trying to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual. [snip](Note: one zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes.)
Factual’s plan, outlined in a big orange room with a few tables and walled with whiteboards, is to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds. The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs. Factual, which now has 50 employees, could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.
In the old days (i.e., when I was a kid) one sign of intelligence was the ability to do math problems in one's head. Calculators eliminated that advantage. Another sign of intelligence was the ability to remember facts, a talent that, in the age of the Google, is about as useful as a buggy whip or butter churn.
Higher-order intelligence includes the ability to recognize situations, retrieve applicable facts, and act to produce a desired result. We laud geniuses for their inspiration in employing facts and ideas that were apparently unrelated to solving the problem at hand (or even problems that we didn't know we had).
If Mr. Elbaz even partially succeeds, his mountain of facts and ability to make connections among them could make him the most powerful man in the world. I hope that he, even more than the company that he once worked for, takes to heart that organization's motto: "Don't be evil."
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