Slashdot Mirror
Does Google = God?
lgreco writes "In an op/ed for the NYT, Thomas Friedman wonders "Is Google God?" Interesting article that disseminates things mostly known to and hopefully well understood by the Slashdot readership. The fact that such commentary made it to the NYT op/ed pages is remarkable." It's the NYT, so a free registration is required.
since google news does not need to register
2 9F RIE.html?ex=1057464000&en=5a99f13790700f88&ei=5062 &partner=GOOGLE[/url]
you can be god, too:
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/
A co-worker of mine has been claiming that google is god for two years now.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/06/29/nyt.friedman/
God wins
Give us now our dayly searches, forgive us of our articles, as we have put them in our keywords. Please O Google grant me now a privilige to use your mighty powers to find the answers to my searches.
So does this. Weird.
"... only one-third come from inside the U.S. The rest are in 88 other languages."
Americans may speak funny but generally its still known as english. Amazingly it's actually spoken outside of the US as well.
I mean, my first reaction to the question "Is Google God?" is "No... Next topic!" Presumably the article is asking something at least slightly more compelling or interesting, but we have no idea of what that might be.
The site is supposed to be news for nerds... not sound bites for nerds. Although I guess that is a lot of what passes for news in the States.
It just has some vague statistics about increasing numbers of Google searches and DNS requests in the last three years, then some specualtion by a talking head tech pundit about how "the rate of technological integration has intensified" and how in future everybody will be connected to everybody else.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I thought this article was supposed to be about Google and God, but it was more about wi-fi and how wi-fi combined with Google will allow you to "find anything, anywhere, anytime". But it THEN goes on about how broadband adoption will allow al-Qaeda will be able to more easily send recruitment videos using video-on-demand. Of course, it mentions 9/11, as expected. It also says that America has to take "it" seriously. Oh, and it states a couple of interesting statistics. Yay. There, now you don't need to RTFA.
Note the last paragraph about the effectiveness of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos, and the possibility of targeting them precisely via broadband video. Brrrrrr.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Summary : google + wireless = inforamtion available for everybody everywhere. They compare it to omniscience and thus gods (btw, where is the other part traditionnaly associated to gods, omnipotence :) ?).
Then they go on rambling that this will allow the bad guy to touch "more" the U.S. (what of the rest of the western world...?) and allow them unite quicker and better.
I think this is a "slow news" sunday, thus this [devoid of content] article went on slashdot...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
But that's not my point. My point is the comparison is quite ludicrous.
There is the disclaimer "little bit" in there, but even so, it feels a lot like Beowulfian "flyting" in the nasty "pay attention to me!" sense. Google may be wireless, but only when it piggy-backs on another, even vaster service, and even so, it's only such part of the time. Not to mention, as ability goes, it's not exactly omnipotent. And anyone who worships Google in more than a "Hey, I've got the toolbar" kind of way should probably reconsider their choice of deity. As dieties go, Google is probably a bit more deserving than some other common choices today, of course, but is still on the "Not such a great idea" side of the choices of "things, Things, dieties, and God's to worship."
Jeez Louise.. Terrorists will be using the interweb to organize more efficiently! Foreign people who hate use will be able to talk about us behind our backs! (No mention that the internet has done more to proliferate American culture and "values" than MTV or McDonalds, or that the internet can be, and actually is, used for good as well as evil..)
Don't get your panties in a wad, United States. Better start fearing your domestic Police State To Be!
OMFG! There's a knife next to my plate! What if a terrorist had sat down here!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Thomas Friedman is the official gargoyle of the state. He's not a tech by any stretch of the imagination. I suspect he just lost a bet with someone who said he couldn't write an article without mentioning 9/11.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Drugs will do that to you sometimes, but the important thing is not to try and write articles and stuff in that "bent" state of mind. In my case, these delusions of grandeur usually pass in a few hours time. A good night's sleep should help too.
Peace \\//
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If God == 0, then Google = God would be false.
Then again, if you believe that God is real, or at least a float, then the specific test that God == 0.000000 is likely to come back true. Now, the real question is whether having strcmp("Google", "God") > 0 being true is a serious theological problem.
I've read Thomas Friedman's book, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", and I can say the answer to that question is yes.
Thomas Friedman has a basic understanding that the 1990's saw major changes in the technological and social structure of the world. He uses this to make up sweeping trite statements about things that he doesn't really understand. Some of his statements are true, but he sugarcoats them and puts them in impressive terms that make them seem more impressive than they are.
For example, he has the famous statement: "Two nations with McDonald's have never gone to war with each other". Yes, that is true, but it actually means "advanced industrialized democracies don't go to war with each other", or perhaps "nation states no longer go to war with each other". But he puts it in flashy terms, and sounds like it is a magical formula.
