Google Books not for humans
October 30th 2005
From George Dyson’s “Turing’s Cathedral,” an essay on his recent visit to Google.
“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.”
They understand. No one else does. Everyone’s bickering over copyrights and competition and all these stupid little things, and we’re all shooting way too low!
I’m sorry, I’m stunned by that. I never thought of it that way before. It half scares me and half excites me that a company would put so much investment into the good of a future AI, recognizing how much of our knowledge is stored in books, and how useless it would be to a computer unless someone makes it digital.
Man… what a mind blow. Let’s hope Google sticks to “Don’t be Evil.”
“Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Digitizing was inevitable, taken longer than I would have thought actually – so the sooner the better so it’s done in a relatively tedious and crude form, so the knowledge has a way of getting spread out – nice and messy – so it doesn’t turn into power.
Like a climbing rope in a mess.
Knowledge. Books.
The ability to browse through hundreds of books, or to type in a half-remembered phrase and find it after twenty years…
To cross-check five different Bibles and trace the differences in translations…
And those are just the uses I would pursue. I can’t even imagine the applications of an AI… but then, that’s the point.
Someone else who thinks about this kind of stuff…
Not that you both think about the SAME stuff, but I read his post and thought of you. Ew. That sounds like a greeting card.