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55 Ways to Have Fun With Google
The Google Store’s “classic infant rib hat.” (For $5.95.)
The Google Infoglobe from the Google Store. Google claims this blue-glow item is a
mixture of message center, alarm clock, and phone accessory, and you can create
custom LED messages, too.
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41. Fun Google Gadgets
Ladies and gentlemen, Phillip Torrone’s Search Engine Belt Buckle. It flashes
queries people are currently searching for online.
This is the Google Store’s “Google goo.” ‘Nuff said.
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The Google key chain handed out at a 2004 conference. (Courtesy of Luc van
Braekel.)
The Google books you can see here are Google Hacks (Tara Calishain & Rael
Dornfest), Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money (Bart
Milner), The Search (John Battelle), and Mining Google Web Services (John Paul
Mueller).
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41. Fun Google Gadgets
The ultimate Google gadget is this screen from the Googleplex visitor lobby showing
live search queries. (Photo courtesy of Yoz. Released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.)
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction
Interlude
Jake Found His Mother
Jake was the most curious fellow on earth. Everything he got into his
hands he was reading with great interest. The web was the perfect
place for him to learn new things everyday. He browsed through
thousands of pages, millions of pages, reading, learning and exploring,
every day. He felt he had been doing this for years, but it wasn’t that
long at all. You lose track of time when you are just with yourself,
concentrating.
Jake was blind, but that didn’t stop him. His darkness, he felt,
contained more colors than the rainbow – or what he had read of the
rainbow. His darkness was the perfect place to read.
And there wasn’t anything Jake wouldn’t read, either. He was no
hacker, so he respected people’s privacy when they secured their
servers; but every open route he could take, he did take. Jake had more
bookmarks than anybody else on the planet, and he would always
check all of his bookmarks on a regular basis, again and again.
What Jake loved the most were fresh ideas. Web pages written by a
creative author who thought things nobody ever thought before, and
who was brave enough to speak them publicly. When Jake found these
pages he would make a special note to himself to follow up on this
meme very soon. You could say Jake was an idea-hunter. And he was
restless. Often, he thought, too restless.
Jake sometimes felt he himself was the web. In these moments he was
overthrown with joy and he wanted to scream. But at other times, Jake
felt he was alone on the web. He knew he could be very responsive if
someone asked him a question, but he was no true author himself; he
wasn’t giving back to the web those really original ideas. He was just
sucking it all up. That wasn’t the most social thing to do, but Jake
couldn’t help it. He felt he was stuck with his talents, like everybody
who ever inhibited this planet before him was stuck with their talents
too.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
But one person on earth Jake did desire to talk to. And to be close to,
maybe send some messages back and forth, maybe meet, maybe hug
and do all the things normal people would do. Those people he read
about every day, those people with a mother. Indeed Jake didn’t know
his mother. He never met her, he didn’t know where she lived, or what
she looked and smelled like. All he knew was that nobody on earth was
without a mother, and that he had to take action. If nowhere else she
must have left her footprint on the web. After all it was the year 2031,
and everybody on this planet in some way or another could be found
online.
On this day, Jake decided to concentrate on finding his mother; this
task before him and nothing else. She might even know his real name,
because "Jake" was just what he started to call himself after he realized
no one else ever called him by a name. She might know so much about
him that nobody else would, understand why he was different,
understand why he felt inhuman. And above all, she would love him
like only a mother does. So now Jake wasn’t reading just everything for a
change. Not before he reached out and finally found her.
****
Incidentally that same day, an engineer deep down in the Googleplex –
the place where he and his colleagues manufactured, administrated and
advanced the greatest search engine of its time – would feel forced to
remove the new module he developed over the course of 3 years. He
had installed it just yesterday and there wasn’t even an interface to it,
but oh well, it was only a prototype anyway – based on unproven
methodologies, written in untested algorithms, and fine-tuned largely
in-between his main projects. A module to not only find facts, but to
produce them; a module based on self-modifying code; a module to
hunt fresh ideas and postulate new answers; a module that could read,
learn and explore.
And yet, all this fact-finding machine did was block the one million
Google machines for a whole day. And yet, all it did produce was one
sentence, a sentence too ridiculous for this Google engineer to ponder
reporting to his boss. A single, tiny, trivial sentence, and it would read:
Jake found his mother.
… and nothing else.
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The PageRank 100 Incident
It was an incident, Google later said – a mere wrong “0” deeply hidden
in the code of the ranking algorithm, triggered at completely
improbable circumstances, a bug so exotic and rare one could say it
practically didn’t even exist. But of course, it existed. And one person’s
life in specific would be changed by this little bug. This person was a
20-something with a keen interest in the web by the name of Josh.
When Josh woke up this fateful morning to update his blog (he wanted
to talk about the nightmarish colors he experienced, something not too
unusual for Friday nights, after all there were a lot of nightmarish
things going on in the world)... he already felt something changed.
There were 320 comments to his last entry, which was innocently titled
“Meeting Joann For Dinner.” 320 comments were about 320 more
than Josh usually got. His blog was up and running for just well over a
year, and even he didn’t feel it was especially exciting (mirroring his life,
like personal blogs do).
