Google’s Amit ‘Mr. Search’ Singhal talks Knowledge Graph, says that Star Trek was an early influencer

In a great story from the Guardian, Amit Singhal talks about the Knowledge Graph and Google’s moves to create the Semantic Web. While the whole article is worth a read, I found the following passage interesting…

Google’s Mr Search, Amit Singhal, has likewise come a long way to get here. He started out in a village in Uttar Pradesh in India, in a home that for the first eight years of his life possessed no screen at all. When one arrived in 1977, a black-and-white television, it carried for Singhal, he tells me, all the magic of prophecy. “There were two kinds of programmes,” he recalls. “Programming for local farmers and reruns of American series such as Star Trek.” You don’t really have to think too hard to imagine which of these programmes Singhal chose.

“I watched way too much Star Trek, to the extent that I could remember episodes by heart,” he recalls with a laugh, “and I deeply believe now that shaped my thinking. The fascination with flying through galaxies and talking to a computer that could answer any question was always there for me. But of course I never imagined those problems would begin to be solved in my lifetime at all.”

It is interesting to see what “Star Trek” innovations are being solved now and which are still too far off to even imagine really being solved.