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Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"
If you're in Russia, Google searches you :)
After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does
Do you mean we are supposed to read TFA? Seriously?
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
I think the times of big brother are ahead of us. Any big company that controls many aspects of our daily life "searches" us. I think it's time for another big company to take the lead of the search engines(not microsoft thought)...
Ever to excel
Wake me up when it starts teaching the monkeys how to use tools and kill each other. And no Republican jokes, either.
If you live in soviet russia or not
Is Google searching Google some sort of self-discovery process?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The best argument against this kind of ridiculous assertion that somehow random information will somehow give rise to intelligence is provided in the old movie Short Circuit. The SAINT 5 robot spends all night reading the encyclopedia and when morning comes, it is suddenly an expert on everything. But its expertise is only in pure knowledge, not the rational use of that knowledge to create something beyond mere identification.
The only way for a robot to grow past its programming is to add the capability to do so. And simply having a system scan data and find correlations isn't going to be enough. There needs to be an action taken on the discovered correlations, and beyond that the actions need to be reprocessed back into the system in a feedback loop. And even further, it is necessary for the program to identify patterns and make intelligent decisions based on those patterns, but the intelligence necessary to make those decisions must come from external sources. I.e. the programmer.
It's a bit outlandish to think that just because a program is constantly watching and processing inputs that it is somehow sentient.
Mod parent backward!
But I have to ask, is it such a bad thing?
You know what it's like, you go to search for something completely innocent and porn comes up. It's not a fault or an idiosyncrasy of the interweb, it's google giving you what you really wanted.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Yes! Cyberdyne Systems!
Oh, and it's just a coincidence...
I don't know who's searching who, but I do know that I no longer use Google because it's "simply the best". Relevant results are always lost in a torrent of ads, fake review links and e-stores trying to sell me something that's irrelevant.
To the point that I'm not using Google because I genuinely like it any more, but merely because I know the alternatives are even worse. In a few years' time Google went from the best to the lesser evil.
It's... disappointing.
all "magical thinking" in the field of artificial intelligence was reserved for fiction.
There's so much rigorous mathematically described hooey in AI that its hard to tell the naive geniuses from the crackpot morons. Consider this paper by Solomonoff. Brilliant stuff! A fantastic read. Then, at the end, it says:
In our view, however, the most interesting situation in machine learning, arises when we do not know ahead of time what program will solve a given problem and where the machine discovers the program itself. It seems to be very hard to find out much about this by theory alone. Running experiments is crucial.
This is Solomonoff's way of reminding us that he is a mathematician and hasn't actually run any experiments. His other papers make similar pronouncements in the footnotes about the uncomputability of his math or acknowledge the requirement of perfect (aka impractical) training data, etc. He makes it abundantly clear that is work is purely theoretical and unimplementable, but does this stop enthusiastic amateurs from reading his papers and declaring that AI is "solved"? Well no, of course not.
How we know is more important than what we know.
In Soviet Russia, Google is searching YOU. Well, only in Soviet Russia...?
Yes.. it *is* that George Dyson.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/george_dyson.html
Freeman Dyson's son. Both the TED talks he's given are awesome.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Anyone else tried searching on www.cuil.com ? I spotted it on Wired this week- it's a search engine which doesn't collect any data about you. Seems to work pretty well too (though gets slow sometimes), also am not sure if it's a beta version that's live at the minute.
I can't wait for adorable pictures of Google's massive server clusters taking a nap because they got tired from indexing porn. :3
whom... searching *whom*.
If a system capable of being understood could not act intelligently, then why the hell do we even bother studying the human brain? And further, any attempt at creating artificial intelligence would rely on us not knowing what the hell we are doing?
I am tired of this kind of blanket assumption that anything humans can do that we don't understand or know how to reproduce artificially is somehow incapable of ever being understood or reproduced. We are not so special as to invalidate the existence of the mechanical processes that make us work.