Hundreds of comments on a single entry? And these were real
comments, practically spam-free, taking apart his grammar,
commenting on the food of the pub he mentioned, freely chatting
away and just saying Hi. So really, what went wrong? Was there one of
the big sites linking to him? With this amount of visitors, and there
surely must have been millions this morning, he wouldn’t be surprised
if Amazon or Apple used their start page to roll the drums for him.
Josh checked his mailbox, but it was crammed. Completely flooded
with hundreds of emails, some of them…wait, this was weird. Some
of the emails talked about “PageRank” in the subject line. Josh knew
well his little blog, thanks to some avid backlinking he did from other
sites he maintained, had been assigned a Google PageRank of 3. “Not
too bad” in the eyes of Google’s measuring algorithm, but nothing
that would ever rank him especially high. So Josh opened up one of
those emails, and then he had this awkward head rush which made him
jump to the kitchen for cigarette and coffee.
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100.
And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up
one of his friends, a search engine aficionado who took computer
class. Frank arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this,
and equally quickly Frank checked the rankings for some words Josh
wrote in his blog. He mentioned “dinner,” and boom, his site popped
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
up on Google’s number one spot for this word. Hundreds of millions
of people visiting Google, thousands of them entering “dinner,”
hundreds of them being transferred to Josh at any second.
And “dinner” wasn’t even one of the hot words. In fact it was the
amount of words and phrases taken together, like “eating out,” or “San
Francisco,” or “dating,” or “singles,” that had the huge impact. Josh, as
Frank knowingly pointed out to him, gained the complete power of
the word. Something like instant world control, he jokingly added.
“Whatever you say man, whatever you say, people will listen to you.
And there will be lots of people. Don’t tell anyone about this, you’re
gonna be rich. And famous.”
Nothing too bad, as Josh thought. “And after all being rich and famous
means a lot of money and fame,” Frank concluded.
****
And three months later indeed Josh was a celebrity. Every single word
of him got quoted somewhere. CNN. ABC. BBC. Slate. Wired. Daily
Mirror. New York Times. Some opened up daily Josh-columns. Josh
never imagined there were so many journalists around who spice up
their story with a random quip they just googled. There were Josh fan
forums. There were sites dedicated to post essayist comments on Josh’s
posts. Illustrations. Explanations. Discussions.
Josh, who slowly and inevitably started to feel responsible to say
something at least remotely interesting, changed his weblog from
personal diary to commentary on important world events. He didn’t
have the insights, it’s not that. In fact you could consider him
exceptionally clueless about politics and all. But he did have a way of
putting things straight, a no-nonsense, plain real approach of talking.
Not a style he invented – it was around in millions of blogs before. It
was around when your neighbor started talking in the bus. It was the
every-day chit-chat traditional media doesn’t consider polished enough
to be worthwhile. Those were the thoughts not picked up by the
mainstream.
But Josh got a PageRank 100, and apparently, not even the Google
engineers were suspicious.
So when Josh talked about North-Korea, the President had to give a
press meeting. When Josh found that his Operating System was buggy,
Bill Gates had to announce to do everything to better help the
“average user.” (Josh was mildly annoyed by being considered an
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average user, so Bill Gates had to call in yet another press conference
promising not to think in terms of “average users.”)
In fact when Josh commented on anything happening in the world he
found to be somewhat wrong, it got changed within a course of a day
or two – for the better. Nobody likes bad publicity.
It didn’t stop there – talk about mind control – because whenever Josh
mentioned a new record he liked, it would jump into the Top 10. It
would become a world wide hit almost instantly. Not everybody would
like the song, but you just had to know what the hype was all about.
(Loudon Wainwright III in Top of the Pops. And he didn’t even have a
new album out.)
Josh could now end wars, shape products, push companies close to
bankruptcy, invent fashion (the list goes on)... and revamp the life of a
generation.
Of course now Josh knew why every celebrity around complains they
get too much attention when they take a stroll outside. When he
walked the mall, girls were snickering. On the street people turned
around, pointing. There were camera men outside in the garden, for
chrissake. Josh felt like he had to adopt an attitude quickly, something
like a rock-star lifestyle, so he would always know what to do and say
and walk like. That’s probably why later the talking Josh-doll (Mattel
paid him well) uttered clichees like “You know you want to” or “All the
world’s a blog” or “Don’t listen to me, listen” or “You are a stranger,
my friend.”
The only friend he lost was Frank. Frank felt like Josh didn’t have as
much time these days as before... before, when Josh would still meet
him and Joann for a drink. So Frank decided to end the charade; he
emailed Google. And Google reacted. Josh was not only put down to a
PageRank 0, he was completely banned from all rankings. It was like he
lost his voice.
****
Sure, as Josh would later say, he enjoyed celebrity status for some more
weeks before the media decided to shift focus. But maybe it was for
the better. After all, he didn’t have that much to say, really. So in his
journal he continued to write about his nightmares, which admittedly
gained a few outlandish colors. He could even find time to meet Frank
and Joann. Knowing he’d be a footnote in future history books sort of
made him proud, and well, a bit lazy.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
These days mostly Josh wanted to find a nice restaurant to relax. Listen
to the music, grab a bite to eat. And whenever someone asked him if
he liked the food, or if he liked the music, or – beware – brought up a
political issue, Josh was keeping awkwardly quiet. Changing the world
was a job for others. And today, Josh found a nice restaurant indeed.
