Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us? 346
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?'"
George Dyson (Score:4, Informative)
Yes.. it *is* that George Dyson.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/george_dyson.html [ted.com]
Freeman Dyson's son. Both the TED talks he's given are awesome.
Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness (Score:5, Informative)
Turn in your geek card!
It was Trinity that downloaded the program to fly the helicopter, not Neo.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2, Informative)
This is the best comment I've read on Slashdot in a long time...
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
Google is searching us... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Another reason for not using Google (Score:3, Informative)
There was an article here on slashdot the other day about cuil, and the verdict was: Epic Fail, not even a contender.
Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness (Score:1, Informative)
It was Tank that uploaded the program to Trinity to fly the helicopter ...
There. Fixed that for you.
Re:This is slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
I read it. (sorry, I know it breaks SOP)
It didn't make me ask the same question as the author. Maybe I've read too much cyberpunk in the last year and it has jaded me. Either way, it was an interesting story. Not great, but interesting.
Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness (Score:4, Informative)
There is a good technical reason why this is done (Score:4, Informative)
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.