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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.
Wake me up when it starts teaching the monkeys how to use tools and kill each other. And no Republican jokes, either.
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.
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
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.
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.
In Soviet Russia, redundant obligatory jokes use YOU!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
Nitpickers are the worst, particularly when they're wrong.
Google searches the internet, but we don't, whilst using it. We search Google, because all the results we want are stored at Google, within Google, and we hopefully find the result we want. Only then are we directed to a site on the internet outside of Google containing the information we searched for.
It is not entirely innaccurate to say that 'We search the internet using Google', but this assumes a logical progession: We search google > because Google searches the internet > so that we cand find what we want on the internet = We used google to search the internet. However, contrary to your misconceptions, it is MORE not LESS accurate to say 'We search Google (to find what we want on the internet).
Nope, quite definitely searching Google. "The internet" cannot be searched, there's no protocol for it. You can search a concentration of culled pages stored in a particular place, but you're not searching the internet. You're searching what that place has stored, believing it to be a subset of the internet.
You can trivially see this with pages that present one thing to Google spiders and another to the real browsing user. Or with 404 links - they existed at the time they went in the index, but they don't exist now. It's not the internet being searched, it's the snapshot subset that's been indexed.
Cheers,
Ian
... 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!
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.
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.
"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.
There was an article here on slashdot the other day about cuil, and the verdict was: Epic Fail, not even a contender.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
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
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"
Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?
Whatever!! We all know that the answer is 42.
Eclipse PDE and Me
The real reason is that some of the tubes are bent, and you can't see round corners.
At the bottom of the
...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.
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]
Advertising revenue and all.
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
If this project leads to the development of readily-affordable Summer Glau lovebots, then I think we men can all agree that eventual nuclear holocaust is a fully satisfactory tradeoff.
Why would another big company be better than Google?
It's like changing from six to half-a-dozen.
factor 966971: 966971
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
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?