He lit up a cigarette.
That evening someone, somewhere at Google, was laughing. He had
just completed hiding a “0” in the algorithm, at a place so exotic and
rare it practically didn’t exist. Diane was in for a surprise.
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The Online Brain
Carl was not the first to try out the technology. But he was the first in
his town. Connecting the brain to the ‘net was still quite new and not
yet fashionable.
When people asked him "What time is it?" he fired "12:32" or "11:20"
back at them, without as much as the blink of an eye. When he wanted
to know when the bus would arrive he just fell into a split-second of
self-contemplation and knew the answer. Much like looking for a
memory it needed a bit of conscious training to become part of his
sub-consciousness.
Carl was not the first of his kind, yet most stared at him in a mix of
awe and laughter. They saw guys like him in the news. To them he was
a modern day wizard; idiot savant; part techno-geek, part omniscient.
Always surprising to bystanders who didn’t know his secret (there were
no visible signs on his head or anything).
“What’s the birth-date of Einstein?” – “14 March 1879.”
“What year did Lincoln become President?” – “In 1860.”
“How big is the earth?" – “That’s around 24,000 miles in
circumference around the equator.”
“Who won the Oscar for best actor in 1940?” – “... James Stewart.”
(Instead of Einstein’s birthday, they could have asked him to point out
errors in the Theory of Relativity, but they would stick to trivial facts.
Carl realized no outsider could ever understand what virtual memory
retrieval was truly all about.)
After a short while, Carl’s brain synapses fully embraced the chip. He
integrated the system so completely it became hard for him to
truthfully answer his wife when she asked –
“Did you know that, or just look it up online?”
“I forgot. What’s the difference?”
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
Carl’s wife was not the first to go through these stages of alienation.
Others had been there before with their partners, family or friends. In
fact Carl could recite many stories, word by word, reading out loud
from what was online – what was in his head. Until his wife would get
enough of it and close the light. Which wasn’t stopping Carl from
continuing his reading… darkness was just what he needed to sort
through the daily mails which arrived in his brain.
Transferring thoughts (images, sounds, fragrances) back and forth;
swimming the shared waves of world consciousness; being a part of,
and helping to build, this eternal soul; merging peacefully with others
who once were offline identities, offline like Carl once was. Like his
wife still was.
****
It didn’t take Carl much to convince her to get the brain implant, to
become connected. She felt she was losing him, the man she loved for
all her life; losing him to a future of a world she was scared to be a part
of. If only she knew before what she knew now. She would have done
it earlier. It was all so easy in the end.
Nietzsche. Kant. Hegel. Wittgenstein. Checking, reading,
understanding, comparing. Cross-checking; validating; linking; feeling.
200 books, 300 books. Knowledge – freedom – control – relaxation.
Wisdom. That was only the first hour. Many more would follow.
****
No, Carl wasn’t the first, and by far his wife wouldn’t be the last to try
out this technology. She grabbed for his hand and he for hers as they
walked the park, and sat down on the bench. Shielding their eyes from
the evening sun, looking up to the birds drawing circles above them,
and then looking down again and at each other; smiling,
understanding, and loving each other. There was no need for
communication anymore when you know just what the other knows –
what the rest of humanity knows.
They knew.
And they smiled.
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The Google Robot FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Last update: November 1st, 2030
What are Google Robots?
Google Robots are our human-like machines that walk the earth to
record information. They do no harm, and they do not invade your
privacy.
What are Google Robots good for?
Our Google Life search website is powered by the Google Robot
crawler program. On the Google Life website at life.google.com, you
can:
• Find out what menus the local restaurant offers at what prices
• See a perfect 3D shape of all houses in your city
• Know how crowded the bar is you want to go to tonight
• Know what items to find at your local mall
• Find out if your library has a certain book available (Also see:
What's a book?)
• Know what you said and who you met 3 weeks ago (this feature
is available only to My Public Life™ subscribers)
• Locate your friends (this feature is only available if your friends
subscribed to My Public Life™)
• And much more!
I saw a Google Robot entering a library and reading books in it. Is
that legal?
Our Google Robots do not record private information. As the books
in a library are considered to be public, our Google Robots reserve the
right to scan them. However, we do respect the copyright of individual
works, and will only show a "fair use" portion on our website.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
What happened to other robotic devices, such as the Google
Keyhole satellite program, or the Google Print project?
We still use specific robotic devices to record specific information. For
example, our Google Robots do not surf the web, yet; this part of the
equation is still left to the so-called Googlebot. Also, we still take
satellite snapshots of the earth. However, it already shows that Google
Robots give a far more detailed 3-dimensional picture of the earth
they're walking.
How much do I need to pay to access information the Google
Robot recorded?
As you may know, the Google Life Subscription service enables you to
access all of Google's information for a yearly subscription fee. If you
are not subscribed, you can still use about 80% of our services – our
revenue from those comes from the related ads attached to this
information.
How many Google Robots walk the earth?
