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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

August 2003

This Week:

IS GOOGLE A GOD?

Imagine describing Google to someone 50 years ago. No matter where you go, you're never out of its reach. You can ask it anything, anytime, and it will be there. That sounds like science fiction, the person might say. Or, it sounds a little like God.

The Internet is arguably the first non-deity in human history to be ascribed with ubiquitous sentience. Its reach is already worldwide, but with the emergence of wireless technology, or Wi-Fi, it seems even more widespread. "Using radio technology, Wi-Fi will provide high-speed connection from your laptop computer or [palm pilot] to the Internet from anywhere—McDonald's, the beach or your library," wrote Thomas Friedman in the New York Times earlier this summer." You can learn the average annual rainfall in Myanmar from a coffee shop in Topeka, or check last night's baseball scores from Siberia.

This omnipresent and omniscient entity has people saying some religious things, as Friedman noted. He quoted a Wi-Fi developer who told him: "Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

Friedman's point—striking the theme of most of his columns—was merely that Google is another way the world is getting more connected (only one-third of 200 million daily queries to Google come from the U.S., he reported) and thus worrisome for an empire with enemies. But by putting in that quote—and with an editor titling the column "Is Google God?"—readers and bloggers starting thinking about theology.

The first few blogged responses I found seemed more worried about overhyping Google than underrating God. "Google just a tool," wrote one. "Google does NOT know what you want. You …. 'help' Google to find what you want." A better question than "Is Google God?", wrote another, is: "Is Google wise?" The blogger observes that "the wisdom of the answer depends on the wisdom of the question."

Another blogger set up this chart to compare Google and God. God is omnipresent; Google is housed in California. God is eternal, while Google was founded in 1998. And so forth. (One respondent was not impressed by the discrepancies, and wrote: "I say Google is as good a god as any!")

The most useful response I found was from blogger Satya Prabhakar. "The answer to Friedman's question ['Is Google God'?] is rather simple: No. Because Google knows but doesn't understand. … Google's ability of metareasoning is limited to one level and it cannot by itself metareason about its metareasoning." Prabhakar goes on to praise "/freedom of exploration" and "recursive self-reflection" as the route to wisdom. That's a whole other weblog, but the point about the difference between information and understanding is important. "Knowledge about is merely the accumulation of mediated information, whereas knowledge of includes intimate understanding, seasoned judgment, and active participation," writes Quentin Schultze in Habits of the High-Tech Heart (which I've written about here and here). Schultze points out that the Hebrew word for intimacy (yedia or yedah) means "knowledge," (as in, "Adam knew Eve"). That's a nuance that has long been lost, and seems even more remote in the Information Age. I wrote last week that the Internet can't know something the way you do when you say you "know it in my heart." The consummate hope of Christianity, Paul says, is "to know fully, even as I am fully known." To know fully does not mean to have Myanmar's annual rainfall handy. And it is impossible to be fully known by Google. Hype to the contrary illustrates that the Internet can bring about knowledge and folly at the same time.

  1. Last week's weblog compared Google with a brain and pondered artificial intelligence. Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay The Singularity, an influential treatise on computers and artificial intelligence, is an interesting read on its tenth anniversary.
  2. Friedman's column on Google
  3. Google and ethics: making moral judgments in search listings, from Wired
  4. The politics of Google's Page Rank, from Salon
  5. A watchdog of Google's methods: Google-watch.org

SPOT CHECK

The Internet is an instrument of isolation, reducing real interaction among people and spreading solitude. But the way television tells it, the Internet makes everyone hold hands and sing. It can even pinch hit for a romantic lover. Two recent spots spread the myth of Internet intimacy. In one, for Yahoo's new DSL service, a man sits at his computer and installs his new DSL software. As the technology serves up sports highlights and movie trailers, he starts to fall in love with it. Literally: the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" starts to play, the lights dim, a fire flares up in the fireplace behind him. If I saw right, he actually caresses the top of the monitor. Whether the man would be better off going about this routine with a woman rather than a plastic box is left unexplored. In a spot for eBay called "Traffic Jam," which rips off Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way" (now it's "Do it Ebay"), a woman rejoices over selling something online. She bursts out of her RV, which is stranded in traffic on the freeway, and is suddenly surrounded by backup dancers from other cars. In truth, if we spent less time on the Internet and freeways, we would have more time and opportunity for actual human contact, for romance and public gathering (not to deny that e-mail can foster some connections, as Andrew Sullivan describes below). Instead, TV says, these two marks of "progress" chase away our loneliness rather than making it worse.