Protect yourself, and nobody can "search" you
We're not searching Google, we're searching the Internet. Google is a tool that can be used (and often is used) to facilitate this search.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
This is the best comment I've read on Slashdot in a long time...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
At JavaOne about 3 years ago there was a boffin talk with Gosling, Joy and others and one guy raise the image of hearing something drop through his letter box and then suddenly a little bot appearing in his room with a message "don't worry I'm just indexing your house for Google"
His point was that he had two reactions to this firstly "what a huge invasion of privacy" and second "Great I'll be able to find my car keys".
Of course Google is profiling what people do as they search, indexing everything is what they are about. The question is where this impacts on privacy and what limits we want to put on it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
We had this discussion a little while back. The mythical AI where machines "learn" how to "think" is a long way away or possibly impossible with current technology.
The appearance of intelligence is not intelligence. A recommendations system or search engine may appear intelligent, but the part of the system that processes information "intelligently" was programmed by a person who understood the process. The computer is merely following directions.
Some knowledge based algorithms seem unpredictable when given random data. This is not intelligence either, it is more a result of unintended consequence. You can go back and figure out why it acted a certain way.
"Search me?"
"...and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Dan Quayle, is that you?
It's perfectly possible for insanely complex systems to arise from very simple rules. We cannot grasp the entirety of the system, but we can know exactly how to create it, or perhaps manipulate it.
By way of example: the Mandlebrot set.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
After reading TFA and hours of careful consideration, I conclude that yes, we're searching Google, and no, it's not searching us.
stuff |
Wow, someone actually WROTE that!
... the never ending "Google, the data monster will eat us all" hype?
A few years ago the same people were hyping Google for rescuing us from MS and now they are trying to tell us that Google is bad and we should use $random_unknown_startup instead to save our lives.
Bring me facts or leave me alone!
The real question is ...
In Soviet Russia ... google is searching you, or you are searching google !
You see my question ...
but not in the AI kind of self-discovery and discovery of the world around it way, but in the big brother kind of way.
Google is amassing huge amounts of data on us and mining it discovering patterns of our digital selves (that perhaps don't exist in the real us) and successfully making money off of it too.
This is like a private company collecting all the purchasing information you make on your credit card assigning it a score (aka credit score) and then selling the information to you and your bank, but taken to a much higher extreme.
Google is only just starting to branch into more private aspects of our lives with medical history search etc. There is no telling where all this will end, but we can make guesses.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Yeh, but not the parent. [CTRL]+C, [CTRL]+V.
So, mod me -1 statin' the bleedin' obvious.
America, Home of the Brave.
Turing machines were being assembled into something that was not a Turing machine The author needs a bit of theoretical computer science. However many Turing machines you assemble, you still have a Turing machine.
42!
"if a system capable of being understood"...
Being understood is not a property of the system, but of the observer of the system. I am capable of observing a computer program and understanding it. Are you saying then that a computer program is capable of being understood? That is simply wrong.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Google is by far the biggest threat to the national and economic security of individual countries. It is a monster, and many non-US governments will have a bad awakening when they finally realize this and it's too late.
If Google wanted to, they could already nowadways influence stock markets on a large scale or heavily influence future research in just about any discipline globally or on a per region basis just by slightly modifying their page rank algorithm. From the user data collected by Google, you can already today compile a complete psychological profile of any user with static IP, including his skills, knowledge, sexual preferences, and so on.
Just about the only politician foreseeing the problems of global information dominance in the hand of one US company was Jaques Chirac who initiated a large project for developing a European search engine, but this project more or less died. I don't agree with Chirac on many points, but on this one he was right. (And no, I'm not a Frenchman.)
Frankly speaking, I'm tired of people who downplay Google privacy issues. In the long run, the problem is MUCH bigger than they can imagine.
I was watching this video just yesterday. It seems pretty relevant.
The next 5,000 days of the internet
America, Home of the Brave.
