The Silicon Valley Templars

The Economist remarks on the religious dimension of the Google project and leaves us pondering about the importance of irrational ideals in moving technology ahead (a topic in dire need of studying and discussion).

One visitor to the company’s “Googleplex” in Silicon Valley “felt as if I were in the company of missionaries”. A consequence of the theory that Google is aiming to run the world could be that “Google may be less liked in the industry than Microsoft inside 12 months,” says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst. Bloggers have started accusing Google of hubris and arrogance. Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future says that “Google is a religion posing as a company.”

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. It’s “in their DNA,” says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist famous for investing early in both Yahoo! and Google. Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We’re not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world’s information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.
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