Joel Liu's personal annotations on this page
Joel bookmarked
on 2005-10-29
-
My
visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th
century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone
was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible
architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there
was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those
books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk.
"We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
This link has been bookmarked by 32 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Joel Liu.
-
-
My
visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th
century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone
was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible
architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there
was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those
books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk.
"We are scanning them to be read by an AI." -
After the visit, Dyson recalled H.G.
Wells'
prophecy, written in 1938:
"The
whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made
accessible to every individual," wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938
prophecy World Brain. "This new all-human cerebrum need not be
concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly
and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else
seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can
have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused
vitality of an amoeba." Wells foresaw not only the distributed
intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this
intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge,
would fall under its domain. "In a universal organization and
clarification of knowledge and ideas... in the evocation, that is,
of what I have here called a World Brain... in that and in that alone,
it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver
for world affairs... We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic
parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious
of itself."
-
-
-
Whether
we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share"
or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together
and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and
ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are. -
Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate
fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is
privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem. - 7 more annotations...
-
-
-
By breaking
the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers
that do things, von Neumann unleashed the power of the stored-program
computer -
In the
early 1950s, when mean time between memory failure was measured in minutes,
no one imagined that a system depending on every bit being in exactly
the right place at exactly the right time could be scaled up by a factor
of 10^13 in size, and down by a factor of 10^6 in time. - 6 more annotations...
-
-
-
What
is Google doing at the Frankfurt Book Fair? And why has a consortium
of publishers filed a lawsuit against them? On the other hand, why do
the "digerati" love Google Print and Google Print Library?
-
-
m cassimatisre google library
-
Mike KossI've met George on several occasions – lectures given at Microsoft or to the MIT Club about one of his books (or books in process - he's currently compiling research about von Neumann). I really like him on a personal level – and I think he and his inter
-
-
TURING'S CATHEDRAL
-
-
-
My
visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th
century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone
was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible
architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there
was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those
books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk.
"We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
-
Page Comments
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.