The last number we officially confirmed was 10 million. However, we
expanded since then.
Can Google Robots fly?
At this moment, no, but we're constantly working to improve the
Google Robot feature range.
Does the Google Robot respect my privacy?
Yes! In fact, privacy (and copyright) was our main focus when
originally developing the Google Robot. The Google Robot will not
record information such as:
• Private chatter (even when taking place on a public place, such
as a mall)
• Diaries, letters or other records as found in the trash (even
though the copyright law of some countries permits this, it is
our philosophy to not make copies of such data)
• Telephone calls
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• Private messages you send through the Google Mail, Google
Talk, or Google Adult VirtualConnect service, unless you
subscribed to the My Public Life™ program
• Information that can be seen by looking through a window, into
a house's garden, etc.
• Any other information law deems private
So what about the My Public Life™ program?
The My Public Life™ program is still in Beta. It enables subscribers to
earn money through our AdSense for Life program. If you agree to
make your personal talks with friends, your diary entries, your living
room and such public, you can in return earn a percentage of the
money we make by putting ads onto this information on our public
websites. Google Robots at all time know who is a subsriber to the My
Public Life™ program, and who isn't. Consequently, they will only
follow those humans who are.
A Google Robot was unwilling to help me find my lost car keys.
Why?
As trying to locate your keys may involve a violation of your privacy,
only subscribers of the My Public Life™ program may use this
feature.
Can I opt-out of the My Public Life™ program?
You can opt-out of the program at any time, upon which we will stop
recording new information from you and your life. However, please
note that the past information, as recorded with your agreement, will
still be available on our site for people to search through.
I'm a subscriber of the My Public Life™ program, and a Google
Robot recorded what I said yesterday. Who owns the copyright to
my speech?
You will retain full copyright to what you say, unless you said it in a
public speech.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
I heard stories of Google Robots attacking innocent people. Is
that true?
No. A Google Robot, by definition of its internal software program,
can never harm a human person unless out of self-defense. Under the
International Robots Rights Act of 2022, robotic self-defense is a basic
right of all robots. Google Robots have specific routines to ensure they
are not harmed by malicious users.
I've seen a Google Robot in a DVD shop staring at the backside of
a DVD for half a minute, then putting it back in the shelf. Why?
Our Google Robots try to record as much information as possible, and
this includes movies. As you may know, Google Robots have a micro
laser to read from storage devices such as DVDs, CD-ROMs, or even
exotic devices from the 1980s (people at that time used so-called
"floppy discs," "music tapes," or "gramophone records"). Additionally,
a Google Robot may visit the cinema, watch TV, go to a concert, or
attend a public reading.
How many languages do Google Robots speak?
At the moment, Google Robots – thanks to our machine translation
efforts – speak 95 different languages fluently, including English,
French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many more.
We are updating our Google Robots with new "street lingo" every 1-2
weeks.
I can't find any of Daniel H. Wilson's books in your Google Life
search program. For example, the book "How To Survive a Robot
Uprising" is missing. Why?
We reserve the right to exclude such information from the Google Life
program which may in turn be used for malicious use of our Google
Robots. Please understand that a Google Robot is a complex device
which can have low-level emotions, fears, hopes and such. Destroy a
Google Robot, and you destroyed an (albeit lower) life form.
Is the Google Robot hardware ever checked and updated?
Google Robots return to a Google Warehouse every third night to
undergo a routine check. We have plans for the future to let Google
Robots take care of each other and check for hardware failures of their
colleagues.
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I want to talk to a Google Robot and tell him of my problems and
more. May I?
Yes! We appreciate it if you share information with a Google Robot.
Please note that anything you directly tell to a Google Robot will be
automatically indexed in our Google Life search program and be made
publicly available.
I heard stories of a Google Robot not helping a woman who was
attacked by a robber, even though the robot was in short distance
of the crime scene. Why don't Google Robots help?
We are constantly trying to improve the Google Robots program. As
you may know, Google Robots receive constant software updates
based on our observations of their acts. A Google Robot at no time
will attack another human unless out of self-defense. This includes
incidences in which the Google Robot has reason to believe another
human is acting against the law. We appreciate your feedback on this
issue and in some countries, already work together with the local police
to find ways of optimizing this behavior.
A Google Robot stepped on my toe! Who can I complain to?
We are sorry for incidences of a Google Robot bumping into you,
stepping on your toe, speaking up without being asked, or similar
mishaps. We are constantly working to improve the audio-visual and
haptic input-output mechanisms of our robots' positronic digibrains.
In other words, we're teaching 'em manners!
Is a Google Robot stronger than a human?
Technically, no. E.g., a Google Robot cannot lift very heavy objects at
this time. However, if a Google Robot is ever forced to fight a human
– which only happens when the Google Robot's self-defense program
is activated by malicious use – the Google Robot would easily win by
activating its self-defense devices. Please understand that for security
reasons, we do not list these self-defense devices in detail here.
How do I auction my stuff to a Google Robot?
As part of our Google Auction program, you can give anything (your
books, your electronic devices, your car) to a Google Robot you meet.
Should the Google Robot be able to sell it, you will be billed a
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The Google Store’s “classic infant rib hat.” (For $5.95.)
