“Your wish is impossible” — December 2006
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A two-day meeting at Google, hosted by Larry Brilliant, to architect E. O. Wilson's Encyclopedia of Life after his TED Prize win. Jonathan Hare attended as chairman of the technical advisory board of the E. O. Wilson Foundation.
In the room: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Adam Bosworth, Peter Norvig, Larry Brilliant, Jeffrey Sachs, Wilson himself.
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The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Wilson described what he wanted: all of life's information, unified, decentralized, privacy-respecting. Adam Bosworth — Hare's own former mentor at Microsoft — said it was impossible: AI understands nothing, and the privacy problem alone made it unreachable. Peter Norvig agreed, and put it at ten to twenty years minimum plus a major breakthrough.
Hare already knew how to do it. The Consilience Initiative specification had been written in February 2007's precursor work and the mechanism filing dated to 2003. The summit is therefore a dated artifact in which the most capable technical leadership on earth independently confirmed the problem was real and unsolved — which is exactly the corroboration a claim of this kind needs, supplied by people with no reason to help.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Mentor at Microsoft — and the man who said it could not be done
Open →agreedTen to twenty years, and a major breakthrough
Open →hostedHosted the summit
Open →whose wish it wasThe commission, the foundation, and the name
Open →the same paradox, in healthcareThe identity paradox, in healthcare
Open →whose wish it wasThe foundation agreed in 2000, real by 2006 — Hare chaired its technical advisory board, and its wish was the Encyclopedia of Life
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-169The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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