March 2008
Peter Norvig is the Director of Research for Google
Futurist: If there was one key breakthrough in AI that would radically change the way people think about it that was printed, on the front page of the New York Times, what would the headline read?
Norvig: That's a hard one. It would have to do something that people care about. It could be winning a prize competition, there's various turning prizes. It could be a product. I guess that's why they call it the Singularity, because you don't know what it's going to be.
Futurist: You do a lot of work with language, how has your experience as director of Google affected your appreciation of how technology change the way people think, speak and write?
Norvig: I certainly believe language is critical to the way we think. Not necessarily in the Worphian way, but in the way we can form abstractions and think more carefully. The brain was meant for doing visual processing primarily. A large portion of the cortex for that; it wasn't meant for doing abstract reasoning. The fact that we can do abstract reasoning is an amazing trick; we're able to do it because of language. We invent concepts and give them names and that lets us do more with the concept because we can move it around on paper. Language derives all our thinking. How is that changing as a result of search engine technology? We now have access to so much more. We now have an expectation that if you have a question, it's resolvable in the amount of time that's worth it. It used to be, you would have a question, you would have to consider, 'Gee, I have to go to the library, it's going to take me half an hour to get there, another half an hour to go through the stacks. Is answering this question worth it? For most questions the answer is no. For the important things you still go through that process. Now, it's 'it's going to take me ten minutes to do this search. So there's a much lower barrier, and more things you're willing to find out. There's a change in what you have to memorize vs. what you know you can get on demand.
Futurist: There's a downside to this, embodied in Christine Rosen's term "ego-casting" which is the narrow pursuit of one's personal interests online. A lot of people say that search-engine technology and the internet enables more people to do this, the fault of course being not with the technology but with the whims of the people who use that technology. How do you see future breakthroughs mitigating or meliorating that, or is even possible because it's a flaw that's unique to humans?
Norvig: I do see a trend in that way. In many cultures, people have elected to have practices that tie things together. So, you have your traditions, stories, and myths that everybody learns. In some cultures you have a universal school curriculum, where everybody learns the same thing. In other cultures you have hit TV shows that everybody watches. So there's a shared sense of "I know this," and "I'm attracted to people that now the same thing." The internet allows you to go broader. But I don't necessarily see that as isolating or egotistical, because you're still connecting to other people. By definition, if you saw it on the Internet, its because someone else wrote it. It's just that you're connecting with a smaller group, not necessarily physically close by.
Futurist: Considering that 50% of high school seniors can't tell the difference between an objective Web site and a biased source, what avenue is there to preserve and empower critical thinking skills in the wake of this extremely convenient and efficient technology that does, in many ways, a lot of the thinking for you.
Norvig: I think that is important, I don't know the statistics, but I agree that that's a problem. Kids have good skills in finding answers but poor skills in telling the difference between The New York Times and the Onion. What can you do about that? I think part of it is education. We're used to teaching reading writing and arithmetic, now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school and so-on. Some of it could be just-in-time education, search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.
Futurist: What do you see as the key breakthrough that has to occur in order for AGI to be fulfilled in some recognizable way?
Norvig: I don't think we know enough. If we knew that answer we would be working on that problem. I think there's lots of possibilities. In the meantime, we should let lots of different groups work in different things.
This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker.