"Erich Schmidt has said that the company's ultimate product, the one he's 'always wanted to build,' would not wait to respond to his query but would 'tell me what I should be typing.' It would, in other words, provide the answer without hearing the question. The product would be an artificial intelligence. It might even be, to quote Sergey Brin again, 'an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain.'" Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google.
Again from Nicholas Carr's book,
Page and Brin gave voice to their deepest ambition. They weren't just interested in perfecting their search engine, they said. What they really looked forward to was melding their technology with the human brain itself...."ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind." The interviewer probed again: "is your goal to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your minds?" ...after a presentation at his old alma mater, Stanford University, in May 2002, Page said that Google would fulfill its mission only when its search engine was AI-complete....in a February 2004 interview with Reuters, saying, "On the more exciting front, you can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear."
Google is doing the world a favor. It is saving it time. How much time? According to them, about 3.5 billions seconds a day or about 11 man hours every second! But there is a little statement, made in their website regarding "15 new technologies" it took to make this speed occur. This aroused my curiosity as to what they might be. For a detailed discussion of them you may look here or directly from Google. You can watch this short video on Google's constant efforts to make the web faster.
"The perfect search engine," says co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."
There are shortcuts to be learned in the new Google Instant video outlined here.
But there remains an important aspect of this progress psychologically for us. This will only increase the speed at which things fly by us. Our brains will become accustomed to this speed and it may affect the way we perceive the slowness of other things around us. I will leave you with this quote from Kevin Kelly,
What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something rather than remember it. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.
1 comment:
I don't know what is scarier, the idea of no longer needing my memory or the fact that I can already see this happening. Being a teacher I already see myself telling my students about websites that can perform functions rather than having them memorize how to do things. For example, rather than tell them to memorize how to format a bibliography, I tell them about easybib.com. Imagine a world where there is no need to know anything because you instantaneous access to everything. Is this really cool or really scary? For me, both.
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