This blog (with the probable exception of Coye—in fact, that’s mostly the reason why we keep you around, Coye, to smash up the normativity of our assumptions. Or something.) is populated by fans of the range of apps Google has developed and made freely available. I myself use Google’s Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Notebook, Docs and Spreadsheets, oh, and that little-known search engine they cobbled together. Siva Vaidhyanathan is not one of these, and he’s working on a book called The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community—And Why We Should Worry. An interesting sample:
“The damage Google has done to the world is largely invisible. Google got big by keeping ads small. It carefully avoided pinching our marketing-saturated nervous systems and offered illusions of objectivity, precision, comprehensiveness, and democracy. After all, we are led to believe, Google search results are determined by peer-review, by us, not by an editorial team of geeks. So far, this method has worked wonderfully. Google is the hero of word-of-mouth marketing lore. Google guides me through the open Web, the space that Microsoft does not yet control. Yet Google must get bigger to satisfy its new stockholders. It must go new places and send its spiders crawling through un-indexed corners of human knowledge. Google’s mission statement includes the rather optimistic and humanistic phrase, “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But Google co-founder Sergey Brin once offered a more ominous description of what Google might become: “The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God.””
[h/t Alan Jacobs]
7 comments:
Hmm. Well, I've long thought that the internet in general would end up destroying culture eventually.
I could see a day where Google sort of ends up developing it's own consciousness, becoming an A.I. deity. And we would have to worship it or else we wouldn't be able to, you know, google ourselves when we're bored anymore.
In what respects would said perfect engine be "like the mind of God"? (we can assume that the search engine would not be eternal)
Would it be like the mind of God in substance or only in qualities?
In what ways does being "like the mind of God" differ from being "like God"?
In what ways is this search engine perfect? (is it morally perfect?)
Is God used as the standard for measuring perection? (is the statement a tautology?)
Is this the search engine than which no greater search engine can be thought to exist, and, if so, is existence a necessary quality of its perfection?
If I was walking along on a sandy beach, and found a search query perfectly executed lying amid the shells and sands....
That's exactly what I think of when I hear this mind of God language, Dave.
You think of Dave when you hear this mind of God language?
No, Dave is alluding to that black and white indie movie "Pi," in which it turns out that a secret number is the name of God and knowledge of this leads to some sort of enlightenment or insanity. So, no, Dave didn't spring to mind when Sergy started talking about turning Google into the mind of God (or something like the mind of God, which, as you point out, is an ontologically different proposition). Although... now that you mention it...
So Jacobs is coming to Austin in the near future to work on an edition of Age of Anxiety. It should be a nice beer drinking kind of cordiality.
Post a Comment