Google’s Glass Ball

“Can we live without it?” “Can we live with it?” Two pervasive questions dividing Google users these days. However “is it for real” is the question that intrigues me, initially raised implicitly and unintentionally by Amit Singhall, Google’s nominated ‘Visionary’, on talking about the Future.

The future is beyond information and into ‘knowledge’. The new ‘thinking’ computers will ‘synthesise’, for example, a PhD thesis of three hundred pages ‘into an easily understood but objective precis’. And this in a nano-second, because for Google everthing valuable needs its speed component. As Singhal says, appropriately economically, “Knowledge to me is how much you can learn in the least possible time.” Actually an efficiency of speed is perhaps the only virtue of pre-Google modern life that Google respects and retains.

We are then hence into the world of knowledge. Presumably (it is not raised) Shakespeare, Proust, Plato and Einstein and a modicum of other thinkers will also be efficiently synthesised for immediate ingestion by the millions.

And then ultimately this knowledge inexorably leads to the final stage, ‘Wisdom’, where there will no longer be wars, hunger, or poverty. Our knowledge will eliminate all such ‘wickedness’.

When such a thinking computer has been assembled and is operating, I would like to ask it two questions: ‘As what stage of Google thinking on the future can or ought we determine that its worthwhile imagination has turned psychotic and has become entirely divorced from reality?’ and secondly, ‘In the light of Google’s clipped slogan ‘Do no evil’ is it conceivable that unwittingly it may be seeding a disposition to do such that?’

Note: a longer article, titled ‘Google World – an Interim Report’ appears in Melbourne Centre for Ideas Enewsletter, No 63, December 2011.

Don Miller
12-01-2012