"The pace of change in technology is so much faster now," Wong said. "Instead of a generation, or even years, we are seeing breakthrough technologies emerging in the space of months." Social norms have a hard time keeping pace.
Indeed, its embrace of the primacy of data over human judgment, in everything from its search algorithm to its attempts to turn hiring into a science, gives some people the creeps. Listen to a talk that Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, gave in 2002 at Stanford. He said Google aims to turn the technology behind its search engine into a true artificial intelligence that could "answer any question, which means you can do basically anything." The audience laughed tentatively, perhaps thinking of the ai in the movie The Terminator that tries to wipe out humanity. If Google succeeds in its mission, Page added with a grin, "then we're doing everything."