I use Google, the biggest search engine on the Internet, just about every day, as I am sure you do.
I don't even look up phone numbers in a book anymore. It is faster to "Google it." No wonder the
founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are the toast of Silicon Valley. They have also been
named "Men of the Year" by the Financial Times.
Technology is a wonderful thing. I am glad to be alive in this age and have access to the Internet,
computers and all the wonders the microchip has brought to our world. The promise this technology holds
for us is in many ways immeasurable. This massive computing power applied to the challenges facing our
world holds out hope that solutions can be found that will improve the everyday lives of the world's
poor.
Technology is being harnessed to prepare for a possible avian flu outbreak. A supercomputer at Los
Alamos, New Mexico, is running simulations showing how fast and in what patterns an outbreak would
spread. The hope is to quickly get a handle on a coming outbreak and lessen the overall impact. Can it
be done? Possibly. One certainly hopes so.
Back to the inventors of Google. Brin and Page are in their early 30s and filled with energy and
ambition. They have gone against the grain of computing to get this far. Their goal with their search
engine seems to be to rival the human brain in speed and capacity.
A Financial Times article quotes Brin saying that the human brain is "proof of how [search]
can be better." This slice of biological computing power is "very easy to use, in a sense, and it's very
quick, and it's much faster than the way human/computer interactions work today ... So it's clear
there's no inherent ceiling we're hitting upon" (Dec. 23, 2005, p. 13). Can a computer search engine
match the power of the human brain? What kind of world would that create?
I have a deep concern whenever I read such boasts from science. Because humanity achieves what was
once impossible, it is increasingly impressed by what its hands have made and less impressed by what
God's hands have made.
