Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  And what would your objection be?

  My objection would be that we don’t do slavery.

  So I’ve noticed. But what if I could get away with it? What if it were the custom in my land, and nobody gave any thought at all to enslaving others, most especially if they were barbarians,30 and so, even though you don’t do slavery in the San Francisco Bay Area, I saw nothing wrong with it and had the means to get away with it? Would you have something to tell me about why it was wrong nevertheless?

  What, are you kidding me? I asked him.

  Not at all. Would you have something to say to try to appeal to my sense of right and wrong?

  I think I’d have a thing or two to say. First off, I’d say just who are you to call anyone a barbarian? One person’s barbarian is another person’s brother. And second, I’d say what gives you or anybody the right to take anybody else as a slave, even if you somehow think that he or she is a barbarian? Barbarians have just as much a right to live as you do. What possible difference does barbarian or not even make? What difference does anything you can say about a person make in terms of whether you’re allowed to make them your slave? A person is a person. Everybody’s life is just as important as anybody else’s, and if you don’t know this simple truth for yourself, then just go ask them.

  Brava, Plato said softly, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell if he was teasing me or not. I mean, he’s impressed because I know that slavery is wrong? So I asked him again, What, are you kidding me?

  Not in the least, he said. That was magnificent, he said, as if he really meant it. And then he repeated what I’d just said, word for word, as if this were some kind of revelation. A person is a person, everybody’s life is just as important as anybody else’s.

  Well, listen, Rhonda, I like to be showered with compliments as much as the next person, but frankly this was ridiculous, which is what I told him. Who doesn’t know a person is a person? I said to him.

  You’d be surprised, he answered me. There is so much you take for granted now, far more than is stored, I begin to suspect, in the information-clouds of Google. There are treasures of hard-earned knowledge stored right there in your view of the world.

  And you’re going to argue, Marcus piped up at this point, that all this amazing stuff that’s now stocked in Cheryl’s mind, in the aisle labeled “morality,” like in a modern convenience store, was imported there by you philosophers.

  But I just finished telling you, I explained patiently, that I never took a philosophy course. Anything that’s amazing in my mind—and frankly I can’t see what’s so amazing about anything I’ve just said—didn’t get there because of the fifty minutes I heard some philosopher drone on about valid and invalid arguments.

  You go, girl, Marcus said to me. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not, but, given the general tendency of the guy, I figured he was.

  I have as much right to my opinion here as anyone else, I said. In fact I have more right, since what we’re discussing is how what’s in my mind got there.

  I couldn’t agree with you more, Marcus said, and this time I could tell he was sincere. I think you’re right on target with your skepticism. You’ve got the right intuitions there. Do you mind if I run with them a little?

  Be my guest, I said, because I’m going to tell you something, Rhonda. Having to answer Plato’s questions is exhausting. The guy is like the Energizer Bunny when it comes to asking questions. Oh, and I ought to mention that right around now there was a little commotion because two Googlers had shown up to take my author on his tour, and I could see that he was really torn. He was involved in the kind of conversation that, you could see, he just lives for. I mean you could see it was his life’s blood. But he was also eager to get an insider’s look at the Googleplex. That whole cloud idea had caught his fancy for some reason. Before I had wanted him to skip the tour, since I thought it would be exhausting for him, but then the kind of conversation he was intent on having was every bit as exhausting, at least for me. He asked me if it would be possible to take the tour after he gave his Authors@Google talk. No, I told him, that’s out of the question, since that’s when you’re signing the books. He was all for skipping the book signing, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen on my watch. When it comes to that sort of thing then I’m the one who has to be the tyrant, since I answer to the publishers, and believe me, they keep track of how their authors do with the various media escorts, comparing our sale records with one another. Marcus tipped the balance by telling Plato again that not only did he want to challenge his view but he could also explain the way that Google works, the way the search engine is able to deliver the right information to people with such accuracy.

  You’re not going to get that on a tour of the Googleplex, he told Plato, since the answers you’re looking for lie in the sphere of abstraction, which, of course, is right up your alley.