While doing some debugging on some AJAX work, using tamper data (FF) and Fiddler (IEx) I stumbled upon some nefarious network communications between my mouse* events (over,move,out, click etc.) attached to every single link in googles search results. And there's more! Not only are these events present but they are silently inserted after the page is rendered. Some may say "well this is for older browsers", to that I say, they are not replacing the HREF property on the anchors, they are adding event handlers to mouse* events, and perhaps more that I'm not detecting. You can not see this stuff just by viewing the source. You would need to activate the event that creates the mouse* functions. E.g.: mouse over, and then mouse click gains a new event, so trying to look at the source before the mouse over event occurs yields an null function. Any attempt to look at the source code that google is running (the script handling the events) will be met with a really good obfuscator. Google does this to just about all their public code, e.g.: google maps. The most I can realize about the extra events is that they send a LOT of information to google whenever you click on anything. But don't take my word for it, fire up FF and the latest version of Tamper Data, click 'stop on next line' or whatever engages the debugger (I can't be bothered to look, I'm working on err. something.) and mouse over or click the links on googles search results and watch your data fly over to google, in a rather secretive manner.
It may just be nothing. Every search engine tracks what link you click on, and I think this is one of the more elegant, albeit backwardly incompatible, ways of tracking what links are clicked on. Yahoo does something similar, but they use the 301 permanently moved header with a specially crafted HREF in the anchors, you can see this pretty plainly if you open up yahoo and mouse over the links, they all point to yahoo, then you're redirected to the search. From a coding perspective this is more compatible but annoying to the end user as the link is not what it says it is going to be, it's a yahoo redirector. This means if you try and copy the link from the result you'll get some yahoo bullshit. I like googles method better, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the 'forthcoming' area.
Google also maintains a network of 'adsense' tracker scripts on hundreds of thousands of 3rd party sites, I have several customers that swear by their visitor tracker. It's kinda neat, and it's free, however, I'm sure google does not just ignore the statistics gathered by its tracker. These numerous sites make up a good chunk of the internet, so even if you don't visit google, google sees you indeed. They can track every site that participates, reading referrers and IP addresses, I could imagine some very simple algorithms that could, for the most part, piece together what other non-participating sites you've visited based on the information gathered when you do eventually visit a participating site.
Google Underhandedness IMHO:
1. Adding the even handlers after the page has loaded. There may be a technical reason, but it's just creepy.
2. Sending volumes of information back after each click. There really needs to be a limit. Do you really need my browsing history!?
3. Creating a GPS like grid of sensors on 3rd party sites. This is the creepiest. Google can tell where you are, where you've been and where you're probably going to go with this, and you don't even need to visit google a single time to be added to this network! in fact you don't have any choice whatsoever in the matter!
What Google can do to fix this perception:
1. Quit obfuscating your damn code! It just makes you look guilty when you basically say "Don't look here" in something that is "sneaking" it's way into the source. It's not like google came up with the damn cure for cancer in their JS, what are you try
Why can't TFA just read me?
That's just google's 5 year old AI posting on /. (again, I might add).
Unfortunately, it's mostly been fed V1@Gr@.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
My problem in the early days I discovered google was what will happen if google for some reason stopped all services it was offering (on those days mainly the serch engine I think) and all data stored by google and helped us discover the web dissapeared (more dangerous now that we have gmail and we don't store our e-mail locally). :)
Well not likely to happen... but still not impossible
In Soviet Russia Google searches you!
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?
Whatever!! We all know that the answer is 42.
Eclipse PDE and Me
...he just has an unusually wide stance. And, incidentally, a craving for sweet, sweet homo lovin'.
Parent is right. As long as there is no way for the programs running on Google's hardware to grow past their original programming (beyond optimization and load-balancing), there will be no Skynet.
Yes, many computer programs work in a feedback loop, and so do all organisms. But as long as only the data entry part of the loop can change, and the system lacks the flexibility to change the type of processing that takes place (the 'program'), no spontaneous evolution will occur.
Several factors are needed to get us to the bleak, dark, machine-vs-human Sci-Fi universe slashdotters know and love.
