Dyson at Google

I gather that the idea of scanning all those books is to be able to return
search results that allow people to read a paragraph or two from the source,
not have access to the whole book. And spiders or AI will read the books and
index them much like they do with Web content. So, in that sense, yes, they
are scanning all those books to be read by an AI.

But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that. Is
this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to it?

ja?
"My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I
felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral - not in the 14th century but
in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one
stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting
everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence
in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,"
explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by
an AI."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html

But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that. Is
this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to it?

ja?

It's hard to tell. I do think the author is referring to 'strong' AI here,
an intelligence that, if any comparison makes sense, supersedes the human
intelligence. To my knowledge Google has not made public anything on trying
to built a globally distributed artificial intelligence, but this can easily
be seen as simply forgetting to mention the fact that everything they are
doing is best defined by those 4 words. If not officially claimed , the
thought seems to be very much alive amongst people who work there.
Personally i guess it's a natural evolution, a becoming of global
intelligence that has been long in the making and our words are just drawing
humanly artificial boundaries that never get really crossed. Google is doing
its part, providing what the market demands: a workable authoritive semantic
ontology based the best of human knowledge. Basically their method is genial
in its simplicity: do not define, let the search define the answer. Ofcourse
the actual enabling of the system involves high complexity and massive data
accumulation.

So is there something more to it? Based on those assumptions, there must be,
what else could be the economic neccessity of doing all that hard, expensive
work? I don't think they think one minute about cashing in on book contents
or fringing in on author's rights. Google does not want possession of what's
in the books, they want us to search them using Google, record, use, profile
those searches to improve the quality of the oracle itself. Quality searches
is the restraint needed to find the right automata, Wolfram would say,
perhaps. Just like they are not interested in our private information when
they recently invaded the desktop search market. They don't care what Jim
Andrews stores on 'beauty' at home, they need to know how _a_ jim andrews
got the notion of beauty before he turned to Google ( although Google
stresses the fact they do not transmit information to the Google servers
through the use of Google Desktop, they do admit somewhere deeper in the
notes on privacy that information can be transmitted when you first use
google locally and then globally or vica versa- i only have that from the
Dutch pages at
<http://desktop.google.nl/support/bin/answer.py?answer148>
http://desktop.google.nl/support/bin/answer.py?answer148 )

Otherwise, sticking to the facts, at least there's more to think about:
- Google is undoubtedly engaged in an attempt to gain control over (the
access to) a critical mass of all that is ever written on earth. In fact
it's not an attempt, they're doing it, no one else has the economic power +
technology to do it and most major libraries/universities are happy to have
it done by Google. Here's a story in Mit's Technology review with accurate
information, i think:
<http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp>
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

- Google is a commercial company. it may be a company run by Extremely Nice
People, wanting to do Extremely Nice Things for Humanity but it's a company.
I've always found it strange that people make such a fuzz over Microsoft and
no one complains about Google (or the Macromedia-Adobe monster for that
matter): they're all companies doing what companies do as far as our
jurisdiction allows (and beyond untill they have to pay too much).
While it might be hard these days to distinguish some of our universities or
other scholarly institutions from the commercial machines they are running
on, still it's quite a change when access to the written word will be
decided on blunt commercial terms. Somehow, i do not like the idea of one
company sitting on top of our top quality information, no matter how Nice it
seems.Some doomsday scenario's immediately spring to mind, deliberate
obfuscation of sensitive knowledge has always been the privilege of those
endowed with the Power over Books. Therefore i think the importance of the
outstanding source of independent knowledge that is available to us now,
Wikipedia, cannot be stressed too much. It is there that we as (virtual)
individuals living together can still act instead of being acted upon.

- through its omnipresence, its dominance, Google already is an intellectual
authority. I would define an intellectual authority here as an institute the
individual turns to when seeking to consolidate its information as
acceptable, workable knowledge. I was discussing the correct spelling of a
Dutch word today with my sister who has a masters degree in our language,
who's acclaimed poetry is being published. As an author and teacher her
first suggestion was to Google it. Just an example, but it shows how quickly
these changes occur and as Google increases the AI currants in their
web-services we''ll be turning for authoritive answers to them on more
important matters.Good, bad or plain ugly, we're living it.

dv
_____

Van: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Namens Jim
Andrews
Verzonden: donderdag 3 november 2005 15:24
Aan: [email protected]
Onderwerp: RE: RHIZOME_RAW: Dyson at Google


I gather that the idea of scanning all those books is to be able to return
search results that allow people to read a paragraph or two from the source,
not have access to the whole book. And spiders or AI will read the books and
index them much like they do with Web content. So, in that sense, yes, they
are scanning all those books to be read by an AI.

But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that. Is
this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to it?

ja?

"My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral - not in the 14th century but in the
12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone
here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting
everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence
in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,"
explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by
an AI."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html

But the implication in the article you cite is much more grand than that.
Is this latter day dot commery (high bluster) or is there something more to
it?

ja?

It's hard to tell. I do think the author is referring to 'strong' AI here,
an intelligence that, if any comparison makes sense, supersedes the human
intelligence. To my knowledge Google has not made public anything on trying
to built a globally distributed artificial intelligence, but this can easily
be seen as simply forgetting to mention the fact that everything they are
doing is best defined by those 4 words. If not officially claimed , the
thought seems to be very much alive amongst people who work there.
Personally i guess it's a natural evolution, a becoming of global
intelligence that has been long in the making and our words are just drawing
humanly artificial boundaries that never get really crossed. Google is doing
its part, providing what the market demands: a workable authoritive semantic
ontology based the best of human knowledge. Basically their method is genial
in its simplicity: do not define, let the search define the answer. Ofcourse
the actual enabling of the system involves high complexity and massive data
accumulation.

So is there something more to it? Based on those assumptions, there must
be, what else could be the economic neccessity of doing all that hard,
expensive work?

If you search Google concerning information from the world of print, then
you will have the option to buy any of the books, I imagine, and Google will
get a little bit from each sale. Books are for sale, whereas Web pages
usually are not. It looks to me like you can generate more revenue with
search over a domain that's saleable. And there are probably a lot more
things you can do with that data.

So, yes, they are not about making all information accessible for free.
They are about making as much information accessible as is necessary to turn
a profit.

I share your concerns about Google as monolith moogle.

The Dyson writing does not sound like something from an independent
intellectual. Very techno-lyrical singing the google tune, isn't it?

The notion that we're going to build machines that are going to solve our
problems for us is horseshit. Just like in our own lives we have to solve
our own problems. No one/nothing is going to do it for us.

ja
http://vispo.com