Google and the World Brain Page #8

But this is a long war.

This is one battle and,

whatever triumph there

might have been for books,

it's going to be short-lived,

because the screen

will ultimately triumph.

They spent several months trying

to negotiate a new settlement,

couldn't reach a new settlement

that was mutually acceptable,

so they're going to

have to go to trial.

'Baidu, China's search engine giant,

has been blamed by Chinese

'writers for participating

in copyright violation.

'This is because the website offers

free online excerpts of stories

'and books without

the authors' prior approval.'

I think very late March

or early April of 2011,

we purged the site of about 2.8

million files that we believed

might be copyright infringing within

a period of 72 hours.

I think a good number of them

were books or chapters of books.

We implemented a rule where no-one

could upload anything of more

than 1,000 Chinese characters without

it being manually inspected

for copyright infringement

or automatically inspected

for copyright infringement.

The problem is then people started

uploading parts of books

in 1,000-character increments

so they would avoid detection.

So there's always people who want

to abuse the system.

The question is,

has Google already been able to make

its search engine better because

of the Google Books corpus and the

scanning of 20 million books?

I think the answer to that is yes.

The question of

whether large Internet

companies are making our lives

easier or gaining power over us,

I think it presents a kind of false

binary because they're doing both.

If they were not

making our lives easier,

no-one would be

using their services.

This is the tricky,

complicated question

that we'll have to face

down the road.

All of them

are making our lives easier.

They're making products cheaper.

They're making our commute less

bothersome and more exciting.

Google will be supplying us with

glasses that will augment reality

and tell us about where

our friends are in the city.

They'll tell us the weather.

They'll tell us everything.

The question is what would

the trade-offs be?

What happens with all

of the information that would pass

through Google Glasses?

Surely it will be stored somewhere.

I'm sure Google will not be

discarding it because they will

need to know what it is

that I've seen yesterday

so that they can customise

what I see today even better.

But then the question is, would the

National Security Agency be able to

go to Google and ask for that data?

Ask for everything I've seen

through my Google Glasses?

And if that would be the case

then the question should be

do we actually want to have a

society where citizens are wearing

CCTV cameras on their heads?

Getting to a better system

where people are rewarded

for their information contribution

to the world, getting to that system

from where we are, where people

are expected to get by with less,

that's going to be a hard

transition.

They might involve government but

they might involve the big companies

and the reason why is the big

companies like Google and Amazon

are shooting themselves in the foot

with what we're doing

because what we're doing is

shrinking the economy. I mean...

My concern is not so much

the direction in which Google,

Facebook for that matter,

want to take the world.

My concern is the fact

that it's Google and Facebook

taking us in that direction.

Our current policy to open up the

library and make it part of this

really very ambitious project, more

ambitious I think than Google's,

which we call the Digital

Public Library of America.

You know, I think that we

owe a great deal to Google.

I can't imagine that this

Digital Public Library of America

would ever have gotten off the

ground had Google not started to

race ahead with its own version of

digitization on this massive scale.

However, you know, Google,

wonderful as it is,

is not familiar with books.

For example, Walt Whitman's famous

book of poems, Leaves Of Grass,

was catalogued under gardening.

We are designing the Digital

Public Library of America

so that it will be perfectly

compatible with Europeana

and that means soon we will have

a worldwide network.

A gigantic world library.

HG Wells' view of science and

technology was what sustained him

and sustained his ideas

throughout his whole life.

He had this sense that, if only

we could get the scientists and the

technologists

working in the right way,

we could transform the world

and he continued with

that belief up until

the absolute final disillusionment

with the entire human world.

It was a book which he called,

so fittingly,

Mind At The End Of Its Tether.

He felt that the whole evolutionary

process that he had been studying

and he felt was leading us

to something new and wonderful,

had failed.

And his last words were that there

was no way out or round or through.

HG WELLS:
Our world of self-delusion

will perish amidst its evasions

and fortuities.

It is like a convoy lost in darkness

along an unknown rocky coast

with quarrelling pirates in the chart

room and savages clambering up

the sides of the ship to plunder and

do evil as the whim may take them.

That is the rough outline of the more

and more jumbled movie

on the screen before us.

There is no way out.

Or round.

Or through.

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