  With that, Plato was so happy that he actually allowed himself a real smile, not just the hint of one, and I sent the tour guides, who seemed genuinely disappointed, on their way. Apparently, they were big fans of Plato’s, too. Go figure.

  Plato got right down to business, asking Marcus what were the points he wanted to challenge.

  Okay, let me just reiterate the major points that have emerged so far, at least as I see them, Marcus said. You assume that if there’s knowledge, especially if it’s non-trivial knowledge that’s difficult to come by, then those who have the knowledge are the few, the experts in that knowledge. Is that right?

  Yes, Plato said. That this is so seems to me almost a tautology.

  We shall see, said Marcus. Okay, then you also assume that there is such a thing as knowledge about how we ought to live our lives, that it’s not just a matter of personal preference or cultural norms, say, and that this knowledge is non-trivial and hard to come by. Am I right?

  Yes, Plato said. It must certainly be non-trivial, since so many people get it wrong, living lives that are almost at a Charlie Sheen level of ass-dumbness.

  He didn’t! I said to Cheryl.

  He did. Repeated me word for word. Even Marcus had to all-out laugh, instead of snicker. Okay then, Marcus went on. So then the implication of these two assumptions is that if anybody has this knowledge—and I suppose it’s consistent with your two assumptions that nobody has it—but if, in fact, anyone has this knowledge, it can only belong to those who have managed to think their way to it. Am I right?

  Yes, said Plato.

  So, according to you, this knowledge is something like mathematical knowledge. It’s just as objective, its truth not determined by personal preferences or societal norms, and it’s just as non-trivial and difficult to access, being a matter of reasoning.

  Yes, said Plato. I agree to all of this. In fact, I would go further and claim that it is not only like mathematical reasoning but that mathematics itself goes into the knowledge.

  Okay, Marcus said, but let’s just stick with the weaker proposition, for the purpose of my refuting you.

  Yes, agreed Plato. That makes dialectical sense.

  Okay, Marcus said, and then took several moments to breathe. He was, as my mother used to put, overexcited. Okay, he said again. What all of this implies, as Cheryl was quick to point out, is that only those who are gifted in reasoning can discover how we ought to live. There’s no other way to access these truths, meaning that non-philosophical people who can’t follow philosophical arguments have to accept the conclusions from the philosophers.

  Yes, said Plato. Hence the enormous obligations to others that philosophers have.

  Including obligations to tell others how they should be living, to legislate morals for them.

  Not in every respect, no, since as was also pointed out by Cheryl, there are many matters that lie entirely in the sphere of personal or cultural preferences. And many such decisions, which are therefore entirely a matter for an individual to decide for himself or herself or to let society decide for him or her, will help to make for a life
worth living. So that, for example, if I am of such a nature that I need to test my manhood—I hope it is not sexist to mention manhood in this context, he asked, looking at me.

  Why don’t you just say test your courage? I said to him. Women test their courage, too.

  Yes, you’re right. If I am of such a nature that I need to test my courage by taking repeated risks, then I am free to do so insofar as the risks I take do not involve any moral transgressions. A great deal of the substance of a life worth living is made up of decisions of this sort.

  But not all of them, Marcus prodded.

  No, not all of them, Plato agreed.

  And these are the contributions to a life worth living that the philosophically unintelligent can’t decide for themselves, but must instead turn the decision over to the philosophically intelligent.

  Not quite, said Plato. Nobody, the philosophically intelligent any more than the philosophically non-intelligent, can decide these matters for himself—or herself—since there are objective facts of the matter. Those who can access such knowledge are no more able to change the facts of how we are to live than anybody else. Like everybody else, they must abide by them. The one difference is that they are able to discover, through the special talents and training that are theirs, what the facts are. So they are not imposing their personal will on others, any more than mathematicians are imposing their wills on others by informing non-mathematicians what the mathematical truths are. They are simply sharing their knowledge with others, knowledge that others cannot access for themselves, lacking the requisite cognitive skills, a matter both of talent and training. This seems to me no more unfair than that the mathematically intelligent share their knowledge of mathematics with the mathematically unintelligent. So, for example, you, as a software engineer, possess considerable mathematical intelligence, I would assume.