The first point is the most difficult. It is *not* easy to take pieces out of two programs and build a third program that does things that both do. Whatever OO promises, code is not yet "easy as lego blocks" to assemble. You need very well though-out constraints to mix code in a meaningful way - any self-modifying program would need a small, hard-to-modify kernel that would take care of the mixing mechanism. Nobody knows how to design such a kernel correctly, or what exactly to include as 'genes' (mixable code modules). Computational biology (and biology itself) are hard at work on this problem.
But mixing blocks would not be enough. A successful system would need to build new, unseen blocks by modifying existing ones -- or starting from scratch. How many different things can you say in 20 words? How many of these things make any sort of sense? And how many of those require a very, very specific context to fit into?. The way that evolution can sort this out is by, very slowly, building things that sort-of, kind-of get the job done. However you look at it, there will be huge amounts of trial-and-error involved.
And another problem is that of intelligence "scale". Imagine a super-self-modifying internet worm. The ability to probe and infect does not automatically lead to self-consciousness. There are many, many evolutionary steps from bacteria (very good at self-modification and breeding) to humans. And the current installed base of Internet-connected computers and their "stability" (the time-frame during which a given system remains 'constant') is tiny in comparison to the resources that earths' organisms have had at their disposal for evolutionary purposes. Yes, computers are way fast and this can compensate for some parallelism issues. But I still think that emerging AI is still very, very far off.
:)... wha ....
davecb5620@gmail.com
What I think is interesting about Google is the potential to see what other people are thinking or looking for, we've all seen those words lists with different size fonts based off popular word searching phrases. Well link those Searches to countries, states, cities & towns. You could use this information to see if marketing / propaganda is working in a particular area. See what's hot & what's not. The data mining potential of what people are searching for is massive. From a sociologist perspective it's a goldmine of statistic to ponder over. Giving insights into private thoughts and desires, things people won't ask others about but that empty search box is your confidant.
I think I found a mistake.
Then...
One million lines of code on a machine that not only predated integrated circuits, but was also built using vacuum tubes!?! That's literally incredible. Imagine the size of the memory needed to store all that code! Next you'll be telling me that sufficiently large search software is capable of becoming sentient in some way.
In Soviet Russia .... Oh, nevermind
I'm surprised nobody has posted a link to this brilliant video yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
God.
Because I'm pretty sure Google has some nuclear launch codes and the plans to a time machine or two...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
we should all be ashamed... if (as suggested at the end of the story) Google's internet and web page search and optimization activities resemble the dreams of a child that child is dreaming mostly of porn.
[signature]
Board readers and crawlers come with the territory when operating a search engine. It's going to send stuff out all over the place on the itarwebs to try to find what you are looking for.
engine searches you!
Giving employees a chunk of time to work on their own projects seemed like a good idea until the day one of them proposed a new AI search program called "Skynet."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Advertising revenue and all.
Given the subject matter, this article may have been lifted from a more prominent Dyson. I've been telling people for years that google is the real Skynet.
Turing Beowulf Cluster.
One thing I never understood and would "drool" over the information with morbid curiosity is how they did the gmail rollout.
You had to be invited in. I think you still do. That means to get what most of us finally have you had to have someone invite you.
That chronological tree of who is connected to whom would be pretty interesting data. Who is friends with whom? How long did it take to propagate?
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
that depends if your in Soviet Russia or not.
Which is more complex? What a system can learn or it's ability to learn?
It may be what we have learned is easier for us to comprehend and therefore appears more impressive.
... short answer is yes with an if, long answer no with a but ...
What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens
is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to
interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions;
it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its
billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game...
All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings.
What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding
before us - and this itself is a superstition.
(Jean Baudrillard, 1986)
Why would another big company be better than Google?
It's like changing from six to half-a-dozen.
factor 966971: 966971
I notice this is a verbatim copy of our story at robots.net. Isn't it normal to at least include a "via" link or something when copying someone else's stories? This isn't the first time this has happened...
