Mind's Eye Re: Search Engine As God

It is true this idea can't resist your initial critique Allan.  The metaphor is a  bit shaky and we have seen it before as Laplace's Demon and its situation knowing everything that has happened and everything that will.  The author's points can be found at the link.  They aren't about god as any of us might consider he/she/it.

Students make Francis' point all the time - but they actually don't know 'how to google' in any depth.  Sites like Wiki and the BBC have given them information that satisfies teachers in schools, but they rarely find all the information and very little of the critique.  The big mess search engines throw up is pretty banal.  I'd no doubt produce more hits on a video of Maxwell eating my dentures than a listing of the details of my petrol from air machine.  I occasionally set questions like 'find the earth's major energy source and critically evaluate the efficiency of the main processes that harness it' - this is a question about the sun and such as photosynthesis, but most seem not to know this post-Google.

My own interest in this IT/IS question concerns "finance".  Finance has long had a god-like quality in my thinking - if we think of the kind of gods that would turn any moral creature to Prometheus.  Most of us in here know the plot - we should build safe homes for 2 billion people from Tornado Alley, British flood plains and on to Monsoon areas and so on.  We should take local-global catastrophe seriously and even such matters as leaving the planet or biological form longer term.  Instead we have finance acting as an unquestioned god on how we organise ourselves.  There's a free PDF on the finance curse here -http://treasureislands.org/the-finance-curse-my-new-book/

Information systems are potentially a way to free us from the finance gods without  replacing them by State capitalism.  Currently they give us more reason to worry about yet more intrusion into our lives by the powerful.  We have problems conceptualising in areas like this because terms like "transparency" are both good and bad.

On Saturday, 29 June 2013 21:57:58 UTC+1, archytas wrote:

If God did not exist – people would invent one! The development of 

human civilization requires mechanisms promoting cooperation and 

social order. One of these mechanisms is based on the idea that 

everything we do is seen and judged by God – bad deeds will be 

punished, while good ones will be rewarded (or was this Santa?). The Information Age has 

now fueled the dream that God-like omniscience and omnipotence can 

be created by man.

This is an interesting way of thinking about information systems - full free paper at http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3271.pdf

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to minds-eye+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.