Consilient Network· The graph of everyone who built this · Add your entry ↗
Outreach path

Google's best engineers told E. O. Wilson his wish was impossible

In December 2006 Google's most capable technical leadership told E. O. Wilson that what he wanted was impossible. They were right about every obstacle they named. This is the architecture that removes them.

7 stopsFor: Google, Alphabet, and the 2006 summit attendeesAll paths
Adam Bosworth had been Hare's mentor at Microsoft. He is the one who said it could not be done.
The path

Follow it in order

Each stop is a page in the graph. The order is an argument — but every one of them is also a door into the rest of it, so you can leave the path wherever it stops being useful.

01David Cheriton, who wrote one of Google's first cheques — and made the introductionWrote one of the first two cheques into Google — and, years earlier, introduced Hare to Andy Bechtolsheim.→02Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Google's first cheque, and gave me Bill Joy's emailWrote the other. And gave Hare Bill Joy's personal email address, which is how that thread starts.→03Both men who wrote Google's first cheques are in this recordPage and Brin walked PageRank around Stanford trying to sell it outright for about a million dollars, because nobody could see the business model in an algorithm.→04Google's top engineers told E. O. Wilson his life's wish was impossibleTwo days to architect the Encyclopedia of Life. Bosworth: impossible. Norvig: ten to twenty years and a major breakthrough.→05Adam Bosworth mentored me at Microsoft, then said it could not be doneRight about the obstacles — AI understands nothing, and the privacy problem alone makes it unreachable. Wrong only about the conclusion.→06Peter Norvig said it needed ten to twenty years and a major breakthroughAgreed, and put a number on it. Recorded without rancour: it was the correct read of what was then possible.→07E. O. Wilson gave me the commission, the foundation, and the nameWhose wish it was, and whose thesis this network is named for.→
Where it lands

What the path is for

The point

This is the most useful artifact in the entire record, and it was produced by people with no reason to help. The most capable technical organization on earth independently confirmed, on a dated occasion with witnesses, that the problem was real and unsolved. Hare already had the mechanism filed.

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