Google is ... Soylent Green!

Saul Hansell of the New York Times reveals that Google has people in its magic black box. Aha! The great mechanical brain turns out to be a mechanical Turk.

While this is news, it's long been known that harvesting human judgment is at the core of Google's approach to making information findable. The heart of the Google algorithm -- a consideration of the number, and nature, inbound links to a Web resource -- does that. Google News essentially distills the collective judgment of thousands of editors, most from "mainstream media," and uses that data to drive its automated placement of stories and photos.

Google's algorithms undoubtedly are highly complex, but there is, at this point, no self-awareness, no real intelligence, no Sky
net living inside what may be the planet's biggest computer network. Not so far, anyway. We hope.