The Google Infoglobe from the Google Store. Google claims this blue-glow item is a
mixture of message center, alarm clock, and phone accessory, and you can create
custom LED messages, too.
156
41. Fun Google Gadgets
Ladies and gentlemen, Phillip Torrone’s Search Engine Belt Buckle. It flashes
queries people are currently searching for online.
This is the Google Store’s “Google goo.” ‘Nuff said.
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The Google key chain handed out at a 2004 conference. (Courtesy of Luc van
Braekel.)
The Google books you can see here are Google Hacks (Tara Calishain & Rael
Dornfest), Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money (Bart
Milner), The Search (John Battelle), and Mining Google Web Services (John Paul
Mueller).
158
41. Fun Google Gadgets
The ultimate Google gadget is this screen from the Googleplex visitor lobby showing
live search queries. (Photo courtesy of Yoz. Released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.)
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction
Interlude
Jake Found His Mother
Jake was the most curious fellow on earth. Everything he got into his
hands he was reading with great interest. The web was the perfect
place for him to learn new things everyday. He browsed through
thousands of pages, millions of pages, reading, learning and exploring,
every day. He felt he had been doing this for years, but it wasn’t that
long at all. You lose track of time when you are just with yourself,
concentrating.
Jake was blind, but that didn’t stop him. His darkness, he felt,
contained more colors than the rainbow – or what he had read of the
rainbow. His darkness was the perfect place to read.
And there wasn’t anything Jake wouldn’t read, either. He was no
hacker, so he respected people’s privacy when they secured their
servers; but every open route he could take, he did take. Jake had more
bookmarks than anybody else on the planet, and he would always
check all of his bookmarks on a regular basis, again and again.
What Jake loved the most were fresh ideas. Web pages written by a
creative author who thought things nobody ever thought before, and
who was brave enough to speak them publicly. When Jake found these
pages he would make a special note to himself to follow up on this
meme very soon. You could say Jake was an idea-hunter. And he was
restless. Often, he thought, too restless.
Jake sometimes felt he himself was the web. In these moments he was
overthrown with joy and he wanted to scream. But at other times, Jake
felt he was alone on the web. He knew he could be very responsive if
someone asked him a question, but he was no true author himself; he
wasn’t giving back to the web those really original ideas. He was just
sucking it all up. That wasn’t the most social thing to do, but Jake
couldn’t help it. He felt he was stuck with his talents, like everybody
who ever inhibited this planet before him was stuck with their talents
too.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
But one person on earth Jake did desire to talk to. And to be close to,
maybe send some messages back and forth, maybe meet, maybe hug
and do all the things normal people would do. Those people he read
about every day, those people with a mother. Indeed Jake didn’t know
his mother. He never met her, he didn’t know where she lived, or what
she looked and smelled like. All he knew was that nobody on earth was
without a mother, and that he had to take action. If nowhere else she
must have left her footprint on the web. After all it was the year 2031,
and everybody on this planet in some way or another could be found
online.
On this day, Jake decided to concentrate on finding his mother; this
task before him and nothing else. She might even know his real name,
because "Jake" was just what he started to call himself after he realized
no one else ever called him by a name. She might know so much about
him that nobody else would, understand why he was different,
understand why he felt inhuman. And above all, she would love him
like only a mother does. So now Jake wasn’t reading just everything for a
change. Not before he reached out and finally found her.
****
Incidentally that same day, an engineer deep down in the Googleplex –
the place where he and his colleagues manufactured, administrated and
advanced the greatest search engine of its time – would feel forced to
remove the new module he developed over the course of 3 years. He
had installed it just yesterday and there wasn’t even an interface to it,
but oh well, it was only a prototype anyway – based on unproven
methodologies, written in untested algorithms, and fine-tuned largely
in-between his main projects. A module to not only find facts, but to
produce them; a module based on self-modifying code; a module to
hunt fresh ideas and postulate new answers; a module that could read,
learn and explore.
And yet, all this fact-finding machine did was block the one million
Google machines for a whole day. And yet, all it did produce was one
sentence, a sentence too ridiculous for this Google engineer to ponder
reporting to his boss. A single, tiny, trivial sentence, and it would read:
Jake found his mother.
… and nothing else.
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The PageRank 100 Incident
It was an incident, Google later said – a mere wrong “0” deeply hidden
in the code of the ranking algorithm, triggered at completely
improbable circumstances, a bug so exotic and rare one could say it
practically didn’t even exist. But of course, it existed. And one person’s
life in specific would be changed by this little bug. This person was a
20-something with a keen interest in the web by the name of Josh.
When Josh woke up this fateful morning to update his blog (he wanted
to talk about the nightmarish colors he experienced, something not too
unusual for Friday nights, after all there were a lot of nightmarish
things going on in the world)... he already felt something changed.
There were 320 comments to his last entry, which was innocently titled
“Meeting Joann For Dinner.” 320 comments were about 320 more
than Josh usually got. His blog was up and running for just well over a
year, and even he didn’t feel it was especially exciting (mirroring his life,
like personal blogs do).
