The best April Fool’s jokes are at once unbelievable yet plausible.
At 11:59 p.m. on March 31, Google announced its release of CADIE, the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, an artificial intelligence whose icon is a cartoon image of a blushing panda.
With CADIE at the helm, Google’s many departments announced a slew of robotically enhanced products, including AutoPilot (to “automatically manage your inbox better than you can, with zero effort from you”), Brain Search (which “uses CADIE technology to index your brain to make your thoughts and memories searchable”), and gBall (a ball with “the ability to measure kicks, get kicking tips, notify talent scouts and locate your lost ball on Google Maps”).
Does this sound unbelievable? Yes.
But implausible?
Not from Google, the international corporation that offers a 360-view of every street corner in America, satellite images of land and sea, a searchable database of nearly every book published, YouTube, and the world’s predominant gateway to the Web.
Google has become so inescapable that “to google” is a verb in most dictionaries. Many students have no memory of a time before Google — a mere research project of Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 — and its growing list of subsidiaries. The years Before Google (B.G.) had libraries with index-card catalogs, phonebooks with yellow and white pages, road maps with keys and legends, and television reruns with limited viewing schedules.
Certainly, the value of Google’s modern convenience is undeniable.
But what is the cost?
In a report released in 2007 by Privacy International, a global non-governmental organization, Google received the lowest possible score in protecting its users’ privacy. The organization said Google had won a “race to the bottom — in corporate surveillance of customers” against 22 other companies, including AOL, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, eBay, and Wikipedia.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, says that Google takes user privacy seriously. (Photo courtesy of www.mattcutts.com) “I have to be honest with you — it made me mad,” wrote Google’s head of Webspam team, Matt Cutts, responding to the report in his blog. “Google as a company takes privacy very seriously.”
Unlike its rivals, in 2006 Google fought to protect privacy by resisting a subpoena issued by the U.S. Justice Department demanding search data that would help restrict child access to pornography.
“Google’s acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services,” Google wrote in a letter to the Justice Department. “This is not a perception Google can accept.”
Yet earlier that year, Google accepted demands from the Chinese government and restricted access to keywords like
“human rights” and “democracy” on Google China.
Google’s level of cooperation with our government is different; the satellite technology that makes Google Earth
possible was purchased from the CIA.
Google’s role as the gatekeeper of all digital information is disconcerting. A study led by the University of Graz in Austria concluded that 61 billion Internet searches were conducted each month in 2007. The study found that an average of 57 percent of U.S. searches are done through Google, and up to 95 percent of Internet users use Google sometimes.
“Google has become the main interface of our reality,” the authors of the study noted.
“Where will [this] lead?” asked Google co-founder Brin, in an interview with Playboy in 2004. “Who knows?”
Currently, Google is in talks to buy the social networking site Twitter. Twitter’s cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, sold their site, Blogger, to Google five years ago.
“But it’s credible,” Brin told Playboy, “to imagine a leap as great as that from hunting through library stacks to a Google session, when we leap from today’s search engines to having the entirety of the world’s information as just one of our thoughts.”
It would be just as credible to have one’s thoughts within the entirety of the world’s information.
“We are not currently planning on conquering the world,” Brin joked at Google’s second annual Analyst Day in 2006.
Needless to say, the best punch lines need time for setup.
For more information, google it.
