Welcome to Google Island | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird. The last thing I remembered was being in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wrapping up a four-hour Google I/O keynote liveblogging session. My last recollection was of Google CEO Larry Page taking questions from the audience and promoting a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms.

“I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out,” he had said. “What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world.”

I realized I was the only one aboard, and the boat was driving itself.

It hit the shore at first light, approaching from a perfect angle that allowed the sun to just peek out over the back of the island. I hopped over the side, and watched as the boat slowly put itself into reverse, turned, and headed back out to sea.

“Hello.”

The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.

“Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said. “Here, drink this. You’re slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose.”

I was taken aback. “How did you…” I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.

“As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn’t speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.”

I was thirsty, so I drank the electrolyte solution down. “This is delicious,” I replied.

“I know,” he replied. “It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream.”

“What… ” I stammered.

“Your prostate is enlarged. Let’s go hangout now. There’s some really great music I’d like to recommend to you.”

We walked across the sand to a small gazebo, shaded by palms, where the beach met the forest. Two comfortable chairs faced the ocean. I watched the boat make its way towards the horizon, and noticed something odd on the beach.

“Larry, there’s only one set of footprints. How did…”

“You are with my Google Being. I’m not physically here, but I am present. Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked. Sure, Google Now could tell you what to do. But Google Being will literally do it for you.

“My Google Being anticipates everything I would think, everything I would want to say or do or feel,” Larry explained. “Everywhere I would go. Years of research have gone into this. It is in every way the same as me. So much so that my physical form is no longer necessary. It was just getting in the way, so we removed it. Keep in mind that for now at least, Google Being is just a developer product.”

The Being was flawless. Utterly human. The three dimensional image, he tells me, was automatically stitched together from millions of photos. Proprietary algorithms ensure that it ages appropriately over time, although it will never wrinkle, he tells me, thanks to an automatic skin softening feature.

There was a sudden puff of smoke and a bang. I winced and found myself staring a person whose skin appeared to be inside out. The thing made a muffled noise that sounded vaguely like “moh jit” and vanished in another cloud of oily smoke. Larry waved his hand at the apparition.

“Don’t worry. That’s just Sergei experimenting with teleportation, his latest X project. Google X is focused on atoms, not bits. Sergei’s having a great time doing that. Also, it keeps him out of my hair. Shall we?”

A car arrived, and we got in the back seat. There were actually no front seats, or steering wheel, or front window, or any of the usual navigation systems. It drove us towards the island’s center, as Larry continued to explain my new surroundings to me.

“We learned so much about regulation with Google Health. It turns out, the government has rules about health records, and that people care about these rules for some reason. So we began looking around for ways to avoid regulation. For example, government regulation meant it was much easier to experiment with white space in Kenya than in the United States. So we started thinking: What if the entire world looked more like Kenya? Or, even better, Somalia? Places where there are no laws. We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with some of our old institutions like the law. We aren’t keeping up with the rate of change we caused through technology. If you look at the laws we have, they’re very old. A law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet. Here, put on these glasses.”

I did, and suddenly, my vision was filled with tentacle porn.

“Go ahead, watch” said Page’s Being. “I won’t judge you, I never have. I merely document, filter and suggest. Based on your history, we know you are interested in cephalopods. This is just a new direction. Enjoy yourself.”

“But I just wanted to learn more after visiting the aquarium! I don’t want this,” I stammered, removing the glasses.

“Sure you do, you just aren’t aware of that yet. For many years now, we’ve looked at everything you’ve looked at online. Everything. We know what you want, and when you want it, down to the time of day. Why wait for you to request it? And in fact, why wait for you to discover that you even want to request it? We can just serve it to you.”

The car stopped, and we got out on an airstrip. Tens of thousands of drones sat on the tarmac. Possibly hundreds of thousands. All of them equipped with cameras.

“You’ve heard about our fleet of planes,” said Page’s Being. “That was just a start. What we needed to effectively see everything, everywhere, at once, was a complete air force. So we built one. You are wondering why they aren’t in the air, I know. It’s because of this.”

He opened his hand and dozens of robotic bugs crawled out and swarmed over his arm and body.

“These are Google Spiders. They’ve crawled the entire island, and now we’re ready to release them globally. We’re sending them everywhere, so that we can make a 3D representation of the entire planet, and everyone on it. We aren’t just going to recreate the planet, though–we’re going to make it better.”

“Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, if a majority public opinion made something right, we would still have Jim Crow laws and Google Reader. We believe we can fix the world’s problems with better math. We can tear down the old and rebuild it with the new. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine it photorealistic, and now imagine yourself living there, or at least, your Google Being living there. We already have the information. All we need is an invitation. This is the inevitable and logical end point of Google Island: a new Google Earth.”

And I realized I believed him. I believed in him, even. Sure, he’s a weird guy living in his own world. But what vision! And I wanted Google to make my world look like its own. And I wanted to give it all my information, about everything in my life, even my most private shameful thoughts.

I put the glasses back on, and took off my pants. We stood, naked, before each other with no secrets, no rules, and no shame. And I knew I never wanted to leave Google Island. Even if I could.