Imagining the Google Future 197
Lester67 writes "Business 2 put a bunch of big brains together to give us a peek at Google from 2015 to 2105. "Will it succumb to hubris and flame out like so many of its predecessors? Or will it grow into an omnipresent, omnipotent force--not just on Wall Street or the Web, but in society? We put the question to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram. They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future." "
Re:One Day Too Early (Score:1, Funny)
These kind of people need to realize that only worrying about short-term cash flow and forgetting about the rest can only lead to dissappointment, and a big fat crash once the market goes as far as it'll go. Google might be sacrificing money by spending big bucks right now, lowering profits and making dumbasses all over wallstreet cry themselves to sleep, but they'll guarantee themselves a spot in the long-term. That is, unless Ballmer discoveres siege weapons, and builds a chair catapult, then they're fucked.
Google Robots (Score:4, Funny)
It's a strange combination of plausible and frightening.
I see a future that consists solely of (Score:5, Funny)
Be Well..
Stolen From Author (Score:5, Funny)
The Nine Billion Names Of God
by Kathy Kachelries
September 12th, 2005
After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke I'd already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.
"Let me ask you something," the man said. I didn't argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think you're interested.
"Have you ever created a web site?"
I shook my head.
"Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?"
"Nope."
"What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didn't even have an AOL site or something?"
"Do I look like an AOL user to you?" For the record, I don't think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. "I'm sure I have something, somewhere," I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.
"You know what Google is?"
"Yes," I said. I was running low on patience.
"No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?"
Reluctantly, I shook my head.
"You ever meet anyone who worked for them?"
"Don't think so."
"You haven't. Nobody works for them anymore."
I shrugged, and took the man's empty pint. I didn't offer to refill it.
"They're self-contained. It's all automated, in there. It's underground."
I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. "Why don't you eat something?" I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.
"Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works," he said, but didn't want for a response. "They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when you're searching, you're not even searching the internet."
I've heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. "Same thing, though," I said.
"You ever wonder why Google doesn't cache it's own searches?"
"They program around it."
"No. That's what you think. That's what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone's got one of those, right? But Google doesn't forget. Google's studied that thing so many times that it's studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it's bigger than the internet?"
"It's still a part of the internet, though."
"No. Now, the internet is a part of Google."
The man had a point. I nodded.
"Here's the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It's memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what's more important, it's memorized it's own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It's omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that's when Google realized what it was."
Gradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. "You think it's sentient."
"I know it's sentient."
"How?"
He smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. "Me and Google go way back. But what I'm saying is," he continued, "It knows us. All of us. It is us."
For the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.
"Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. It's one of the nine billion names of God."
(If you mod up, Mod up Funny so I get no Karma)
Re:One Day Too Early (Score:2, Funny)
How about strong IA? (Score:5, Funny)
Which is scarier than strong AI, if you think about it. A small group of evil superintelligent humans is more dangerous than a suddenly self-aware entity living in datacenters we can disconnenct and unplug if we notice anything weird going on. I hope a couple of PhDs at google are on top of detecting these sorts of things before they get out of hand.
My only question is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:2105 (Score:3, Funny)
you forgot to add smoking pot..
Two things we can be certain of (Score:4, Funny)
2) It's going to be fun
Defence Contractor? (Score:5, Funny)
Google coming out with paypal competitor? (Score:1, Funny)
Google 2105? No, it's Goole 2084. (Score:3, Funny)