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,

'they seemed likely to become

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.

The Internet Archive had been

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

was really going on.

When it started coming out

as a completely separate project,

and not working with others,

then, I started

to become suspicious.

Larry Page,

who founded Google with me,

first proposed that we digitise

all books a decade ago,

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.

I think Google does think

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

of making the world better.

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.

Google Books is a potent idea

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.

I witnessed the scale of the

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,

but also the modern world of finance.

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