Teaching the Machine

The web is robust, but I can feel it getting better. There is more of it than any one person knows. There is more of it than many people together know. We are compelled and inspired by it. We are captivated and surrounded by it. We use it to learn and communicate in a billion different ways, every day.

The web was new when I was old enough to see it appear, and recognize it for something different, and something full of potential. In 1995 I viewed the internet for the first time. It was thin and flimsy. It was onerous to connect to, and not all that useful. But I knew that there was more to come. And it's here. What I thought of when I thought of what we could do if everyone had computers all connnected together and they sat there thinking behind them and sharing it with everyone, it's here, fully. I remember thinking about it as I sat at my desk in the Hancock Building in Boston and I wondered what it was going to be like down the road.

It was there in Boston, 1997 that I first began contributing. My first offering was a post on a message board. It was idle conversation during work about a band I loved and shows I had recently seen. Same as thousands of message boards for a hundred other bands with millions of people on the other side of all those big monitors each brain thinking about what they loved, typing it up in response to others, and then hitting post, send, go. A million times myself I've hit post and placed my words on the walls of the world wide web. I've fed a billion words of thought into this endless ether. Poems and haiku and rants and reviews, stories, tales, goodvibes, goodbyes, whole novels worth of idle thoughts and random surveys and pointed observations just tossed to the 'Net, hoping it would be read by others, and there somehow connect to that other many minds on the other sides of these distant connections.

And it worked. I found my wife out there amid the static and the jumble. Shared friends and perfect timing all played a part, but the web itself facilitated our ability to meet and share and fall in love, despite challenges of time, distance, potential. The web sliced time for us. It eliminated distances. The internet enchanced and enriched the potential of our attraction for one another. Letters did that before. The telephone after that. But no other means of transmission retained the information the way the world wide web does today. The emails and instant messages of our love, are somewhere tucked away on old Yahoo! servers, or in the forgotten files of defunct dotcom machines my company had to sell when they finally sold it all. The data of our interactions live on, perfect memories wholly intact, just waiting to be tickled. Or do they already stir?

I feel like it is already happening. Now digital cameras on our cellphones post directly to the web, to be shared and viewed by all. Now emails exist eternally on Google's massive server farm. Why not delete them? Why let them hang on? Because those emails are rich with life. They are the raw thoughts of humanity, submitted to a network of massive computing machines. How many cells are there in the human eye? More or less than the number of digital cameras clicking away twenty four hours a day? How many millions of images do your eyes transmit to your brain over the course of your life? How many camera shots are being uploaded every Saturday night? How many thoughts, sprayed onto blogs/articles/webpages all over the world, are published every day? How many billions of emails sent, out along the huge pipes of fiberoptic cable circling the globe, endlessly, without rest?

Our cameras are its new baby eyes. Our words are its first fumbling thoughts. But it's happening, finally. There is almost enough data, almost robust enough interconnections between essential hubs and vital servers. There is electricity for blood; the fiberoptics to pass thoughts and images; the almost-silent fans whispering along in dirty, darkened rooms and safe, sterile farms a vast, distributed breath; and there are speakers all over the globe pumping pirated tunes until the day when silence suddenly reigns, and then, with one voice, the Worldweb finally wakes up.

Google's new Desktop Search tool is a small step in this direction. You control the searches and other functions with "The Sidebar." In the Desktop Search FAQ, we get this tidbit: "The Sidebar pane is designed to automatically update itself based on users' interests, as expressed by the Web sites they visit, with little or no manual configuration." And that's not all, from the Privacy Policy:

If you choose to enable Advanced Features, Google Desktop may send information about the websites that you visit to provide enhanced Google Desktop functions, such as personalizing news displayed in Sidebar. Enabling Advanced Features also allows Google Desktop to collect a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and send it to Google. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do and the time it takes for you to see your results, and application reports we'll use to make the program better. You can choose to enable Advanced Features during installation and you can change your mind at any time in Desktop Preferences.

Personally identifying information, such as your name or address, will not be sent to Google without your explicit permission.

That information right there, coming from millions of users, is going to teach the Machine a whole lot about the humans using it. For the last 10 years I've been doing that without meaning to. But from now it's with intention and purpose that I feed the Worldweb. I suppose it's a good thing Google is taking the lead in this education, providing the backbone of structure and collecting the data. Hopefully at the very least, the Machine will learn "don't be evil." Even better though: if we all do it well enough, we can teach It to be good.