The Searchers of an Obsessed Quest
Is Google’s search engine a matrix of the AI Universe?
The quest to answer 4 billion Questions every day!
It has taken me half a century but, finally; I had a prophetic dream last week.
I saw John Wayne in “The Searchers”. The dream reassembled one of the most famous of all John Ford shots, one of the search party galloping away in a valley, as Indians ominously ride parallel to them, silhouetted against the sky.
The film is about an obsessive quest. The niece of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is kidnapped by Comanches who murder her family and burn their ranch house. Ethan spends five years on a lonely quest to hunt down the tribe that holds the girl Debbie, not to rescue her, but to shoot her dead, because she has become one of the Comanches.
Then, as I woke up, a spark came into my mind. And what if we are all obsessed? We are all searchers similar to John Wayne in the movie?
Why then do we ask every day 4 billion questions? To an engine, to a machine?
Google now processes over 40.000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 4 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
What they are searching for?
IT S ABOUT QUESTIONS
Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask.
As Kevin Kelly analyses it «even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. The widening gap between the two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. The gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, Science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.”
“We have no reason to expect this to reverse. The more disruptive a technology or tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect that technology such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and quantum computing to unleash a barrage of new enormous questions — questions we could have never thought to ask before. It’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.»
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
We ask every year the “Engine” 2 trillion questions, and every year it gives back 2 trillion answers. Most of them are accurate. Many times the answers are intriguing. Some times are strange.
We’ve always had questions. The answering business has gone far away from the phone directory assistance.
The technologies of generating answers will continue to be essential, but we will value the technologies that help generate questions more that the past believe a lot of scientists. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, alternative possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore.
Questioning is more powerful than answers.
The name Google comes from “googol,” the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol is so large that there is not a googol of any known thing in the universe — not dust particles, stars, or atoms. The word has been around since 1938 when it was introduced into mathematics by Columbia University’s Edward Kasner (1878–1955) — invented, he said, by his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta — but the new kid on the block, Google has transcended the etymology. It is more than a trend. It is a cultural wave.
It is purely AI.
Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching for it, or is it searching for us? ask in his beautiful book “Inevitable” Kevin Kelly.
In a super connected world, thinking differently is a source of innovation and success. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its tales and myths.
So only stories will give back the right answers.
It is the Leibniz’s dream. The philosopher’s plan three centuries ago was to design a formal language and technique and then express questions in the language and apply the rules of the calculus mechanically. He fantasised that savants would sit together and calculate the outcome of their debate with no disagreement or confusion.
Leibniz’s dream was hopelessly utopian.
The web is the largest collection of information ever known. It contains progressively the answer to every conceivable question — if not today, perhaps tomorrow, or next year — and revive the dream of a universal Engine that can answer everything.
But if the web is our sole information source and we interact using a particular tool, we have no way of evaluating the results obtained, comparing them with others, or knowing whether what we have found even scratches the surface of what is available.
Most users blindly trust their search engine, a single information source, when at their feet lies a subtle, collective, multiply linked structure. Why?
Like Leibniz, we are all seduced by the dream of reason. We feel or hope, that it is possible to get a unique, definitive solution. We yearn to avoid ambiguity, the obligation to select results, the need to investigate the fallibility, and test the performance of search tools, to judge the quality of resources.
But the dream of the reason is a dangerous nightmare. We must continually invent creative new procedures for searching. We must use critical thinking to test search tools. We must spend time and use clarity.
Searchers trust their ability as web explorers. Over 90 percent of all who use search engines say they are confident in the answers; half are very confident. Judge their research activities as successful in most cases.
The less experience they have, the more successful they regard their searches. This is a dangerous vicious circle: users believe they are capable searchers precisely because they are uncritical toward the results that their search engine returns.
As the inventor of WWW Berners Lee said “There was no central computer “controlling” the web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organisation anywhere that “ran” the web. The web was not a physical thing that existed in a certain “place”. It was a “space” in which information could exist .”
We call serendipity the art of finding something when searching for something else. The word comes from a tale called The Three Princes of Serendip (an old name for Sri Lanka). These princes journeyed widely, and as they traveled they continually made discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not seeking.
Seeking answers to questions is not a static activity, but involves a quest, a journey. Exploration of new territory requires the right instruments. We need luck and reasonable thinking to make new discoveries.
We are navigating in dark waters. It is not possible to plan all research steps; we must be flexible enough to integrate and adapt our strategy as required. We often find something that we are not seeking, but it behooves us to understand and interpret the discovery.
Innovation is about creating new connections and new relations.
Serendipity implies that the trails of our exploration and discovery can never guarantee certainty. Every result is ambiguous and temporary, subject to revision as new perspectives unfold.
Just as nature is continuously changing, so is our search. It’s a dynamic exploration: a collective transmission is in constant flux, not a static database that yields the same answer to the same question.
The process is fascinating, but there is no fixed point, no guiding star, and no guarantee. We travel with innocent hearts and a good spirit, eager to face the continual challenges that a dynamic archive poses. We must be resourceful and embrace a diverse set of tools. To make sense of the universe (which others call the Engine), we must recognise its dynamic character, accept that discovery is never-ending, and exercise our decisions at all times. We must succeed where the librarians and collectors of Alexandria and Babel failed.
THE QUEST
The film of John ford inspired a lot of creators and Explorers.
There is this eternal storyteller in our mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. The Engine gives the data to this storyteller, this inner narrator.
Ethan’s quest inspired a plot line in George Lucas’s “Star Wars.” It’s at the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver written by Paul Schrader, who used it again in his own “Hard Core.” Hero, in each of the Schrader screenplays, is a loner, driven to violence and madness by his mission to rescue a young white woman who has become the sexual prey of those seen as subhuman. Harry Dean Stanton’s search for Nastassja Kinski in Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” is a reworking of the Ford story. Even Ethan’s famous line “That’ll be the day” inspired a song by Buddy Holly.
I wonder, however, if John Wayne in Searchers had the means to find Debbie using the Search Engine if he would do it and save five adventurous years against the Comanches.
World Cinema would lose also one of his Masterpieces.
