You Work for Google (but Google works for you, too)

Here’s a wonderful and accessible guest article by my longtime friend Erik Dreyer that presents the internet as a (part) human computer. It was originally published a couple weeks ago in Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Outpost, a print newspaper whimsically launched by Erik and some friends in Anchorage, Alaska. The paper featured coverage of local and national issues, as well as essays and art and was very well received by the local community.

You work for Google

But Google works for you, too

Erik Dreyer

The Internet has several commonly accepted analogies - it’s often referred to as a place, a warehouse or a highway. You may have said or heard someone say, “Let’s meet on the Internet,” as if the Internet was a cafe down the street or some merry-go-round anyone could hop onto and mingle with the other riders.

The Outpost, Vol 1, Issue 1

There’s also the notion that “you can just find it on the Internet,” as though the Internet is some gigantic warehouse containing every piece of information anyone would ever want to know. Email, instant messaging (IM), voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and social networks make it seem like the Internet really is an information highway where communication and other data travels quickly and freely between everyone.

Do the above analogies seem appropriate to you? They do to me, and that’s the fascinating part. All of these analogies are appropriate and apply to the internet, but they don’t capture the entire picture of what the internet can do. This suggests a greater and even more powerful analogy must exist.

What do you get when you connect billions of processors together (electronic and human), give them access to data input streams of all kinds (including mobile) and to hundreds of millions of terabytes of existing data and storage capacity for newly generated or synthesized data? You get one awesome giant computer.

Man and machine working together

The processors of this giant computer include electronic processors, like those inside our laptops and desktops, and the minds of the people using the Internet. The electronic and human processors have unique but complementary skill sets, enabling them to excel at a wide range of complex tasks together that neither could perform alone.

An important consequence of the Internet-as-a-computer analogy is that it implies a different set of expectations. What we expect from a place to meet, a warehouse or a highway, is far less than what we expect of a sophisticated computer. Places to meet are fun, warehouses are resourceful and highways are convenient … but computers? Computers can be programmed to actually do stuff.

For example, Google ranks web pages, in part, by scoring them based on how many people link to them from other web pages. Web pages that have more links pointing to them from other web pages receive a higher score. Google also uses information like which search results users click on and how long they stay on each page to refine the ranking, and has built sophisticated software to collect, analyze and synthesize this immense volume of data.

However, all of this sophistication wouldn’t get them anywhere without the work of hundreds of millions of people around the world deciding what web pages to link to and using Google’s search engine to find what they are looking for.

Sure, Google has hundreds of thousands of electronic processors in its control, but the processors that it needs the most—and the ones that its business is most dependent upon—are you and me.

Craigslist, eBay and Wikipedia are other examples of Internet programs that draw-out knowledge held within individuals, and utilize sophisticated software to put this knowledge to use for the masses. For Craigslist and eBay, it’s the knowledge is of what is for sale and who values it (and at what price), whereas Wikipedia calls upon millions of amateur fact finders to put together a body of knowledge that dwarfs paper encyclopedias and is freely available to anyone.

Google, Craigslist, eBay and Wikipedia have transformed (and in some cases, created) their fields, proving to be either more efficient or convenient than existing services. Why? Because they have employed the giant human/electronic computer that is the Internet to perform operations that were both too large for traditional human-based operations, and too subjective to be automated entirely by traditional computer algorithms.

All together now

Harnessing this collective knowledge for the good is an important cause. The newly formed MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts has teams that are using collective intelligence to address issues like climate change and health care research. Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT CCI, describes collective intelligence as “groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.”

The cause has also been taken up by Tim O’Reilly, a Web 2.0 guru and founder of O’Reilly Media. In his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008, O’Reilly passionately argued that data-driven web applications harnessing collective intelligence have the power to help solve real world problems in fields such as politics, climate change, medicine and finance. In all of these efforts, machine intelligence is the key to connecting, processing and delivering collective human intelligence to the areas where it’s needed most.

The Internet isn’t just a place to meet, a warehouse, or an information highway, it is all of them put together. It combines the collective strengths of many minds with the strengths of electronic processors and storage, and therefore is the most powerful computer ever built. Steve Jobs once asserted that a computer is like a bicycle for our mind - that computers extend the capabilities of our mind similar to how bicycles extend the capabilities of our body. Well, in reverence to Mr. Jobs and in reference to his lucid analogy - the Internet to me is a bicycle for the human race.

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Erik Dreyer grew up in Anchorage and is now focused on the Internet start-up he co-founded with friends from college in the beautiful Pasadena, California. He can be reached at erik@minklabs.com. Erik would like to thank Victoria Barber, Alexander Jacobs, and Ryan Witt for their help to edit and refine the article.