The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

For Dyson, who has spent much of his life speculating about the inner lives of machines, the visit to Google must have been exhilarating. Here, after all, was a company eager to deploy its enormous resources, including many of the brightest computer scientists in the world, to create an artificial brain. But the visit left Dyson troubled. Toward the end of an essay he wrote about the experience, he recalled a solemn warning that Turing had made in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In our attempts to build intelligent machines, the mathematician had written, “we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children.” Dyson then relayed a comment that “an unusually perceptive friend” had made after an earlier visit to the Googleplex: “I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?”60 The reaction, though obviously extreme, is understandable. With its enormous ambition, its immense bankroll, and its imperialistic designs on the world of knowledge, Google is a natural vessel for our fears as well as our hopes. “Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin has acknowledged. “Others say Google is Satan.”