  Yes, Marcus said, I suppose you could say that.

  And by working here at the Googleplex, Plato said, you are able to provide the benefits of your mathematical intelligence to others who are lacking this kind of intelligence, who make use of your powerful search engine while simply regarding it as techno-magic.

  The difference, Marcus said, is that not everybody believes himself to be good in math or even cares to be. In fact, only those who are, in fact, good in math give a hoot about whether they’re good at it or not. But everybody cares about living his life well and has strong views about how best to do it. And if you tell him that he’s just lacking the cognitive ability to figure it out for himself, he’s going to have some harsh words for you.

  That is exactly right, Plato said. This is a way in which philosophical skill is entirely different from all others. When someone thinks that he or she has great talent at, say, the flute, when in fact there is none, people either laugh at the person or are annoyed, and family members try to restrain the person as if he or she were crazy (Protagoras 323a). But all people have a stake in believing themselves masters of much of the domain of philosophy, most especially the questions of how life should be lived. To think oneself to be anything less than a master seems to diminish one’s very humanity. This is true to such an extent that a person who lays no claim to such knowledge seems not human at all (ibid. 323b). This might well be called the predicament of philosophy. For the fact that each and every person is committed to the belief that they are masters of this domain no more shows that they are indeed such masters than that…

  Yes, yes, I know, Marcus said, smiling. Than that I’m able to decide for myself whether I need the expert attentions of Dr. Kolodny.

  Precisely, answered Plato, with his suggestion of a smile. So now, which of the steps in my argument do you want to challenge?

  To tell you the truth, just about all of them, Marcus said. But since our time is limited—how long do we have? he asked me.

  Twelve more minutes, I said firmly.

  Right. So since our time is extremely limited, Marcus said, I’m going to restrict myself to only one kind of objection, and mainly because of the promise I made that I would explain something to you about the secret behind Google’s success. It just so happens that that secret provides grounds for rejecting your claim that non-trivial knowledge that can’t be gotten to by regular individuals can only be accessed by experts.

  I am intrigued, said Plato.

  Okay, well, I’ll start with Google. You know about the World Wide Web, I take it, Marcus said, which seemed a bit patronizing to me. I mean, my grandmother knows about the World Wide Web.

  I know that it contains vastnesses of information, Plato said, and that each person has a screen on which can be projected portions of that information.

  Vastnesses upon vastnesses of information, Marcus responded. The last time anybody counted, which was back in 2008, there were more than a trillion Web pages, and who can even estimate what it is by now, since we’ve been adding information by orders of magnitude. But that doesn’t even begin to calculate the amount of information that Google has in its cloud storage. The aim is to store all the world’s information, which means copying the contents of the thirty-three million books in the Library of Congress, or, even more ambitiously, if you count every pamphlet and piece of ephemera and miscellanea ever printed and in all the world’s languages, eventually approximately 129,864,880 books. It means every restaurant menu, every telephone book, the archives of newspapers and magazines, the merchandise for sale in every store. And I’m not even counting all the videos on YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, and all the pictures, including a photograph of every street corner and road on the planet, which is the plan of Google Street View, photographed in high resolution and kept as up-to-date as possible. When Google says it wants to make available all the world’s information, you should understand us quite literally.

  But getting all this information is the easy part, Marcus continued. The hard part is, given the vastness of the storage, how to scan through it all and get the user the exact bits of information that he needs—and don’t correct my sexist pronouns, Cheryl. That’s bullshit. Okay. Wait a minute. Have you actually used Google yet?

  No, Plato said. Is it hard to learn?

  There’s nothing to learn, Marcus and I both said simultaneously. Marcus pushed his Mac over in front of Plato. Just type in some word or some words. Anything you’re curious about. And, Rhonda, what do you think Plato typed in?

  I have no idea, I said to Cheryl. I’m still trying to process the information that he had never used Google.

  Yeah, she said, I know. Anyway, it was just the one word: Socrates. That was his search.

  Wow, I said.

