Is Google God?

[Jagat]

Sees all, knows all: Is it God or Google?

 

By STEPHEN STRAUSS

Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - Globe&Mail

 

A few weeks ago The New York Times printed a column with the tingling headline: "Is Google God?" Google is, of course, the Internet search engine, and god is, of course . . . well, what constitutes a deity turned out to be one of the interesting issues of the debate that followed publication.

 

The article quoted a high-tech supremo saying that Google, when linked to a wireless system that allowed you to access the search engine's powers from your laptop or cell phone, "is a little bit like god" because "god is wireless, god is everywhere and god sees and knows everything."

 

Internet skeptics quickly responded that god is also eternal, while Google was founded in 1998; God is omnipresent, and Google is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Others pointed out that within five years, Google might be technologically obsolete. One technophile smirked, "God is, like, in the machine."

 

However, what was most interesting to me was that the Times headline writer had almost off-handedly captured something essential about most people's feelings about Google.

 

The article appeared on June 29. As of yesterday, if you typed the phrase "Is Google God" into the search field, in something less than a second you got 2,200 hits. None, as far as I can tell, contains any pre-New York Times reference to a god-like Google. Moreover, if you entered the phrase "is Google" followed by Christ or Allah or Buddha or Yahweh or Satan or Lucifer, nothing turns up.

 

What is awe-inspiring is that Google instantaneously appears to know everything about a topic that was just born. This capaciousness fills a simple Web searcher with the sense of being in the presence of something that, if it doesn't know everything about everything yet, will some day.

 

Moreover, Google's connective capacities seem divine because they are quite literally beyond the average person's ability to truly understand how they work. As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

And Google does have some attributes that make it very appealing as a deity. The most obvious is that Google answers back when you ask it a question -- in contrast to the problematic nature of prayer, which leaves petitioning humans struggling to figure out whether the unseen has even heard, much less responded.

 

Moreover, if Google's answer is negative or vague, it lets you do an instant "repray." You simply change your search terms and tease a truer (or shorter) answer back.

 

But what I am less sure about is what humans are doing with the god-like technology they created. Last year in Italy, the police shut down five Internet sites that featured pornography and a picture of the Virgin Mary. A British newspaper reported, "Police said they censored the images so that the 'precious freedom of expression' was not used to offend 'the dignity of people.' " French and German browsers have been denied Google access to sites deemed to be racist. The Chinese government for a time blocked Google access entirely. Now Chinese searching for terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in China" are either directed to a government-approved page or have their Google access blocked for a few hours.

 

Such incidents have raised much debate over freedom of speech and civil liberties. Now, in the light of the Times headline, I have been wondering about the issues censorship raises when faced with claimants to divinity.

 

Can you limit a divinity's powers, even those of a completely accidental and imperfect god, simply because you don't approve of the extent of its reach? Put another way, can one justly censor the growth of any technology that threatens to become more than its human creators can comprehend?

 

If the short answer is "I don't know," then the longer one is, "I am waiting to see."

 

My sense is that a truly divine technology will manifest its omnipotence by finding a way not to be limited. It will make itself so miraculously useful that to prevent it from being all it can be will seem not a question of bad public policy but of technological impiety.

 

Maybe, in an actualized Google universe, those who have attempted to limit Google's apogee will be seen as our age's equivalent of pagans. But while awaiting the answer to this larger question, I am still wondering about something the search engine doesn't tell me today. If Google does turn out to be god, pray what was the name of the New York Times copy editor who one blithe day became its first prophet?

 

Stephen Strauss is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.