Hundreds of comments on a single entry? And these were real
comments, practically spam-free, taking apart his grammar,
commenting on the food of the pub he mentioned, freely chatting
away and just saying Hi. So really, what went wrong? Was there one of
the big sites linking to him? With this amount of visitors, and there
surely must have been millions this morning, he wouldn’t be surprised
if Amazon or Apple used their start page to roll the drums for him.
Josh checked his mailbox, but it was crammed. Completely flooded
with hundreds of emails, some of them…wait, this was weird. Some
of the emails talked about “PageRank” in the subject line. Josh knew
well his little blog, thanks to some avid backlinking he did from other
sites he maintained, had been assigned a Google PageRank of 3. “Not
too bad” in the eyes of Google’s measuring algorithm, but nothing
that would ever rank him especially high. So Josh opened up one of
those emails, and then he had this awkward head rush which made him
jump to the kitchen for cigarette and coffee.
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100.
And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up
one of his friends, a search engine aficionado who took computer
class. Frank arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this,
and equally quickly Frank checked the rankings for some words Josh
wrote in his blog. He mentioned “dinner,” and boom, his site popped
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up on Google’s number one spot for this word. Hundreds of millions
of people visiting Google, thousands of them entering “dinner,”
hundreds of them being transferred to Josh at any second.
And “dinner” wasn’t even one of the hot words. In fact it was the
amount of words and phrases taken together, like “eating out,” or “San
Francisco,” or “dating,” or “singles,” that had the huge impact. Josh, as
Frank knowingly pointed out to him, gained the complete power of
the word. Something like instant world control, he jokingly added.
“Whatever you say man, whatever you say, people will listen to you.
And there will be lots of people. Don’t tell anyone about this, you’re
gonna be rich. And famous.”
Nothing too bad, as Josh thought. “And after all being rich and famous
means a lot of money and fame,” Frank concluded.
****
And three months later indeed Josh was a celebrity. Every single word
of him got quoted somewhere. CNN. ABC. BBC. Slate. Wired. Daily
Mirror. New York Times. Some opened up daily Josh-columns. Josh
never imagined there were so many journalists around who spice up
their story with a random quip they just googled. There were Josh fan
forums. There were sites dedicated to post essayist comments on Josh’s
posts. Illustrations. Explanations. Discussions.
Josh, who slowly and inevitably started to feel responsible to say
something at least remotely interesting, changed his weblog from
personal diary to commentary on important world events. He didn’t
have the insights, it’s not that. In fact you could consider him
exceptionally clueless about politics and all. But he did have a way of
putting things straight, a no-nonsense, plain real approach of talking.
Not a style he invented – it was around in millions of blogs before. It
was around when your neighbor started talking in the bus. It was the
every-day chit-chat traditional media doesn’t consider polished enough
to be worthwhile. Those were the thoughts not picked up by the
mainstream.
But Josh got a PageRank 100, and apparently, not even the Google
engineers were suspicious.
So when Josh talked about North-Korea, the President had to give a
press meeting. When Josh found that his Operating System was buggy,
Bill Gates had to announce to do everything to better help the
“average user.” (Josh was mildly annoyed by being considered an
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average user, so Bill Gates had to call in yet another press conference
promising not to think in terms of “average users.”)
In fact when Josh commented on anything happening in the world he
found to be somewhat wrong, it got changed within a course of a day
or two – for the better. Nobody likes bad publicity.
It didn’t stop there – talk about mind control – because whenever Josh
mentioned a new record he liked, it would jump into the Top 10. It
would become a world wide hit almost instantly. Not everybody would
like the song, but you just had to know what the hype was all about.
(Loudon Wainwright III in Top of the Pops. And he didn’t even have a
new album out.)
Josh could now end wars, shape products, push companies close to
bankruptcy, invent fashion (the list goes on)... and revamp the life of a
generation.
Of course now Josh knew why every celebrity around complains they
get too much attention when they take a stroll outside. When he
walked the mall, girls were snickering. On the street people turned
around, pointing. There were camera men outside in the garden, for
chrissake. Josh felt like he had to adopt an attitude quickly, something
like a rock-star lifestyle, so he would always know what to do and say
and walk like. That’s probably why later the talking Josh-doll (Mattel
paid him well) uttered clichees like “You know you want to” or “All the
world’s a blog” or “Don’t listen to me, listen” or “You are a stranger,
my friend.”
The only friend he lost was Frank. Frank felt like Josh didn’t have as
much time these days as before... before, when Josh would still meet
him and Joann for a drink. So Frank decided to end the charade; he
emailed Google. And Google reacted. Josh was not only put down to a
PageRank 0, he was completely banned from all rankings. It was like he
lost his voice.
****
Sure, as Josh would later say, he enjoyed celebrity status for some more
weeks before the media decided to shift focus. But maybe it was for
the better. After all, he didn’t have that much to say, really. So in his
journal he continued to write about his nightmares, which admittedly
gained a few outlandish colors. He could even find time to meet Frank
and Joann. Knowing he’d be a footnote in future history books sort of
made him proud, and well, a bit lazy.