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

HOUSTON — Developers here are tearing down perfectly good buildings or acquiring empty lots to make room for what look like century-old factories. Inside are loft-style apartments that try to mimic the faded mystique of Manhattan neighborhoods like SoHo or TriBeCa. The trend is taking root in several cities without much of a loft tradition, including Las Vegas, Atlanta and Washington. But its most active and creative proponents are here in Houston … The lofts in the Manhattan building have their own evocative names, like the Met, Brooklyn and Times Square. … They come with features like terraces and whirlpool tubs and have buildingwide amenities like a concierge, resort-style pool and wine cellar. Summary*

The Titanic, assailed by rust as well as by hundreds of explorers and moviemakers, salvors and tourists …. is rapidly falling apart. The world's most famous shipwreck … has the weakest of legal protections to fend off humans who are loving it to death, and no protections at all against rust, corrosive salts and microbes on the hulk. Divers who have visited the Titanic in the past decade report that its disintegration is accelerating. The crow's nest, where a lookout warned, "Iceberg right ahead!" has vanished. The forward mast has crumpled. The captain's cabin, where he was resting when the ship struck the iceberg, has collapsed, as has the poop deck where passengers gathered as the liner sank. Summary*

DIGEST

For links with an * you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"

• "All America's friends in Baghdad say the same thing," reports Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. "I love your ideas, but my daily life—salary, electricity, security—is worse since you came, not better." No sooner is he awed by the ideals of the new Baghdad police mission statement—including such revolutionary words as "rights," "laws," and "/freedom"—than Friedman looks into the barrel of an AK-47 wielded by masked robbers on a main Iraqi highway. Reporting the incident to an elusive U.S. patrol, he is told, "We just don't have enough people." What may be worse, there aren't enough troops to protect the country's electricity lines, for which American readers on the East Coast and Midwest have a new appreciation. Friedman concludes: "We have planted many good ideas and programs here, but the ideas will not be heard and the programs will not flower without more money to create jobs, more troops to protect the electricity and more time to train Iraqis so U.S. troops can get off the streets." Full story Although I was skeptical of the necessity of invading Iraq, I was equally hesitant to buy the media's storyline of postwar chaos. It just seemed too convenient. Columnist James Lileks predicted we would hear of "Setbacks and Troubling Developments and Roadblocks to Peace and the rest of the vocabulary the media deploys when a brutalized nation is freed … and does not immediately assume the characteristics of a Nebraska small-town school board." By now, though, I fear we have repeated the pattern we continued in Afghanistan: go in with guns blazing but no clear idea of how to restore a broken nation, and only a half-hearted commitment to try. 

• Nor is help on the way on the domestic front, where states are said to face their "most dire fiscal situation since World War II." U.S. governors, all but two of whom are running deficits, bemoan Washington's failure to bail them out. What they fail to realize, says Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic, is that federal funds come from taxpayers, the same ones who live in their states. Governors have always tried the nifty trick of blaming big spenders in Washington while relying federal handouts to stay afloat—as much as one fifth of state revenue comes from federal grants for education and infrastructure. Rather than slashing state taxes and calling on Washington to bail them out, as governors have been doing lately, Easterbrook says, it would make more honest to cut federal taxes and raise state and local ones. Full story*

• "Headlines seem distant in the daily press. They are personal in the blogs," writes syndicated columnist Terry Mattingly. He talks to uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and homosexual, about his emotional blogging in the wake of the Pope's pronouncement against gay marriage. "It's hard to describe the agony gay Catholics are now in," Sullivan wrote in his blog. "Many powerful Christians still don't think of the homosexual person as fully human." Preparing to take a month off to pray and ponder leaving the Catholic Church, which is "in my bones and in my soul," Sullivan said he spent hours reading the e-mails of fellow gay Catholics and other supporters. "So much extraordinary support, compassion, intellect, encouragement. Sometimes, this blog feels like a family. I'm awed and buoyed." Full story

• Are too many trees to blame for forest fires? Congress has been debating the question as it relates to forest fires out west. Preemptively "thinning" dead and smaller timber from forests to make room for growth and wildlife among larger trees can help reduce the intensity of forest fires when they start. Too much density may be to blame for how hot it got last year, one of the worst on record, when 7 million acres burned. But environmentalists read "thinning" as "logging," and variations in climate and elevation make it hard to develop a consistent science of thinning. Full story

• Miscellaneous:Magnetic Poetry turns ten—Iceland whaling condemned—World's most endangered tribes announced

Nathan Biermais editorial assistant atBooks & Culture.

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