Google’s effectively unparalleled capacity for high-level innovation may prove to be the source of many of the technological innovations that will define human advancement in the 21st century. Inherent in the spectacular potential of companies like Google to reshape society, however, is the profound societal danger associated with such innovation. Navigating the evolving relationship between humanity and technology will be among the greatest challenges of our generation.
Google’s advertising and analytics software, its unmatched access to personal data, its free software offerings, its mobile products, and many more of its services are all on the cutting edge. But these offerings pale in comparison to Google’s long-term vision. Google has played a key role in redefining the relationship between humans, geographic space and software. For example, Google’s constantly expanding street view service is now ubiquitous in just about every major commerce hub across the world, including key regions in the global south. As of last December, their latest fleet of 25 self-driving cars had driven around 600,000 miles without a major accident (far better than an average driver). Google glasses are straight out of a futuristic spy movie, except that Google puts such technology in the hands of consumers.
Other initiatives could have enormous political impacts as well. Google’s “uProxy” initiative, still in “restricted beta” mode, is a peer-to-peer service that allows one to establish an encrypted Internet connection with somebody they trust, allowing a user to evade essentially any government surveillance or fire-wall. Its “Project Tango” aims to give its mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion in the real world, enabling the phone to process not only its location, but every physical detail about that location, calling to mind the fictional technology developed by Wayne Industries in The Dark Knight (2008), which uses sonar to map all of Gotham in real-time.
They are also making significant investments beyond just software: their appropriately titled Google X, a secretive research initiative, has been conducting research on sophisticated robotics and machine learning. In the last year, Google has acquired some of the most advanced and promising robotics companies in the world, including DeepMind, a firm that specializes in advanced machine learning called “Deep Learning”, and Boston Dynamics, makers of a slew of biomimicry-inspired robots such as Cheetah, a robot that can run up to 28.3 miles per hour as well as numerous other firms with diverse specialties, talent and intellectual property. Google envisions manufacturing applications of these robotics capacities, potentially even challenging Amazon in high-tech manufacturing.
These initiatives appear to be the components of a wildly ambitious — and perhaps still amorphous — vision of next-generation technologies that exist at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer usability. Google is not only attempting to create disruptive technologies, it is pushing towards the precipice of a paradigm-shifting technological revolution. Fittingly perhaps its most ambitious vision is an outgrowth of its very first offering: its search engine. Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google and founder of the Singularity Institute, intends to help the company develop its search engine to behave like a “cybernetic friend,” that “will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, [because] It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better…, perhaps, than even yourself.”
Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management on Google Search, shares Kurzweil’s vision: “Our vision is the Star Trek computer...You can talk to it -— it understands you, and it can have a conversation with you.” Though Google openly admits such ambitions are implausible in the short-term, Google is not merely speculating. Its bombastic idealism is central to its corporate philosophy and strategy. Google’s profitability allows them to make long-term investments that are essentially unmatched in both scale and audacity. Google’s market dominance, rather than constraining innovation (as most monopolies do), seems to amplify both the rate and scale of innovation; for better or worse, we are witnessing the astonishingly improbable convergence of profitability, ambition and big-picture thinking that may turn out to be a core driver of 21st century innovation. Google often feels more like a movement than a corporation, publicly representing itself as a company in which employees are “true believers,” passionately investing their intellect and creativity in creating something they believe transcends themselves — a future yet-to-be constructed. Their corporate philosophy echoes such bold values: “We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected...We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards.” The moral implications of Google’s growth — and the growth of other high-tech companies — are profound. Our reaction to the explosive rate of technological advance is of the utmost importance for the future of humanity. Though predicting Google’s impact on society is impossible, it is naive to dismiss the possibility that Google, or other private actors, could fundamentally alter the balance of power between private corporations and public institutions, the barrier between physical space and “the cloud,” or even the structural organization of human society.
Our generation has the responsibility to act conscientiously in this critical juncture in the evolution of the relationship between humanity and technology, because how we respond in the coming decades will have a significant impact on the future of human society. It would behoove the Middlebury community and other centers of critical investigation, to engage in collective dialogue about how best to harness the potential of looming technological innovations while avoiding their pitfalls. Our ability to navigate these ethical dilemmas may be our generation’s legacy — or our greatest calamity.
Who Run the World? Google.
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