EXA

Exa is six orders of magnitude above tera.

Most Sun readers know about gigabytes and megabytes. But it’s estimated that in the year 2002 we created five exabytes (that’s a byte followed by 18 noughts) of information. |Link|

I have trouble imagining that amount of data. I’m sure Eric Schmidt does too, but to him its just a mountain of rough diamonds waiting to be polished by Google. And his plans look, well, ambitious.

And then there’s my dream product — I call it serendipity.It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you’re typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point.

This would be good for journalists and politicians too!

Impossible you might say. But I’m an optimist about human nature.

History has proven that we have the ability and ingenuity to solve problems and improve our lives if only we are given the freedom to do so.

And that’s exactly what the Internet does.

Sounds innocent and helpful enough, but Schmidt clearly means this as a kind of political watchdog.

He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper. |link|

Combine this with GooglePAC, and you have the biggest name on the Internet looking to take on Washington.

Now, I don’t want to disturb my fanbase here, but I have to say that I’m not as optimistic about these possibilities as Schmidt. If a politician knows that he is being rabidly fact-checked not just by some watchdog group but by the collective intelligence of Internet in real time, the chances that he’ll respond by increasing the level of political discourse is very small. Its much more plausible to think that this will push the level of debate even further (!) down. It puts pressure on the politicians to play to a wide, not deep, and to keep the topics on abstract intangibles that can’t be checked or even concretely interpreted by man or machine.

As much as I love television, it has seriously hurt political discourse in this country. Political discussion on the internet is still in its infancy (to the point of being almost quaint) and it will be a long time before it matures. It will take even longer for politicians to understand the internet well enough to turn it into the new town hall. Politicians must realize that when you speak on the internet you are not speaking to a single audience but to multiple, well-entrenched audiences, each with their own concerns and hobby horses, and who chatter about it all nonstop. Pandering to any one of these groups, and worst of all to the least common denominator, makes you look foolish, especially when they are being scrutinized by the brightest AI we have today.

The solution is obvious: say thoughtful things about important issues and be good to your word, and you’ll gain respect even from those that disagree. But the high road is never the easy one.