William Gibson: We never imagined that AI would be like this

William Gibson, primary philosopher and poet laureate of cyberspace, had an op-ed published in The New York Times recently, where he writes of a force almost beyond comprehension, "a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world." This is artificial intelligence unlike any we have seen, an organ of global human perception in which we are both the surveilled and the surveillant, what is in essence "a post-geographical, post-national super-state." And what is this force called? That's right: Google.