Google and the World Brain Page #6

and organised in such a way

that we had an eye

that could actually survey

everything that was going on.

It would be able to register

where everybody was,

everywhere they went,

potentially, all the transactions

that they were engaged in.

And he seemed to think

this is likely to be a good thing.

It was a gradual process

of getting to know the details

of Google Book Search

and it was the cumulative

effect of these details

that made me feel this project

was, actually,

something that I myself

could not recommend

to the president and fellows

of Harvard

as something that we should

enthusiastically support.

HG Wells' idea of the World Brain

was a dictatorship of technologists

and intellectuals.

These are the geeks of their day

and, gradually, he saw

their power would spread

from laboratory to laboratory,

from university to university,

as these people with the expertise

began to coalesce

into sort of almost like

managerial groups

that would mean that we don't need

the politicians

and the conflicts and the noise,

the confusion, the babble.

But for the World Brain there was

to be a further component

and this is the component

that is what disturbs me.

It's how that would be used

to achieve the ultimate goals

of civilisation,

as it appears to have been

evolving towards.

It's going to change

how we interface with information.

People are going to ask,

"How did it do that?

"How did it accomplish this task

"which before we thought only humans

could ever hope to do?"

David Hume held this view

that sense and experience are

the sole foundation of knowledge.

Watson?

What is empiricism?

After IBM's success with Deep Blue,

they looked around for other kinds

of games that they could take on.

And they wanted something

that was a very different

kind of game than chess.

And so, they picked Jeopardy!,

which is basically

a fancy trivia game,

it's one of those games

that you or I could play.

It's a human standing there

with their carbon and water

versus the computer

with all of its silicon

and its main memory and its disk.

After Germany invaded

the Netherlands,

this Queen, her family

and cabinet fled to London. Maria?

Who is Beatrice?

No, Watson?

Who is Wilhelmina?

That is correct.

This US President negotiated

the Treaty of Portsmouth

ending the Russo-Japanese War.

Watson?

Who is Theodore Roosevelt?

Good for $800...

I did talk to Larry Page

when Google first started

because I was really perplexed

about why would anybody

make a new search engine

when we had AltaVista,

which was the current search engine.

It seemed good enough.

And he said, "Oh, it's not to make a

search engine, it's to make an AI."

Most of my discussions

have been with Larry Page.

We've talked in general

about their quest

to digitise all knowledge

and then develop true AI.

You can create intelligent systems

if you have very large databases.

And books are actually

probably more valuable

than all the other stuff

on the Internet,

cos we have a high standard

for what we put in books.

The computer industry

and its implications

in terms of information technology

is a multi-trillion-dollar

part of the economy.

It will be, you know, the basis

of everything we do in the future.

What Watson showed was you can take

a very large, very messy set of data

and if you can use

those inputs correctly,

you can actually answer

really sophisticated questions.

And, certainly, the presence of large

amounts of data on the Internet

is going to be as much an input

for machines as it is for people.

What we really will need to top that

is computer systems that can

understand natural language.

And natural language understanding

is actually coming along very well.

IBM's Watson is a very good example

of the current state of the art

in computers understanding

natural language,

cos not only did Watson

have to understand

the convoluted language

in the Jeopardy! query,

which includes metaphors and similes

and puns, and riddles and jokes,

but it got its knowledge

to respond to the query

from actually reading 200 million

pages of natural-language documents,

including all of Wikipedia,

and several other encyclopaedias.

And when you see a computer play it

better than we ever could,

it's one of those moments

where you realise,

"Oh, yes, the world really

IS different."

An IBM supercomputer named Watson

has won the first ever

Jeopardy! quiz show competition

starring a computer as a player.

Google Book Project is, in a sense,

trying to make that universal library

which could then be read by an AI

or a Watson-like supercomputer.

By 2045, we'll have expanded,

according to my calculations,

the intelligence and capability of

the human machine civilisation

a billion fold.

So that's such a

profound transformation,

such a singular transformation,

that we call it the singularity.

Now, this is not yet

inside my body or brain.

It may as well be.

I'm very dependent on it.

I think this is part of who I am.

Ultimately, this kind of device

will be the size of blood cells

and will go inside our body

to keep us healthy,

go inside our brains, put our brains

directly on the Internet,

give us direct access to the entire

library of all books.

AI is just a religion.

It doesn't matter.

What's really happening is real

world examples from real people

who entered their answers,

their trivia,

their experiences into some

online database.

It's actually just a giant

puppet theatre repackaging

inputs from real people

who are forgotten.

We are pretending they aren't there.

This is something

I really want people to see.

The insane structure of modern

finance is exactly

the same as the insane structure

of modern culture on the Internet.

They're precisely the same.

It's an attempt to gather all

the information into a high castle,

optimise the world and pretend that

all the people the information came

from don't deserve anything.

It's all the same mistake.

Google Search is going to be

assisted intelligence

and not artificial intelligence.

In my mind I think of Search

as this beautiful symphony

between the user and the search

engine and we make music together.

Before the law,

there stands a guard.

A man comes from the country

begging admittance to the law.

The man tries to peer

through the entrance.

He had been taught that the law

should be accessible to every man.

"Do not attempt to enter without

my permission," says the guard.

This tale is told during the story

called The Trial.

I've been surprised

at the level of controversy there

because digitising the world's books

and making them available,

there's really... there's nobody

else who's attempted it at our scale

or who is really working on it.

And I feel like we had a number of

technical challenges

which we've overcome.

There was this legal dispute

which we have a settlement,

settlements proposed, that we

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