BigShinyThing

Google Base, Google Video, Google News, Google mail … It’s all getting very Googlefied out there. This week, Wired published a nice precis of exactly what Google is up to and who feels threatened. A quicker fear fix is available via the short film Googlezon which we featured a while back and which managed to even freak out Rupert Murdoch.

In a more recent twist of Google Fear, historian Charles Dyson alleges that Google’s book scanning project has a far loftier purpose than any of us imagined — the creation of artificial intelligence. Dyson has written about his visit to Google’s HQ:

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.”

Dyson’s treatise on the power of Google is readable in full on Edge.org.

UPDATE: In an Economist article on Google published 14th Jan 06, Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future had this to say:

Google is a religion posing a company… they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test (in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as human in written conversations).

You read it here first.