[wordup] William Gibson - Google's Earth

[Adam Shand]

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html

August 31, 2010
Google’s Earth
By WILLIAM GIBSON
Vancouver, British Columbia

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their
questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in
a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them
what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us
what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some
rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined
computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space
Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently
reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a
genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned.
Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing
tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we
chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google
is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to
boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it
before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would
all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own
private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more
transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes
everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone
accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame
Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid
content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for
Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of
us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still
we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to
do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations,
Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the
movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine,
we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We
imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite
of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation
in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically
driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually
scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future,
increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited
periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now
cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the
physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not
only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the
sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires
and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had
their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single
multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in
discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t
really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down
from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google,
we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the
surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously
participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national
super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on
profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in
Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another
comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose
their private lives via social networking sites might need to be
granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This,
interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where
they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can,
while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company
should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth,
terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to
connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not.
Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give
birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively
retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great
many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the
prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual
witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly,
appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in
the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link
one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search
engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually
could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to
have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and
proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever
more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater
extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”

-- 
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." -- Emma Goldman