The company has cornered the market for indexing our very lives into a neat and UI friendly search engine. “Google’s Grand Plan to Make Your Brain Irrelevant” discusses Google’s buying spree, as it attempts to absorb every bit of useful infrastructure build on its omnipresence. The company claims that it does this in order “to build an enormous digital brain that operates as much like the human mind as possible”. Google’s pet project, Google RankBrain, already handles 15% of all google searches as an organic AI that adapts and learns. This “digital brain” will be able to “learn ‘organically’ — that is without human involvement”.

The aggressive push for acquiring new technologies and absorbing every innovator into the Google fold seems a little hostile to the average Google consumer. To us it seems as though Skynet is rising and that soon we’ll all be forced join John and Sarah Connor in rebellion. But before we fire up the time machine and send the Governator back to destroy the evil Google, let me share a little experience. I’ve been to Silicon Valley and indeed spent a few days in the deep dark Google offices. Google has created, for itself, a university after university where you actually get paid to learn and create.

The kind of minds assembled at Google aren’t mad scientists bent on bringing the world to their digital knees. They’re inquisitive and hyperactive minds bent on finding the most efficient solutions to problems we don’t even know about. The kind of conversations going on at Google would make your jaw drop and your mind race. Google has recognized a problem
that most of us only now realize is a problem, the flow of information. For the longest time, the public’s only source of information are from the very institutes that model themselves to be the keepers of the peace. We haven’t had a chance to split the veil and consolidate our collective knowledge…ever. What Google is doing is unprecedented, new and even scary. Especially because Google must build itself in a closed ceiling system, trying to navigate through tricky legislation; special interests who really would want to turn our lives into a privacy dystopia; conservative governments that would rather have its citizens read heavily curated and edited information; and indeed the very public they’re trying to help.

Already “for many of us, Google already functions as an important part of what WIRED columnist Clive Thompson has called our outboard brain. The more Google ‘knows,’ the less we have to remember. We just Google it.” The article seems to be under the impression that
Google’s upgrades will be used to turn our own minds irrelevant. However, it doesn’t recognize that for most of us our minds were a little irrelevant. Just measure the speed with which I can find the answers to most questions than someone who grew up in the good old days of the public library would. Without being able to Google things, I would spend more time memorizing than I do learning and understanding. Google is a scary idea, especially because so many things are already in the wrong hands but when Google says they’re not trying to be evil, I’m inclined to believe them. In fact I have to believe them because without Google I myself may fall into the evils that are conceived by ignorance. With access to so much media, so many publications, articles, forums and perspectives from all over the world I’m able to be a more aware human being. I’m able to navigate through life with a few less fears and few more facts.