With its Search products Google is already shaping the Western World views and culture in subtle ways not everybody's noticing. In doing that, almost always in a purely algorithmic way without human intervention, the "evil" threshold has been passed many times. Again, without anyone really noticing.
In other words, it was an old motto already.
It is always with human intervention - whoever controls the ranking algorithm controls the display results. That's power of Google. Simple change of ranking algorithm can drop some website's traffic by 80%-90% for good or bad.
It is with human intervention, so please consider it far more evil.
Each individual search is of course determined algorithmically, but the criteria for relevance that the algorithm applies are chosen by Google employees.
The Guardian's headline is very misleading. Google's mission statement is not "don't be evil" - it's "to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Larry Page is clearly referring to the mission statement that may need to change, not "Don't be evil." This is all made very clear in the original FT article The Guardian cites, they just chose to go for a more inaccurate and salacious framing of the entire story. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3173f19e-5fbc-11e4-8c27-00144...
"Don't be evil" is the corporate motto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
That's a very difficult motto to change. Removing it would mean "we're free to do evil now" and that won't be received well. Anyway, I wonder if is there anyone left who thinks Google is still faithful to their motto.
> Removing it would mean "we're free to do evil now"
It's a subtle distinction, but the motto is "don't be evil", not "don't do evil." The former allows you to do evil things in service to noble purposes. For example, "don't do evil" would have required the company to shut down services rather than sharing information with the NSA. "Don't be evil" allowed them to balance that evil action against the good created by those services to realize a net-positive societal benefit from offering those services.
Yes, me too and knowing that I never wrote "don't be evil" on the door of my house. Google did it and they put themselves in the position of having to be more moral than anyone else, to everybody.
Given that the robotics part is from the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, who aim to make robots for the US military, some people would disagree with that summary. It's a long way from "don't be evil" to "we're a defense contractor".
Now that Boston Dynamics is part of Google they will finish their existing military contracts and then no longer take on military customers.
"Google told the Times it will honor Boston Dynamics’ existing contracts, including a $10.8 million deal with DARPA to develop its Atlas prototype for potential humanitarian use in disasters like the Fukushima meltdown. But Google added that it does not plan to become a military contractor itself."
They really haven't taken over the world, but they have run out of relatively low hanging fruit to attack.
As gets pointed out a lot, their fundamental problem is an allergy to business models which involve humans in the workflow, and this will continue to be their problem as they simply haven't learned how to deal with people properly.
I suspect a lot of the difficult world problems relate to poverty. The first job of "real" AI should be to better employ the under employed.
Google (along with other highly successful companies) should provide the work environment and training programs for people in the 3rd world that will allow them to earn enough to become customers of 1st world businesses; similar to the way china buys US bonds that enable the US to buy chinese products. I think the first job of the 3rd world worker should be to transform their environment to 1st world standards.
This will be extremely challenging. For example, there aren't enough resources to make the 3rd world into the 1st world. Those are the problems that google should hire 3rd world workers to solve.
