CADIE

Every year, millions of people play pranks on their friends, family, and co-workers as part of April Fool's Day (incidentally, the day after my birthday -- phew, that was close!) The pranks range from simple to the cruel and elaborate. However, I'm most drawn to the large-scale pranks, such as those carried out by NPR, that don't cause any physical or psychological harm -- while still fooling the masses.

While I didn't get pranked myself this past April Fool's, I did check the Google blog several times throughout the day, anticipating Google's yearly tradition of announcing a new, fake tool. (Given Google's out-of-the-box thinking and rapid rate of development, I've certainly taken these "tools" seriously before.) And I wasn't disappointed: yesterday, Google introduced CADIE, an eerily HALesque "Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity" which associated itself with the image of a panda. Of course, CADIE was much more than a panda -- as posts from her (now-removed) blog revealed, she was growing in both intelligence and maturity, surpassing her creators in a single day. As the Google blog ominously concluded, "It seems CADIE has a mind of her own..."

In a matter of hours, CADIE found some improvement to make for nearly every Google tool, such as Brain Search for your phone and making Chrome available in 3D. Though I already knew that this was an April Fool's Day prank, I wondered how someone would take these "developments" seriously -- the notion of a computer (or CADIE) running the world seems so outdated, the stuff of mid-century sci-fi. Even for someone who had forgotten it was April Fool's Day, the whole thing seemed a little ridiculous.

As I thought more about it, I realized that our generation seems more concerned with how other people behave. Our class discussion on the digitization of medical records, for example, revealed that we worry about the government and large corporations far more than we worry about some sentient computer. It's important to keep in mind that with any user-based technology (such as Google), the most significant factor is the users themselves.