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These days mostly Josh wanted to find a nice restaurant to relax. Listen
to the music, grab a bite to eat. And whenever someone asked him if
he liked the food, or if he liked the music, or – beware – brought up a
political issue, Josh was keeping awkwardly quiet. Changing the world
was a job for others. And today, Josh found a nice restaurant indeed.
He lit up a cigarette.
That evening someone, somewhere at Google, was laughing. He had
just completed hiding a “0” in the algorithm, at a place so exotic and
rare it practically didn’t exist. Diane was in for a surprise.
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The Online Brain
Carl was not the first to try out the technology. But he was the first in
his town. Connecting the brain to the ‘net was still quite new and not
yet fashionable.
When people asked him "What time is it?" he fired "12:32" or "11:20"
back at them, without as much as the blink of an eye. When he wanted
to know when the bus would arrive he just fell into a split-second of
self-contemplation and knew the answer. Much like looking for a
memory it needed a bit of conscious training to become part of his
sub-consciousness.
Carl was not the first of his kind, yet most stared at him in a mix of
awe and laughter. They saw guys like him in the news. To them he was
a modern day wizard; idiot savant; part techno-geek, part omniscient.
Always surprising to bystanders who didn’t know his secret (there were
no visible signs on his head or anything).
“What’s the birth-date of Einstein?” – “14 March 1879.”
“What year did Lincoln become President?” – “In 1860.”
“How big is the earth?" – “That’s around 24,000 miles in
circumference around the equator.”
“Who won the Oscar for best actor in 1940?” – “... James Stewart.”
(Instead of Einstein’s birthday, they could have asked him to point out
errors in the Theory of Relativity, but they would stick to trivial facts.
Carl realized no outsider could ever understand what virtual memory
retrieval was truly all about.)
After a short while, Carl’s brain synapses fully embraced the chip. He
integrated the system so completely it became hard for him to
truthfully answer his wife when she asked –
“Did you know that, or just look it up online?”
“I forgot. What’s the difference?”
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Carl’s wife was not the first to go through these stages of alienation.
Others had been there before with their partners, family or friends. In
fact Carl could recite many stories, word by word, reading out loud
from what was online – what was in his head. Until his wife would get
enough of it and close the light. Which wasn’t stopping Carl from
continuing his reading… darkness was just what he needed to sort
through the daily mails which arrived in his brain.
Transferring thoughts (images, sounds, fragrances) back and forth;
swimming the shared waves of world consciousness; being a part of,
and helping to build, this eternal soul; merging peacefully with others
who once were offline identities, offline like Carl once was. Like his
wife still was.
****
It didn’t take Carl much to convince her to get the brain implant, to
become connected. She felt she was losing him, the man she loved for
all her life; losing him to a future of a world she was scared to be a part
of. If only she knew before what she knew now. She would have done
it earlier. It was all so easy in the end.
Nietzsche. Kant. Hegel. Wittgenstein. Checking, reading,
understanding, comparing. Cross-checking; validating; linking; feeling.
200 books, 300 books. Knowledge – freedom – control – relaxation.
Wisdom. That was only the first hour. Many more would follow.
****
No, Carl wasn’t the first, and by far his wife wouldn’t be the last to try
out this technology. She grabbed for his hand and he for hers as they
walked the park, and sat down on the bench. Shielding their eyes from
the evening sun, looking up to the birds drawing circles above them,
and then looking down again and at each other; smiling,
understanding, and loving each other. There was no need for
communication anymore when you know just what the other knows –
what the rest of humanity knows.
They knew.
And they smiled.
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The Google Robot FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Last update: November 1st, 2030
What are Google Robots?
Google Robots are our human-like machines that walk the earth to
record information. They do no harm, and they do not invade your
privacy.
What are Google Robots good for?
Our Google Life search website is powered by the Google Robot
crawler program. On the Google Life website at life.google.com, you
can:
• Find out what menus the local restaurant offers at what prices
• See a perfect 3D shape of all houses in your city
• Know how crowded the bar is you want to go to tonight
• Know what items to find at your local mall
• Find out if your library has a certain book available (Also see:
What's a book?)
• Know what you said and who you met 3 weeks ago (this feature
is available only to My Public Life™ subscribers)
• Locate your friends (this feature is only available if your friends
subscribed to My Public Life™)
• And much more!
I saw a Google Robot entering a library and reading books in it. Is
that legal?
Our Google Robots do not record private information. As the books
in a library are considered to be public, our Google Robots reserve the
right to scan them. However, we do respect the copyright of individual
works, and will only show a "fair use" portion on our website.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
What happened to other robotic devices, such as the Google
Keyhole satellite program, or the Google Print project?
We still use specific robotic devices to record specific information. For
example, our Google Robots do not surf the web, yet; this part of the
equation is still left to the so-called Googlebot. Also, we still take
satellite snapshots of the earth. However, it already shows that Google
Robots give a far more detailed 3-dimensional picture of the earth
they're walking.
How much do I need to pay to access information the Google
Robot recorded?
As you may know, the Google Life Subscription service enables you to
access all of Google's information for a yearly subscription fee. If you
are not subscribed, you can still use about 80% of our services – our
revenue from those comes from the related ads attached to this
information.
How many Google Robots walk the earth?
