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Sheep Talk at Google

Last week I drove down the peninsula to Google HQ for the first time. Well, sort of..... rewind a short 15 years to 1991 when I worked as a summer intern at SGI (apparently still not dead yet) and lived on Rengstorff. Every day I bicycled to work on Amphitheatre Parkway past the garbage dump and empty fields which would be developed by SGI and years later bought by Google. This was well before the bubble when I was just starting to think about the future and the big picture. This was my first introduction to California culture (thank you Nick, Don, and Steve). Ok.... as I consider them the years stretch, and time recedes.

Fastforward to the present. John Hawkins, a Google engineer and Electric Sheep user invites me to speak at Google. Of course I accept. I feel a profound affinity for Google. Of course I am an enthusiastic user from day one.... as are many. Beyond that I draw a parallel between the sheep and google: their spiders read the babble of the net and run all pages through an algorithm to derive Truth. The Sheep similarly listen to the voting of the audience and use a genetic algorithm to derive Beauty. Hello Web 2.0. Hello Noosphere.

Watch the presentation here. Thanks John. Posted by spot at September 25, 2006 02:39 AM