Google and God's Mind
The problem is, information isn't knowledge.
By Michael Gorman
December 17, 2004
The boogie-woogie Google boys, it appears, dream of taking over the universe by gathering all the "information" in the world and creating the electronic equivalent of, in their own modest words, "the mind of God." If you are taken in by all the fanfare and hoopla that have attended their project to digitize all the books in a number of major libraries (including the University of Michigan and New York Public), you would think they are well on their way to godliness.
I do not share that opinion.
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Once upon a time, not so long ago, back when people dreamed of silver rockets landing on worlds where the skies were red, or purple or some other eye catching hue; when, in other words, people believed in a certain kind of techno-adventurous future (a combination of American frontier myth and space opera) it was not uncommon to come upon a story about a thinking machine that achieves sentience.
This early space age fantasizing was different from the faux cognitive engineering that produced Arthur C. Clarke's HAL 9000, the star computer of the late 60's book and film, "2001, A Space Odyssey". Murderous HAL was built to think - in Urbana, Illinois if I remember correctly - from the ground up.
Unlike HAL, those first generation dream machines became self aware because, as some heroic scientist was always explaining, they 'had the sum total of human knowledge in their databanks'. Mysteriously, simply because of the depth of the catalogue stored, this immense database created the conditions in which a big electronic library became the deepest and most ambitious of thinkers. For the newly conscious super machine it was always a short step from being able to rapidly call up any information to planning world domination.
Of course, this idea - that a sufficient collection of information will lead to something very profound - predates the computer era. Indeed, it even predates the industrial revolution. If I recall correctly at least one or two prominent Enlightenment era philosophers believed that the raw accumulation of data equaled a mastery of reality.
So the Google guys are echoing an old idea. Not as old as the hills but pretty damn long in the tooth.
.d.