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"St Lawrence of Google"
mcho writes "The Economist has a story about Google's co-founder, Larry Page, who " always wanted to change the world". The article attempts to make an arguement about the company's true intentions, amid all the rumors about potential Google products. "Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, 'they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test' -- in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.""
Forget about the AI rumor. It's just a rumor, the last sentence of TFA, unrelated to the rest.
More interesting is the following quote:
This somehow reminds me of Apple in the 90s. They were on a crusade. They had found the holy grail. They could not fail. They would bring their vision to the world.
They could fail. And they failed. It didn't destroy them, but put their feet back to the ground. Where they belong. Today they make great products while listening to their users needs. They have learned that even though they may be on a mission, missionaries usually do not change the world. Hard workers and creative people do, as long as they stay connected to reality.
Bill Gates from Triumph of the nerds:
Chriss
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Yeah, but any slashdotter regular will fail the Turing test in the first place.
is that to build a truly self-aware computing grid, the LAST thing you want is for it to be distributed over the entire globe. The amount of data a system has to integrate to reach self-awareness is massive, and the further apart the nodes are the more latency you'll have. Once the system is up and running, then maybe you'd want to spread it apart to protect against natural disasters, but in the development stage you'd only be handicapping yourself needlessly. The writer's conclusion is based on an understanding of science that doesn't seem to reach past the Terminator 3 level.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Seriously, does the author of the submission even know what deus ex machina means (not the literal Latin meaning, I mean how it's used)?
Of the three definitions, I would say only 2 or 3 would make sense in the context that the phrase is used. So, the ultimate goal of the company is to have Google pop up unexpectedly and resolve conflicts in an artificial and contrived manner.
Sorta like Clippy. *ducks*
my pet machine
Please read up on what, exactly, deus ex machina is. It is a literary term, describing the way gods would be lowered on to stage with a mechane (machine) to solve otherwise unsolvable problems that came up during the play. Because the "gods" would come from the "machine," the term "deus ex machina" was used - meaning, literally, god from the machine.
People using the term to describe Google sound like people who overheard the term once, had no idea what it meant, so they translated it and decided to take a literal meaning to the thing. I'm reminded of people using the term "body of crime" incorrectly (once even on CSI... *sigh*).
Rob
So Google's big project is scanning every single book and indexing them online. It's a great idea. Why just search the internet when you can also be searching every work of literature? It's an obvious advance for Google, improving the search engine in a small but obvious way that makes a big difference as far as real usability.
Here's the thing: indexing books online is an incidental benefit. Google's real goal is to create a working, statistical AI. They've been hiring top-of-their-field AI researchers for a while. Last summer, Google won a competition for machine translation. They translated from Arabic to English and vice-versa better than all of their competitors. They did this using a statistical approach -- just feed the computer thousands and thousands of already translated documents, and eventually the machine can start making inferences based on probability. Given enough data, it works.
The same idea can be applied in the generic case. Wouldn't being able to ask an AI any question and receive a correct answer revolutionize society? And, the sum total of world literature is probably enough data to do so. They could call it AskG. He would know everything. And, the way they could roll it out, is by launching, and simultaneously updating wikipedia. It's well known that Wikipedia is riddled with small errors. Hell, the other day I inserted a gibberish statistic in an article about a city, and it's still there. Imagine if Google AI launches, and then announces that it has fixed Wikipedia. If Google AI made 50,000 edits it would overwhelm Wikipedia's normal editors, but whichever edits were checked by humans would certainly be confirmed as correct.
And, a new age of humanity would be ushered in. It would we a new Library of Alexandria. We would end the Age of Information and enter the Age of Knowledge. The singularity has already begun, but no one has realized it -- the singularity began the day Google went live.
Would AskG immediately fix quantum theory? Given all the data about science published by researchers, could G form new conclusions that humanity's best and brightest haven't? Could G solve the logistical challenge of solving world poverty?
There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.
See the best sci-fi short story ever written, Asimov's The Last Question, or a simple find and replace hack of that story, The Last Query.
You know, Bill Gates may be Chairman, but Balmer has definitely become "The Chair Man".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }