Google and the World Brain Page #7

to understand about Google

is that they try to roll out

projects first

and then, to think about

the consequences later.

So you will often see them experiment

with something that looks very cool,

maybe the Google Street View

Project...

Google launched Street View in 2007,

part of the search engine's

long-term goal

to create a virtual

3D map of the whole planet,

right down to street level.

But investigations have revealed

that Google Street View cars

were collecting more than just

photographs for their databanks.

Their antennas were also hoovering

up personal information

from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks,

including Internet history

and passwords.

I think the case of Google

collecting Wi-Fi information,

it reveals a complete lack of respect

for privacy within the corporation.

Such projects often reveal that

Google does not fully understand

the social consequences

of its own work.

We actually do more search

queries in China alone

than any other search company does

in any other single-national market,

by which I really mean

Google in the United States.

So we certainly do aspire

to be a World Brain.

I think HG Wells was, I mean,

he is well known for having been

quite prescient

about a lot of the things

that he envisaged.

Sure we don't have

the time machine yet,

but pretty much the rest of it

was dead on.

We have a product, which is a very,

very popular product,

it's called Baidu Wenku,

the Chinese name of it

is the Baidu Library.

It allows people to upload

materials that they have

that are either

of their own creation,

or that they have the intellectual

property rights to, to our site.

There isn't an area

of human knowledge

that hasn't been filled out

and made more rich and wondrous

by the fact of the Internet.

I am often sort of shocked

by people who see it

as the beginnings

of this dystopian future.

I embrace it unequivocally.

The Fundamental Knowledge System

which accumulates, sorts,

keeps in order

and renders available

everything that is known

centres on Barcelona.

With its 17 million active workers,

it is the Memory Of Mankind.

You can look at the Internet

as something divine.

We eventually will come, I think,

to revere some of our

technological creations,

like the Internet,

to be almost like cathedrals

of redwoods,

to be as complicated

and as beautiful

as natural creations.

And that, in a real sense,

that there is more of God

in a cellphone

than there is in a tree frog,

because a cellphone is

an additional layer of evolution

over the natural frog.

It's a new form of medieval church

or something like that.

Everybody is to give their data

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