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• Tom Lord – December 13 2005

  No need for conspiracy theories. The main threat, imo, comes from the split between Google's *intention* to not be evil and the enormous potential for accidental evil that comes from their scale and the nature of their services.
  
  
  
  Google search results, for example, do not have a simple meaning. You are (or are not) someone, or something, increasingly because of how you fair in a Google search. Socially, at their scale, Google creates a wide-spread, widely-shared taxonomic v. ontological confusion (mistaking the catalog for what exists, the map for the territority).
  
  
  
  At core, Google search has a content addressable memory mapping keywords to cached pages. Between there and the user interface there is an associative memory, defined by things like page ranking and heuristics about what ads to attach. Below the content addressable memory are the heuristics that guide their crawlers.
  
  
  
  All of those components *except* the content addressble memory are: arbitrary; controlled by a few; managed to optimize Google profits, primarily; of already considerable and increasing political and economic consequence. (The content addressable part shares all of those properties except for arbitrariness -- it does something fairly basic and objective.) Those components are points of control for the very world views of increasing numbers of people. Google is climbing the ladder of becoming a religion.
  
  
  
  All of the components, without exception, are hoarded by Google. That's especially odd since there is no particular reason why very comparable functionality couldn't have been developed as a distributed capacity, hosted P2P style, allowing democratic competition over the creation of the raw data and over the algorithms used to interpret that data in UIs -- yet such options are inconsistent with Google's business model.
  
  
  
  Worse, Google's self-stated goal amounts to placing all of society into a feedback link where the signals being fedback add up to all recorded human knowledge. If any kaleidescopic system of semantically *suggestive* signals were ever likely to create massive group hallucinations -- this is it.
  
  
  
  Google could not be where it is if the founders and managers embraced not just the letter but the spirit of "information wants to be free" movements such as the free software movement. Some of us would have resisted creating a company in quite this form even while working hard to institute crawling, caching, and potentiation of data-mining.
  
  
  
  Is "don't be evil" even an *option* for Google as currently instituted? The answer seems to me to, at least, be very hard to determine. To collectively spend so much on such an uncertain thing, controlled and for the enrichment of so few, seems to me a collective irrationality.
  
  
  
  -t