Google Has a 300-Year Plan…
Excerpt from R.M. Vaughan‘s article in Globe & Mail
CLICK IMAGE ABOVE TO WATCH MOVIE TRAILER
Ted Remerowski’s documentary traces Google’s rise from its establishment in 1998 to its confrontation with the Chinese government in January, 2010, and wonders whether it’s living up to its corporate motto: Don’t Be Evil.
According to filmmaker Ted Remerowski’s new documentary Google World (debuting on CBC – TV’s Doc Zone on Feb. 11 at 9 p.m.), the corporation has a mind-bending 300-year plan to put all known information into digital “clouds,” virtual warehouses run by its spooky, HAL 9000-like mega computers. And that plan gives Remerowski reason to pause, because when Google says “all information,” it means everything about you and me as well.
R.M. Vaughan: Google’s 300-year plan sounds monomaniacal, to say the least, but is there anything inherently wrong with wanting to create a “world library”?
Ted Remerowski: Absolutely not. It’s a great concept. The difficulty is that you’re talking about all intelligence, [but] held by whom? And how is it being used? Google claims that it is transparent and open, but what I discovered is that when you’re talking about their intellectual property, they are not transparent. They keep everything very close to the chest. What happens when they have all the knowledge at their disposal? That’s the question. Now, it’s not going to be a question we’re going to have to answer, because it’s 300 years away, but they are moving in that direction, and as they keep getting more and more information, you’ve got to ask yourself: Are we getting access to that information? Are they doing something with that information that we don’t know? Who knows? What do you do when you have the smartest guys in the room holding such enormous clout over data?
Read the entire article on the Globe & Mail website here: