Monday, December 13, 2004
Google does it again:
google will put online public domain libraries of old books from stanford, harvard, a few other places, with a goal of a million books pretty darn soon.
infoexplosion. on the one hand, that means we are all rich now. anyone with a million books is rich. and somebody will figure a way put the million books into a breadbox sized thingy, and then smaller boxes. so our hypothetical grandchildren can come with a million books built in. then autonomous agents to read the books.
this is a big step toward the singularity.
there are already a billion people online. with each of them having access to a million books, that means whoever wants to can be a scholar. not everyone will want to; i come from a family where that is our calling. take a problem - fermat's theorem, how to build an ansible, turn two billion eyeballs on it, see what happens. the new answers will raise new questions. the rate of cultural evolution just took a big jump.
google will put online public domain libraries of old books from stanford, harvard, a few other places, with a goal of a million books pretty darn soon.
infoexplosion. on the one hand, that means we are all rich now. anyone with a million books is rich. and somebody will figure a way put the million books into a breadbox sized thingy, and then smaller boxes. so our hypothetical grandchildren can come with a million books built in. then autonomous agents to read the books.
this is a big step toward the singularity.
there are already a billion people online. with each of them having access to a million books, that means whoever wants to can be a scholar. not everyone will want to; i come from a family where that is our calling. take a problem - fermat's theorem, how to build an ansible, turn two billion eyeballs on it, see what happens. the new answers will raise new questions. the rate of cultural evolution just took a big jump.
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