Google and the World Brain Page #2
the Declaration of Independence
so that everybody
could have access to it.
Thousands of volunteers worked
from all over the world
to go and build this.
He even had the idea
that it ought to be possible
to download the entire library that
he had created if you wanted that.
And I think it did act as a kind
of example of something
that, later on, Google and others
took up in a much bigger,
more extensive way.
My name is Raymond Kurzweil
and I'm from Queens, New York.
'When I was 12, I became fascinated
with pattern recognition.'
And, as a young teenager,
I did a project to teach computers
how to recognise patterns in music.
I've built a computer
and, by feeding it certain
relationships and music,
I was able to write music with it.
Raymond, how old are you? I'm 17.
Do your parents know
what you've been up to?
LAUGHTER:
Recognising printed letters
was a classical unsolved problem
in the field of pattern recognition.
And so, I created the first
omni-font optical character
recognition.
This was about 1975.
1978, we developed
a commercial version.
And we talked about how you could
ultimately scan all books
and all printed material.
'When automobiles came along first,
a rich man's monopoly.
'They cost upward
of a thousand pounds.
'Henry Ford altered all that.
'He put the poor man on the road.
'We want a Henry Ford today
'to modernise the distribution
of knowledge,
'make good knowledge cheap and easy,
'in this still very ignorant,
ill-educated,
'ill-served English-speaking world
of ours,
'which might be the greatest power
on Earth for the good of mankind.'
We started the Internet Archive
in 1996.
The idea was to have all
the published works of humankind
available to everybody,
that this was the opportunity
of our generation,
that...like the previous generation
had put a man on the moon.
completely open with Google.
In fact, I'd gone and given
a speech that was attended
by, I think, all of the senior
executives
on how one could go about
building a digital library
of all books, music, video,
and I'd hoped that there was going
to be a way to work with them,
but that was not to be.
Libraries had signed secret
agreements with Google...
We didn't know what
as a completely separate project,
and not working with others,
then, I started
to become suspicious.
Larry Page,
first proposed that we digitise
when we were a fledgling start-up.
Five years later, in 2004,
Google Books was born.
Despite a number of important
digitisation efforts to date,
none have been at a comparable scale,
simply because no-one else has chosen
to invest the requisite resources.
If Google Books is successful,
others will follow.
I don't think that Google is aware
of the fact that it's a corporation.
of itself as an NGO
that just happens
to make a lot of money.
And they think of themselves
as social reformers
who just happen to have their stock
traded on stock exchanges
and who just happen to have
investors and shareholders,
but they do think of themselves
as ultimately being in the business
There are few more irreparable
property losses
than vanished books.
Nature, politics and war
have always been
the mortal enemies of written works.
Most recently, Hurricane Katrina
dealt a blow
to the libraries of the Gulf Coast.
At Tulane University, the main
library sat in nine feet of water.
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime,
in Cambodia,
decimated cultural institutions
throughout the country.
Khmer Rouge fighters took over
the National Library
throwing the books into the street,
burning them,
while using the stacks as a pigsty.
Now, with Google, the University
of Michigan is involved
in one of the most extensive
preservation projects
in world history.
on a number of dimensions.
What I like about Google Books
is the idea of not losing books,
especially books that might be
genuinely abandoned.
The idea of getting
all that stuff online
is, of course,
going to be a benefit,
so that, we have to love.
I went to Google in January 2003.
I actually made, what now I feel
quite embarrassed about,
I made a presentation to them,
telling them what they ought
to be doing.
Only to find out a few months later
that they'd actually been doing it
for a while already.
Project Ocean was the kind of
code name, development code name,
that Google were giving to what
eventually became Google Books.
So it was called Project Ocean
because it was big, I imagine.
HE CHUCKLES:
Google seemed to think
that they could do
almost a million in three years.
You could say that this mass
digitisation
is something like running
a huge machine through a library.
You take books by the shelf.
They are put in cartons, on carts.
They are loaded onto trucks.
And then, Google at this time
had three places in the country
where it was doing digitisation.
Supposedly, it didn't give
the address of where they were.
Google won't say how much
scanning all the books cost.
But there are estimates that...
well, it's somewhere between
$30 and $100 per book,
so if you multiply that times
20 million...
Google, early on,
bent over backwards to keep us
from communicating
with the other libraries.
There were three or four large ones
and each of us was told
we should not tell the others
what kind of a contract we had
and how we were working with Google.
To begin with, it had
to be kept fairly quiet.
It was probably mid 2003 when
I started to take the wraps off
in terms of this is going
to be a possibility
that we might be working with Google.
operation and it was very impressive.
20 very large work stations
with very high-resolution cameras
sitting on top of a cradle
with very intense lights.
And, underneath, a lot of black
boxes, which, presumably,
contained all of Google's algorithms
that makes Google search what it is.
And they uploaded that stuff
straight to Mountain View,
straight from Oxford.
Google certainly depends on knowing
more and more and more
for their algorithm to be better
and better and better.
And this is the core of the way
economics in this space now works.
They had a specific interest
in having lots of things in Google
that would lead people to use Google
so they could make money
by having advertisements there.
What are books?
They are full of data
and so, the more data you have,
the more you can fine-tune
your search technologies.
Some of the enthusiasts for Google's
way of gathering data,
and it's not just Google at all,
I mean,
it's Silicon Valley in general.
It's the current cultural moment
and includes the other
Silicon Valley companies,
Translation
Translate and read this script in other languages:
Select another language:
- - Select -
- 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
- 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto (Esperanto)
- 日本語 (Japanese)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Deutsch (German)
- العربية (Arabic)
- Français (French)
- Русский (Russian)
- ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
- 한국어 (Korean)
- עברית (Hebrew)
- Gaeilge (Irish)
- Українська (Ukrainian)
- اردو (Urdu)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
- Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Italiano (Italian)
- தமிழ் (Tamil)
- Türkçe (Turkish)
- తెలుగు (Telugu)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
- Čeština (Czech)
- Polski (Polish)
- Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Românește (Romanian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Ελληνικά (Greek)
- Latinum (Latin)
- Svenska (Swedish)
- Dansk (Danish)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- فارسی (Persian)
- ייִדיש (Yiddish)
- հայերեն (Armenian)
- Norsk (Norwegian)
- English (English)
Citation
Use the citation below to add this screenplay to your bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"Google and the World Brain" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 24 Nov. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/google_and_the_world_brain_9221>.
Discuss this script with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In