  Yeah, Cheryl said, taking another long sip of her drink. I think even Marcus was overwhelmed by that. We were all silent for a moment as Plato just stared at the page, transfixed. I couldn’t see the page because Plato was across the table from me, but I imagine that the results included a row of images of Socrates to be found on the Web, and maybe that’s what put that expression on his face.

  Okay, Marcus said after a few moments, and I noticed that he had brought his voice down a few decibels. Let me explain a bit to you what’s going on here. The first thing to see is that there are 4,700,000 results for your query. These are all the places in Google’s storage cloud in which the word “Socrates” is mentioned. Enormous, huh? Your friend Socrates is a popular guy, even though, as you can see, some of these results are not really about him. Like here, the fourth result down is some sort of online business where you can download forms for a do-it-yourself divorce or rental agreement, and which for some reason or other named itself “Socrates.” Are you okay? Marcus asked suddenly, noticing Plato’s face, which frankly, Rhonda, I just don’t know how to describe. I mean I had used the word “stricken” before, but I just don’t know what word to use for the expression he had on his face as he was staring at the results he got by searching for Socrates.

  Plato slowly turned to look at Marcus. What do I do now? he asked quietly.

  Marcus gave me a quick glanc
e and I discreetly shook my head no. I didn’t think it was a good idea to click on any of the results because who knew what effect it would have on Plato, who, by the way, had to speak in less than fifteen minutes.

  Wait a minute, I said to Cheryl. Are you sure he wasn’t asking something else when he asked, what do I do now?

  No, I don’t think so, Cheryl said. I mean just like he said, all that traumatic stuff with Socrates was ancient history. I don’t think he was about to be having a nervous breakdown just because he Googled the guy.

  Okay, I said. Go on.

  So Marcus said, Let me just explain a bit to you what’s going on here. See the numbers here: what they tell you is that the search engine scanned through its trillion-plus Web pages and found those 4,470,000 results in 0.10 seconds. But that’s only the beginning, okay, since it’s not going to be any use to you for the search engine to just dump all those 4,470,000 results on you, right? It’s got to sort them for you, put them in a usable order, hopefully progressing from what’s likely to be the most useful to what’s least likely to be useful. That’s what the search engine has got to figure out, and Google’s search engine figures it out better than any other search engine. That was the secret of its early success. Okay. But how does it know how to do this? How can it get inside your head and try to get the information to you that you most need? Did Google hire a panel of experts, a bunch of talented scientists or mathematicians or philosophers or literary scholars to read each of the trillion Web pages out there and write a review of it, which Google used to decide whether ordinary people are going to want to see that page when they search for something? No! This is where the original genius of Google came in, the genius of discounting experts. Google has an algorithm that automatically assigns a number to every single page on the Web, a number that corresponds more or less to its usefulness, and which depends on how many other pages link to that particular page. The more links to the page, then the more useful it is, all things being equal. But, of course, all things are not equal—they rarely are, are they?—since not all of those linking pages are going to be equally important. How do we sort out which ones are? Well, by in turn ranking them in terms of how many other pages link to them. So if a page that has many pages linked to it is linked to another page, its linkage is going to count more, be more heavily weighted, than a page that doesn’t have that many links. Google’s algorithm—the simple one, the one with which it all began a decade ago, which is ancient history in this world—assigned a value to every Web page ranking its usefulness, based on the number and usefulness of the pages that linked to it. Then when you type in a word or words, Google can deliver you the results ranked in their order. Okay, you following? Sorry, of course, you are. Anyway, that was the original idea for the algorithm, but it’s gotten a lot more complicated now. There are actually a few hundred signals that the search engine is using now. And one of the most important signals is how each individual user responds to the results he gets. So if you were to click on the third result, rather than the first or second, that’s a kind of vote you’re making with your click, telling us that for you the ordering was wrong. All of the votes, in the form of hundreds of millions of users’ responses to the results they get in the order they come in, is information that goes into the algorithm that Google uses to get the information to you. There’s no expert in the system somewhere who knows anything or decides anything. Somebody once said, I can’t remember who, that when you read a really great book you feel as if it’s reading you while you’re reading it. That seems like bullshit to me—what does it even mean?—but when it comes to Google it’s really true. Google is using you while you’re using Google, using you to perfect itself.