"Is Google God" is his flashy way of saying "Is the internet a source of near endless information?". When you put it in those terms, then, well, yes, it is. But he gets away with being a serious writer by changing his words around and seeming to say something new.
It's people like him that make me wonder why Slashdotters ever bothered to complain about Jon Katz.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
However, the real point of the article is that in an increasingly linked world, it is more important than ever to be good world citizens.
Lord Rees Moag and James Davidson make this point in their book 'Sovereign Individual": large countries become increasingly vulnerable to small countries and organized groups because of the threats of cyber attacks, etc.
As this article points out, with the free flow of information, small groups can share information and form larger political and action groups.
Not to be political, but I was against the recent Iraq War because I think that it is a very bad idea to alienate other countries when we largely depend on the global "dollar standard" for hoarding money and purchasing oil to prop up our economy. I am a more than a little concerned that our turning our backs on the UN will cause us all kinds of problems in the future. (BTW, the US has vetoed 35 UN security council resolutions ssince 1970 - so, it was not so atypical for Russia, France, and Germany to threaten to veto one of our resolutions.
-Mark
Here is the results on GoogleFight :
google is god = 157049 results
google is evil = 204364 results
Conclusion : Google is NOT God, Google is EVIL!! We are doomed!!
...It's always interesting to see which of the science-fiction concepts of my youth have actually come to pass. Moon travel came to pass, but certainly not the way Heinlein or H. G. Wells or Jules Verne imagined it.
In the sixties and early seventies, people were awed but poorly informed about computers. The commonest question that "lay" friends and relatives would ask me is "But what do you DO with a computer? Do you ask it questions?" That seemed bizarrely naive to me, and I would try to explain that it was more like playing with an electric train set, and that, outside of jokes, or Asimov's "Multivac" stories, you didn't "ask questions" of a computer.
Well, Google may not be Multivac, but it sure is a lot more like Multivac than H. G. Well's space gun or Cavorite sphere is like Project Apollo. You don't normally phrase the questions as questions, and it doesn't provide interpretative, English-language "answers," but it certainly is an awesome and it may not be omniscient but it's an order of magnitude more "scient" than anything else I've seen.
And, yes, it FINALLY looks as if "flat TV you can hang on a wall" is not only here, but I expect I'll be buying one within the next five years or so.
No helicars or voice typewriters yet, though.
(No, ViaVoice is NOT a good realization of the "voicewriter" fantasy. Oh, and for the record, to me, "Ask Jeeves" does NOT feel like Multivac at all, but Google does. I can't say why, that's just the way it strikes me.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually I prefer to think about Google, or the web in general, as the hitchikers guide to galaxy as described in Douglas Adams novels. It knows about anything but most of the time the answer might not quite be what you were looking for.
cu,
Lispy
Do you not know that Google is powered by Python, the living software symbol of the tempter of the fall of Adam and Eve?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
GW Bush: Get me some of that broadband video! I'm so sick of targeting Ossama Bin Laden only to hit a camel in the ass. That Google thing sucks. 2,900 answers but not one of them knows where I can find that asshole.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.
The point is more fear and paranoiac fantasies as only Thomas Friedman can spin, with an evil-doer under every rock, a terrorist behind every tree and, now, a rabid, sweaty-toothed madman coming to get us behind every keyboard.
From his lofty perch high atop the NY Times, Friedman has seen a career revival thanks to 9/11, winning a Pulitzer for his turgid writing about the event and its effects. When Friedman gets basic facts just plain wrong, it makes you wonder how much else he gets wrong, or otherwise intentionally distorts or misrepresents just so he can make everyone see the world through his lens where terrorists will get all of us.
Examples?
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure...
and
A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net
Really? The last time I checked VeriSign was only responsible for maintaining the .com and .net registries, as well as most SSL certificate services. There are 243 country code top-level domains, plus the .org TLD, not just .com and .net. The way Friedman makes it sound it's as if there's nothing else out there, and I'm not sure which is worse: that he was too lazy or too apathetic to talk to anyone other than VeriSign to get a basic understanding of the Internet to accurately write about it for his many non-technical readers.
These are basic facts and are simple to check. Any journalism student can do this so why doesn't Friedman?
Given his penchant for hyperbole in overstating the negative consequences of everything and minimizing the positives, it's no surprise that Friedman has completely missed the fact that the same technologies he fears are just as capable of opening up communications. He says that while the world is growing more integrated and what the world thinks about the USA will matter more, the USA is becoming ideologically isolationist and it doesn't need to heed what the rest of the world tells it. Proliferation of the Internet facilitates the free exchange of ideas that can result in better understanding and relations with the rest of the world, which Friedman apparently believes is full of nothing but some sort of irrational monolithic hatred.
When Friedman takes such a reductionist view of the world that amounts to Us vs. Them, is it any wonder that all Friedman can see are terrorists, terrorists everywhere and not a refuge in sight.
When the only tool you have is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.