by Jack Campitelli | August 19th, 2010
Here’s a recent quote from this arrogant and/or ignorant prick:
We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is. One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. - Eric Schmidt CEO of Google
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/eric-schmidt-on-future-of-search.html
I hope all of you who put up with my musings can finish the rant from here. But in case you’ve had a long day I’ll help.
I don’t know this Google CEO person. I’m hoping he takes care of his dog and his family. What I don’t need is Google taking care of me and “telling me what I should be doing next.” I want the facts, just the facts, from Google. I don’t want them to think for me. Their secret search engine algorithms are all the “Google-think” I can stomach.
Google’s CEO has left reality. He is not ahead of his times, he has abandoned his times. And, if he’s right, and I’m wrong, I don’t want to have anything to do with the times or the people who think this kind of thinking is ok. None of us need one more person to tell us what to do next. If we don’t know, then we need to find out for ourselves.
I’m sure, should the gentleman take offense, he could defend his statement by saying it only applied to “searches” – that it was NOT a metaphor for life. Except, “searches” are now an important part of how we live our lives, thanks to Google, and how we find stuff out, how we make decisions. Google presuming to tell me what I “should be doing next” is so offensive there are scarcely words to describe it.
The days of us needing Father Church, Big Daddy Government, or, even Glenn Beck, to tell us what to do should be over. Forever. We have to get on to our own lives, our own values.
One of the great writers on myth, Joseph Campbell, said (I paraphrase) that the journey to adulthood embraces abandoning the God of your father (and finding your own). I remember being shocked when I first heard this; I was young and religious. Later, I knew how right he was. The journey to adulthood, which came late to me, and to many will come not at all, is the adventuresome quest for our own values, not ones taught to us. Values we have to learn in our blood and in our bone. A parent’s true job is not to keep the child from all ills, but to let the child make as many non-life-threatening mistakes as the child can make and learn from them — to keep the child from getting hit by a bus until the child is old enough to know that buses can kill you. Similarly, the values of others are there only to hold us until we have enough life under our belts to find our own values. At the end of our quest, we may decide that “others” values are, in fact, good enough to be our own. But they rarely are. And we rarely do.
If the quote from Google’s CEO weren’t crazy enough, Google, God bless ‘em, is reportedly helping out the CIA – not the Culinary Institute of America. The other CIA. Here’s a chilly article to read:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/
“Wired,” for those of you who don’t know, is a pretty serious news source on internet- related subjects including encryption. This is not the first time Google has found itself in bed with the CIA.
What is MORE interesting than the article are some of the comments below it including one posted from “amanfromMars”. If you look at the technical vocabulary the writer uses, this guy seems to know what he is talking about: if the CIA is getting data about “stuff” from searching the internet, then, as usual, they assume the “dark world” is totally stupid and can’t figure out how to plant all sorts of data that the search engines find that waste precious government resources chasing it down. Hell, the Soviets did this for years before the internet and so did the U.S. – plant deceptive information – to screw with each other. To actually exterminate their best agents whom they mistakenly came to believe worked for the “other side”.
How stupid. If some marketer in Pakistan can figure out how to send me Viagra ads that are tricked-out to appear to come from my own email address, thereby bypassing all spam filters, then I’m pretty sure “they” have the technology to totally screw with Google’s data if Google is going into the spy-biz with the CIA. In fact, I can almost see a spontaneous underground domestic movement of disenchanted U.S. citizens devoted to planting bogus information for Google/CIA spiders to find. Co-incidentally, Google may thus become useless for us, too, and we will have to abandon Google. Great business plan, Mr. CEO.
As if life weren’t “complicated” enough, now I’ve got to try to find another “search engine” that I can trust. Sadly I realize that as soon as someone gets it down, as Google has, it understands its power and wants to “tell me what I should be doing next.”
I wonder, is the Nazi-gene built into each of us? Put us in charge of anything and we start to want to rule? First those around us, and tomorrow, the world? Boy, THERE is something to watch out for in ourselves and, if you’re the praying type, ask God to keep you humble before every meal.
Is THIS the curse of Eden? Clearly baptism can’t purge it because it happens to preachers, too. In Genesis, when man eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, clearly all hell breaks loose. What a cursed species we are. Another translation of the “knowledge of good and evil” is the “knowledge of life and death” – that is the knowledge that we are “alive” but that we will die. That is a very sobering burden to carry around. Animals don’t have this curse, it seems. More easily, they take each day as it comes without knowing it may well be their last, oblivious to the forces that are coalescing to create their fate. Man takes his days as if the “last day” was out there a ways. And when the end gets close, we are often despondent. We have the special knowledge that we are living on death row and really never know when the executioner will come for us. And, if we think, we know how fragile life is. How it all hangs by such a slim thread. If we don’t bury our head in the sand due to this knowledge, then every single moment of life is precious beyond all.
And so, into this imperfect world, comes someone whose company “interfaces” with our lives in a fundamental way and this person wants to tell us what we should be doing next. He perceives this to be his mission – the destiny of his company is to decide our destiny.
Talk about your snake in the garden.
