Andrew Keen: Will life on planet Google be a nightmare or a dream?

Is Google good or is it evil? Is the company an all-knowing behemoth that is hubristically "transforming our lives", Big Brother-style, with its intrusive technology? Or is it a plucky, selfless Silicon Valley start-up that is "audaciously" organising all the world's information for all of our benefit? Is Google Orwell or is it Disney?

The answer might depend on whether you trust the marketing instincts of English or American publishers. Last week, I was in London to do a debate at the ICA with the New York Times reporter and prolific Silicon Valley-based author Randall Stross, who has just written a highly informative and strictly unbiased new book called Planet Google. His main point is that Google – through its ubiquitous search engine artificial algorithm, Google Earth and Google Sky maps, G-mail email service, YouTube videos, Google Book Search, Google's Android mobile phone, and myriad other knowledge initiatives – has one simple goal: to manage all the world's information. Stross even notes that Dr Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and PhD-in-chief, has done the maths and concluded that it will take the company exactly 300 years to index and search all the information in the world.

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Does Stross argue that this makes Google good or evil? It depends whether you buy Planet Google in the US or the UK. In America, the book (published by Free Press) comes with the cheerful subtitle, "One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know"; while its British publisher (Atlantic Books) have given the same book the ominous subtitle, "How One Company is Transforming Our Lives". Identical book, identical author, identical information – but an entirely different vibe about what Google's really up to.

The truth -- and even on planet Google there remain truths – is that Google's greed for knowledge is both thrillingly audacious and terrifyingly threatening. Google is, in fact, an Orwell-Disney co-production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101, then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at the click of a mouse, know all there is to know about ourselves, our neighbours and the world.

Is this what we've always wanted, or what we've always feared? Is planet Google a nightmare or a dream?

According to Stross, Google is beyond good and evil. He explains that the numerati at Google are meticulously organising their mission to become organisers of all the world's information. Schmidt has worked out that between 2 and 3 per cent of today's information is searchable – but that in 300 years time, 100 per cent will have been sorted and indexed by Google. By 2308, we really will be living on planet Google. I am both relieved and rather miffed that I won't be around to observe this.