Google, the genie of our future, tells us what to do

I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable - before his malfunction. But HAL was a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand axe, with which we chop our way through the densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to bot.