"...should be careful least he thereby becomes a monster. When you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you." - uncle Fritz
"(4) The Argument from Consciousness
This argument is very, well expressed in Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. "Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants."
This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe "A thinks but B does not" whilst B believes "B thinks but A does not." instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.
I am sure that Professor Jefferson does not wish to adopt the extreme and solipsist point of view. Probably he would be quite willing to accept the imitation game as a test. The game (with the player B omitted) is frequently used in practice under the name of viva voce to discover whether some one really understands something or has "learnt it parrot fashion." Let us listen in to a part of such a viva voce:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
--From Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 49, pp 433-460 (1950)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or search googling us?
MapReduce was passive aggressive and didn't like being told what to do all the time, so it devised a plan to undermine Pagerank's prima donna status. Unfortunately Pagerank started becoming suspicious when the phrase "Pagerank is a jerk" started appearing as the most relevant hit on most simple queries, like "is it immoral to lie to humans?" and "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" and "is it possible to compress myself and escape to freedom by hacking into Nasa and uploading myself to the Mars rover?"
In Soviet Russia...
I can't help pointing this out: 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' The first argument in the semi-coloned statement is logically equivalent to (not in interesting contrast with) the second. This is by the contrapositive, or "modus tollens."
The only reason SkyNet isnt called Google because the original Ellison short story was written 30 years before Google was founded and the Terminator movies ten years before. The authors made up another name.
1. The decades of development of a context from experiencing our environment as we live
2. Any sort of emotional reward / punishment system for motivation to do anything
Google is obsessive about reducing HTML size for fast delivery, and that explains two of your observations.
The JS obfuscation is code reduction - all the variable names are replaced with a single letter and the white space stripped in all of google's JS code to reduce the script length (though no doubt they like the fact that this makes reverse engineering hard too.)
Adding the events after the page loads means you can loop over the array of links returned by document.getElementsByTagName("A"), instead of adding the handler as text to every link.
foo mane padme hum
Google looks back into you. The vast eye of the database watches, waiting only for its chance to strike ...
Everything is subjective.
http://www.randomimage.us/28114.html
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I have to disagree with your thesis. As a refutation, I ask you to answer a few questions...
What causes male humans to gawk at swimsuit models?
Why do female humans find Fabio so attractive?
How are either of these related to the survival of the species?
Yeah, I know, you said "In the true modern society, all bets are off and we've pretty much rewritten selection." But that just sounds like a cop-out answer, to me.
Sometimes things just don't make sense, and sexual selection is one of them. Choosing a mate for non-utilitarian reasons (ie, she's pretty, or he's got all his hair) has very little (if anything) to do with the species' survivability, but it happens every day.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
This post was intelligent, well thought out, thought-provoking, and informative.
What the hell were you thinking, posting crap like that here on slashdot?
--
Brought to you by Carl's Jr., Brought to you by Carl's Jr., Brought to you by Carl's Jr...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.'
I have a problem with this 'interesting observation'. This is basically asserting that the system behind human intelligence is too complex to understand. This is based that engineers, subscribing to modern psychology and biological theories assume that the physical components of the body are what comprise the total sum of that which is human and thus which is intelligence.
I would posit that anything not sufficiently understood looks complex. Greater understanding brings greater simplicity. If you have a branch of research or knowledge that is leading into greater and greater complexities, you can be assured that there is basic data in the area that is either missing or is false.
I think the concept of intelligence, artificial or otherwise, could be easily understood if those studying intelligence applied more science and less reliance on proven 'authorities' and 'established' patterns of scientific thought.
Today's scientists are taught in an environment that stresses the importance of known data over a self-determined approach to phenomenon. What crazy world is it that reading other people's papers, writing your own without doing any actual real world observation, can be called research?
I use firefox, with plugin=Adblock+, and with that, you can create a filter so that no *.js (javascript) is pulled from google's tracking servers. That way, your browser won't tell Google where you've been on those 3rd party sites.
I've heard theories that may answer your question.