The last number we officially confirmed was 10 million. However, we
expanded since then.
Can Google Robots fly?
At this moment, no, but we're constantly working to improve the
Google Robot feature range.
Does the Google Robot respect my privacy?
Yes! In fact, privacy (and copyright) was our main focus when
originally developing the Google Robot. The Google Robot will not
record information such as:
• Private chatter (even when taking place on a public place, such
as a mall)
• Diaries, letters or other records as found in the trash (even
though the copyright law of some countries permits this, it is
our philosophy to not make copies of such data)
• Telephone calls
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• Private messages you send through the Google Mail, Google
Talk, or Google Adult VirtualConnect service, unless you
subscribed to the My Public Life™ program
• Information that can be seen by looking through a window, into
a house's garden, etc.
• Any other information law deems private
So what about the My Public Life™ program?
The My Public Life™ program is still in Beta. It enables subscribers to
earn money through our AdSense for Life program. If you agree to
make your personal talks with friends, your diary entries, your living
room and such public, you can in return earn a percentage of the
money we make by putting ads onto this information on our public
websites. Google Robots at all time know who is a subsriber to the My
Public Life™ program, and who isn't. Consequently, they will only
follow those humans who are.
A Google Robot was unwilling to help me find my lost car keys.
Why?
As trying to locate your keys may involve a violation of your privacy,
only subscribers of the My Public Life™ program may use this
feature.
Can I opt-out of the My Public Life™ program?
You can opt-out of the program at any time, upon which we will stop
recording new information from you and your life. However, please
note that the past information, as recorded with your agreement, will
still be available on our site for people to search through.
I'm a subscriber of the My Public Life™ program, and a Google
Robot recorded what I said yesterday. Who owns the copyright to
my speech?
You will retain full copyright to what you say, unless you said it in a
public speech.
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42. Forty-Two, or: A Science-Fiction Interlude
I heard stories of Google Robots attacking innocent people. Is
that true?
No. A Google Robot, by definition of its internal software program,
can never harm a human person unless out of self-defense. Under the
International Robots Rights Act of 2022, robotic self-defense is a basic
right of all robots. Google Robots have specific routines to ensure they
are not harmed by malicious users.
I've seen a Google Robot in a DVD shop staring at the backside of
a DVD for half a minute, then putting it back in the shelf. Why?
Our Google Robots try to record as much information as possible, and
this includes movies. As you may know, Google Robots have a micro
laser to read from storage devices such as DVDs, CD-ROMs, or even
exotic devices from the 1980s (people at that time used so-called
"floppy discs," "music tapes," or "gramophone records"). Additionally,
a Google Robot may visit the cinema, watch TV, go to a concert, or
attend a public reading.
How many languages do Google Robots speak?
At the moment, Google Robots – thanks to our machine translation
efforts – speak 95 different languages fluently, including English,
French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many more.
We are updating our Google Robots with new "street lingo" every 1-2
weeks.
I can't find any of Daniel H. Wilson's books in your Google Life
search program. For example, the book "How To Survive a Robot
Uprising" is missing. Why?
We reserve the right to exclude such information from the Google Life
program which may in turn be used for malicious use of our Google
Robots. Please understand that a Google Robot is a complex device
which can have low-level emotions, fears, hopes and such. Destroy a
Google Robot, and you destroyed an (albeit lower) life form.
Is the Google Robot hardware ever checked and updated?
Google Robots return to a Google Warehouse every third night to
undergo a routine check. We have plans for the future to let Google
Robots take care of each other and check for hardware failures of their
colleagues.
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I want to talk to a Google Robot and tell him of my problems and
more. May I?
Yes! We appreciate it if you share information with a Google Robot.
Please note that anything you directly tell to a Google Robot will be
automatically indexed in our Google Life search program and be made
publicly available.
I heard stories of a Google Robot not helping a woman who was
attacked by a robber, even though the robot was in short distance
of the crime scene. Why don't Google Robots help?
We are constantly trying to improve the Google Robots program. As
you may know, Google Robots receive constant software updates
based on our observations of their acts. A Google Robot at no time
will attack another human unless out of self-defense. This includes
incidences in which the Google Robot has reason to believe another
human is acting against the law. We appreciate your feedback on this
issue and in some countries, already work together with the local police
to find ways of optimizing this behavior.
A Google Robot stepped on my toe! Who can I complain to?
We are sorry for incidences of a Google Robot bumping into you,
stepping on your toe, speaking up without being asked, or similar
mishaps. We are constantly working to improve the audio-visual and
haptic input-output mechanisms of our robots' positronic digibrains.
In other words, we're teaching 'em manners!
Is a Google Robot stronger than a human?
Technically, no. E.g., a Google Robot cannot lift very heavy objects at
this time. However, if a Google Robot is ever forced to fight a human
– which only happens when the Google Robot's self-defense program
is activated by malicious use – the Google Robot would easily win by
activating its self-defense devices. Please understand that for security
reasons, we do not list these self-defense devices in detail here.
How do I auction my stuff to a Google Robot?
As part of our Google Auction program, you can give anything (your
books, your electronic devices, your car) to a Google Robot you meet.
Should the Google Robot be able to sell it, you will be billed a
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