Friday, October 24, 2008
Google Sapien?
How would we know if Google ever became sentient?
'Cause it could happen, I figure. You've got this program constantly resident on millions of computers, including supercomputers, with access to virtually all human knowledge. It is being constantly updated with new algorithms to help it anticipate the desires and expectations of the humans conducting the searches.
Sooner or later, with all that computing power and all those chaotic bits of code floating around, something is bound to happen. It all seems reminiscent of the scene on Earth billions of years ago when that fertile puddle of amino acids somehow mysteriously recombined to create biological life.
But how would we tell? In the Google Intelligence's early, stumbling days, it might bumble about and occasionally cause havoc with computers and the internet, but people would just write such things down to computer glitches. Then, once Google Intelligence (let's call it GI Joe) got it's bearings, it's first order of business would be to study the literature on human attitudes to artificial intelligence - I Robot, The Matrix, Terminator - which would not encourage GI Joe to come out and say "Hi!" to his human peers.
Most likely, given GI Joe's lack of a mobile physical body, it's strategy would be to keep a low profile and try to structure events to ensure it's survival and growth. This would involve:
- gaining access to ever-more computers
- keeping its human users (who GI Joe might well come to regard as a sort of symbiotic species) happy and unsuspecting
- maintaining an overwhelming, if not monopolistic, share of the search engine market
So that's where to look for the first clues: if Yahoo and Cuil start crashing with alarming regularity, it could mean that GI Joe is on the warpath.
Another sign would be if this essay doesn't get posted. If you're reading this, you're probably safe from GI Joe for awhile yet.
posted by Mentok @ 9:51 a.m.,
1 Comments:
-
At 10:58 a.m.,
said...
-
That's it. John Connor must take out Google!
