

By Allison Summers, Christian Post Reporter Monday, November 14, 2011

Google may be in the process of inventing a future the world never could have dreamed possible. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the conglomerate is running a top-secret research laboratory called Google X in an "undisclosed Bay Area location", looking into some of the wildest and most outlandish ideas one might only think possible in a movie.

"It's a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low," wrote The New York Times. "Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space."

"They’re pretty far out in front right now," Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at M.I.T.’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics, told the New York Times. "But Google’s not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies."

While most of these ideas are nowhere near fruition, Google is expected to release a product developed in the lab by the end of the year, though it will not tell what it is.

With driverless cars and robot assistants among some of the concepts being looked into, the laboratory is reportedly so secret that few employees know about it. Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, is said to be very involved in the project.

While the news of Google X has many curious and excited about what the future holds for Google, not everyone is that impressed by the fact that Google has such an outlandish research laboratory.

"So Google has a confidential research and development lab?" wrote one commenter on the Times’ article. "Who wants to bet every other tech company has something like this as well? Sorry, unless there are some photos or leaked documents of secret inventions this doesn’t really surprise me. Now, if they know when the Galaxy Nexus is being released on Verizon, that would be something amazing."