Google, the ultimate big brother?

Today's analysis of BBC is on Google and its latest development. I have heard it three times so far. First time I heard of it passively, and I didn't pay too much attention to it. When it came back second time, I listened to it half-heartedly with other works in hand. Then, in its third repetition, I caught the sentence that Google would finally make pc disappear and everything would be on the Internet.

It is this bold prediction that suddenly reminds me of the Big Brother. According to the analysis, Google is using a very sophisticated technology to mine data, making sense of a user's habit and delivering real customer based advertisement. I just started to use Google Reader several days ago, to consolidate information that I generally would obtain from different websites. Some web pages are interesting enough that I'd like to save them as bookmarks. Both Google and Yahoo provide such a function, but Google adds several buttons with which I can write a note and share with other on my shared list page. It's so handy that I immediately fall into it.

The most interesting aspect is that Google performs a kind proxy role. Once you create your own reader, your productivity is immediately enhanced. All of a sudden, all the information you need are consolidated in one page in the form of HTML. The only negative feeling that such a self-created page is that its content probably seems too much to read one by one. But then, you have 'mark all as read' button. If you are not in the mood to read anything, and don't want to accumulate reading stuff, simple mark them all as read.

This feature is very convenient to an end-user like me, but it also means that the web sites I have lumped into my reader is exposed to Google as well. It can do some analysis, and deliver advertisement specifically catering for my need. The day after I created my reader, Google delivered some media sites under the most recommended sector. It must have found that all inputs I have consolidated in my reader are from different newspapers and magazines.

I guess I'm just one of millions of thousands end users of Google, that our reading habits and tastes, no matter how trivial it seems to be individually, means something for a real global company. Its sheer size, and details it can reach, are truely unprecedented. Now with the launch of its new web browser Chrome, Google's world will be expanded further. The fact that nobody knows how large this virtual world has become is itself a bit frightening.

The co-existence of machine-human brain has caused a lot of concerns. Last month, the Atlantic published an interesting cover story, posing the question 'Is google making us stupid?'. Nicholas Carr points out in that story that losing focus, lack of deep reading and thinking, and becoming a passive information receiver instead of a critical thinker, all these syndromes are not uncommon now among Google users. Some scholars have raised their concerns about the tendency that the point-and-click culture of Internet is damaging people's intelligence and the civil culture.

This probably is the price one has to pay for the increase of productivity. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of the scientific management, once anticipated 'a utopia of perfect efficiency', that which the system is the first and man the second. Google seems to be steadily approaching to this aim, systematizing everything, including our mind. The gruesome picture is someday, every user's mind is uploaded to the system, so it becomes a supernatural gigantic brain, or a matrix.

Actually, in its founders' vision, Google will be building artificial intelligence on a global scale. Larry Page, one of two founders of Google once said, 'the ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter', that 'working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.' Another founder Sergey Brin said in a 2004 interview with Newsweek, 'Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.'

Nicholas Carr is quite skeptical about such a prospect, worrying that all of us would turn into a kind of 'pancake people' - 'spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.'

Highly possible, I should say, but if, and only if we have lost our sense of real world, including the care of our inner nature. The problem, if there is any regarding its promotion of efficiency in handling information, is not from Google itself, but from ourselves. Have you become a prey of a powerful computer system?