Is Google Good?

TCS 12/16/04 Is Google God? By James Pinkerton
http://www.techcentralstation.com/121604H.html

So to the question, once again: "Is Google God?"
The answer, of course, is "no." If anything, we are the gods. "Man created the Internet" will be the beginning of some future book of genesis. And all of us created Google and the info-sea in which it swims. Yet as we look down at that brainy deep, we see everything in that new realm. We observe good and evil, the gloriousness and ghastliness of our old world, all of it recapitulated in our new online world. Yup, everything is therein, from the greatest flights of intellectual comprehension to the lowest depths of pornographic degradation.

The Net has made us more powerful -- much more powerful, infinitely more powerful. But we still must fear our own strength. We must be humble. And for lessons on humility we can turn to many sources, most notably history, which teaches the powerful and the proud stern lessons about folly and falling.

Which sounds about right. The Net, and now Google, have made us bigger, but not necessarily better. And bigger, if it means bigger weapons and bigger appetites for destruction, is worse. So even as we feel wonder at our achievements, we must feel pity for our future if we aren't wise. And above all, we must never think that we are gods, beyond challenge, beyond mistakes, beyond the potential for destruction and self-destruction.