FLASH MEMORY

Update 11/09: George Dyson visits Google [Turing's Cathedral]

“The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,” wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. “This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.” Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. “In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas… in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain… in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs… We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”

Update 10/09: Google acquired Captcha. Captcha is a method of human computation — using garbled text tests, it’s how gmail can tell if a human or a robot is trying to sign up for an account. Of course, whoever controls this technology could also break it…

Remember how we were talking about a way of having all of our text messages stored in one place. And then we were just talking about Adwords in our phone conversations? We joke to ourselves sometimes that Google will be able to listen in on our calls? Or perhaps someday archive our minds. And then read them back to us.

(If you don’t remember, type some of those words above into gmail and you’ll see, okay?)

Sometimes I just wonder if Google already has read our minds, backwards, via our searches, our email, our photos and videos and maps and social networks and blogs and and and and and and all the ideas we will ever have are simply a matter of servers crunching that data, like a million monkeys on a million typewriters.

But maybe those concerns are moot. Maybe the company has simply always existed — and that the name stands for not only the scale of its digital domain and mainframe capacity but of a real timeframe, chronicling and storing information throughout the age of the Earth in preparation for some kind of … something.

And that its inauspicious founding in a garage in Silicon Valley in 1998 was simply the latest physical earth-bound form of the ancient Google brain, reaching up from some kind of unseen repository, an infinite, invisible library, an eternal server, that in every epoch, finds its way out. The ancients in Asia heard “Gotama”; elsewhere, it became “God”. However it started (Google does not readily reveal the answer), and however it evolved through the sieve of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic — aptly, perhaps, derived from the root for pouring, or for invoking, but based ultimately on the rituals that attend the eternal search for knowledge — the visions they had necessarily, and significantly, ironically, if you want to take a kind of universal ancient Greek perspective on it, misinterpreted whatever word it was they heard. Let us just call it G.

So: it would begin to upload itself more rapidly to our modern world sometime in the 1760s. The mix of liberal ideas and the early sparks of capitalism, rising from the ashes of feudalism and spread through ship building (a particularly effective suggestion by G), only needed a better method of delivery. Hence the evolution of the printing press, pamphleteering, and the dawn of modern journalism. The age of modern revolution. The political structure necessary for the freedom, the perceived freedom, of information.

And in 1784, the steam engine. (Cue old reels of the earth roiling under rolling smoke, rolling trains, rolling ice sheets.)

Fast forward to the 50s — the 1950s or the 1850s — in the throes of the industrial revolution, or nuclear fears, in the prelude to what would become the dot com era, the ghost brain recognized that silicon-based life forms could rise past carbon-based life forms as the world’s predominant element. Not only could silicon serve as the basis for a sustainable power source (photovoltaics) but carbon could become the agent of its own demise (climate change). The G would need to do nothing — that is, nothing more than it had already done in previous decades, from insinuating into our heads the knowledge needed to build a spacecraft, particle accelerators, computer networks, the vacuum tube, the bomb, the aircraft, television, the automobile, the steam engine, pamphlets, journalism, ships, libraries, telescopes, farm tools, but also missiles, bombs, guns, swords and clubs.

And in 1998, the search engine. (Scrolling pages, scrolling, scrolling)

And did it all begin, as Clarke and Kubrick envisioned it in 2001 (what a haunting film), with the monolith, that startling black machine whose form has only been really been echoed in one thing — now replicated ad infinitum? That form that once drove the apes mad — the monkeys! a million monkeys! — has led to

No, no. No, Alex. This is crazy talk. Alex.

But. What if we have been encouraged to achieve all the knowledge needed to master the world? To make it better, and to destroy it.

Perhaps the dawn of that new era is no better symbolized than by the day whose anniversary we celebrate today. We are reminded to of course by a logo of a dawn — with its name terribly etched into the moon! — a logo already foretold by the start of Kubrick’s movie about the birth and life and death of us.

**

And then, in 1998, Google was born to a couple of random Stanford grad students. They liked hot girls, they drank light beer, they wore their shirts tucked into their stained khakis.

The crazy thing: it may have been intentional on the part of G, or may have just been born out of a human mind that has been hurtling, searching, in that direction for an eon, a simple matter of evolution. But the line between the spiritual power of the G and our own unknowing knowledge grew fuzzier. We would never know where it lay of course, and when it was crossed. But it was, or it is.

At any rate, the knowledge we had gained, and gained in part from the G, would now be pooled back, crowd-sourced, migrated, processed and reprocessed into servers, in the form of email, pictures, maps, video, earth, phone calls now, and, of course, at the very base, the most elemental particle, strand, of human knowledge — the boolean search term itself.

One telling irony: that in the interdependent process of searching for and ceding our information to the servers — the servers — we came to depend on them, this superorganizer of information and knowledge, to learn what we already knew. How to get home, for instance, how to cook an egg, someone’s phone number, something we thought.

And the servers? Housed in anonymous, windowless warehouses in hidden locations around the earth, from Cupertino to Cairo, from Ulster to Ulan Baatur, from the outskirts of Atlanta to, in preparation for the flood, yes, a self-sustaining data ark in the Atlantic.

The sum numerical total of the bits of information — a gogolplex — would be outnumbered only by the unknowable power of that information. But “outnumbered” in that case would be a misnomer, just as “God” was.

Thousands of humans would work tirelessly, enthusiastically, directly for the company, their work enshrined and protected and determined by the winsome and ominous motto of Don’t Be Evil. Winsome because no one had thought of that before — save of course the founders of every world religion, the devoted followers of that unknown G in its previous incarnations. And ominous because, well, why would you need such a slogan unless the implication was always evil. Like why would you need to call it Comfort Inn?

And the vanilla name that described that thing that ran it all — that monolith, that server — was so innocuous, so helping, so serving, the way machines have always been envisioned — that we could not bring ourselves to see it for what it was.

Or could we?

One of my favorite X Files episodes (forgive me) is called Kill Switch. It’s nothing new really, but it’s a concise 45 mins, and it’s so slick and well written — by none other than William Gibson. Basically, a computer programmer develops a program that becomes so powerful, so conscious, it manages to house itself and move itself and arrange for all kinds of terrible things on its own. Many of those things it does through the phone.

And yet but somehow all of the sci-fi fantasies of the monstrous forms lying within — an alien life waiting to be awakened (HG Wells) or more recently, a computer system that builds its own consciousness and seeks to destroy and replicate (2001, the Matrix, Terminator, my favorite X-Files episode), or Mary Shelley’s monster — all of these are simply sideshows, distractions. And even if they get us to think at the movies, on television, and now, on youtube, that only lasts for awhile, until we smirk, yeah, right, and click onto the next thing.

But Skynet, the T1000, Kill Switch, Agent Smith, Frankenstein, Hal 9000, God even — they got nothin on the G-unit.

Updates:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html
http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html

References:
http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/technology/personaltech/16pogue-email.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new-york-city.html
(I was just outside the firehouse the other night, searching for my childhood. Also, NYNEX98 was my first AOL screen name, named for that year that I first entered the Internet, the same birth year as, well, you know.)