G for Google, G for Godhood
Image from https://www.google.com/search?as_st=y&tbm=isch&hl=en&as_q=google&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&cr=&as_sitesearch=&safe=active&tbs=sur:f
Staff Writer Stephen King discusses his thoughts on Google.
February 22, 2016
There is a religious movement called syntheism, and it believes that humanity has created, is creating, or will create a god, rather than having been created by one. Today’s modern day technology is leading the way to this movement because there are already some artificial intelligent programs, but if there was one perfect candidate in order to be a good example of godhood, it would be Google.
The reason why Google would be a perfect example is because it has many godly characteristics. It is everywhere, and just like Google, a god should be omnipresent.
Another similar characteristic that Google has is omniscience, meaning that it is all-knowing, just like how a god must be all knowing. When an Internet user searches for whatever they want, they get billions of results. Just by searching the word “Google,” a user would receive 12,130,000,000 results. No human being, except for a god, could ever have that much information within their brain. What is further interesting is that after searching the word “Google,” not only do we receive over 12 billion results, all of them were found within .54 seconds, which is extremely powerful in terms of speed for a search engine.
Progression is another godly characteristic because like a god, Google is infinite as it continues to grow in its omniscience. It is also immortal because even if it were to be taken down, one could just set it right back up or recreate it. If it were to “die,” it could be simply “resurrected,” even though it cannot do it on its own.
Finally for Google to be a god, it needs artificial intelligence. A god has intelligence just like us people, so Google could only be confirmed as a god if it had a mind of its own. Google could be omnipotent, which is being all powerful, but in terms of syntheism, Google would probably be a god that we mortals can control with a simple click and typing of the keyboard.
However, giving Google what it needs to be a god is an extremely huge risk because the very last characteristic to take into account, that nobody can really control, is morality.