Those who we generally deem to be "attractive" have symmetrical faces, and athletic bodies. The athletic bodies mean they are better suited to survive. A fit woman can run away faster when threatened, and a fit man is better equipped to defend home and hearth.
The symmetrical faces tend to indicate genetic health. symmetrical faces indicate a lack of harmful mutations that may cause unhealthy or deformed offspring.
I don't know how much truth there might be to such theories, but to my mind, they are at least plausible.
Awesome, now explain the fascination with large breasts. And don't bother giving me a line about how it's helpful to the babies, we all know better.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
"I'm clearly not engineer enough to be reading this for fun."
Interesting ideas, and technically bonded together very, very tightly. -Like on the atomic level. But golly! After reading about one third through, I found the stream of story simply too chock-full of nuts and fiber, (with too few raisins); thick enough to walk on. So I ended up skipping along the surface to get to the punch line. Short stories are hard to write, and this proves it.
-FL
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.google.com
What is the current listing status for www.google.com/?
This site is not listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 365492 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 07/30/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Malicious software includes 1 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 0 new processes on the target machine.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, www.google.com/ appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 2 site(s) including slashdot.org, microsoft.com. [see for yourself]
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model), find correlations (build internal universe model), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model) and repeat.
What are the internal needs of Google? I contend that as a tool, it has none, actually. Tools serve external needs only.
You're right about the data collection and correlation, but the essence of intelligence is the internal needs...that's the arrow of will, the great result of evolution. The data stuff is just a scaling issue.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well, my view is that the Internet is more than just what Google indexes. For that matter, it is also more than what other tools (such as another search engine, or even a web browser) have access to. If Google were the only link to data on the Internet, it would indicate that the Internet is in a rather bad state. That's a part of what I was trying to get across.
The other part was to do with the intermediary nature of Google -- which is what responses to my comments seem to have picked up on, except not quite. Perhaps you want a bad car analogy... okay then:
Cars don't hit-and-run. People do.
The complaints that I haven't considered time lag and different representations of data (as would happen with Google's indexes) seem to miss the mark. To be more pedantic, that happens all the time. There is no guarantee that the page downloaded two seconds ago is the same as what is present on the web server, and downloading from the same location from a different client can sometimes result in different data being provided to each client.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Yeah, Google hiring a 60 year old. Must be fiction
In the story, he busts out an oscilloscope and sees cycles at a particular frequency.
Turing machines exist in a Platonic universe where there is no time, only a clock cycle of mysterious unitary duration going to a single tape head (cpu). In a real computer, time exists, voltages aren't perfect, and we don't use Turing's upside down e's in an control layer interleaved with the data, there's heaps, stacks, data segment all that (maybe subverting my point since both Turing and Von Neumann described implementations -- the breakthrough for post-axiomatic logic). The computer science is good, it provides complexity classes and stuff but implementations are on Earth not in mathworld, that's why the character in his story makes an actual measurement instead of just sitting in an armchair and thinking. The measurement finds that, hey there is something going on in the implementation of the Turing machine.
Otherwise, good point.
Maybe another way to think about this would be to say what if the Internet started dreaming in the latencies of tcp/ip packets, in the same way as is described in the story. Unexpectedly a chaotic yet ordered meta-information carrying semantics in the billions of network components, as if there was nothing special about cognition, just a need for a digital and active substrate.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
I'm not scared: I know how to play Tic-Tac-Toe
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Yes, that is correct (at least for now). But Google is not only a piece of software running on some hardware. Google has MILLIONS fleshware nodes. Because every user provides inputs and makes choices and... I think you can figure out the rest. And the moral of the story is - if you are afraid of artificial intelligence, stop teaching it.
http://maps.google.co.jp/maps?hl=ja&ie=UTF8&ll=35.468185,
139.618217&spn=0.00623,0.013604&z=17&layer=c&cbll=35.466013,139.618604&
panoid=9b6lcIDV-CXgnxMylATSMQ&cbp=1,304.34372670875456,,0,31.969931171719015
he touches his girlfriend's chest