Google's Master Plan.

Tis a rare company that--because of its power to redefine entire industries--captures the attention of both Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In the 1990s, Microsoft was such a company. Now Google has reached this lofty status in record time, just seven years, and guessing what it might do next has become a global parlor game.

To answer that question, remember that the folks running Google are not exactly M.B.A.s. They are computer scientists with a taste for the fantastic and the cash to make a serious run at realizing computer science's No. 1 fantasy. That, of course, is artificial intelligence. You won't find this stated plainly in company reports, but many leading observers of science believe that Google is now the most likely crucible from which artificial intelligence might emerge.

Consider Google's core assets. First is a vast network of hundreds of thousands of computers, which serve its search service and its new ideas--e-mail with unlimited storage, satellite images of the Earth, Internet phone service. Google plans to add listings of all kinds (movies, etc.), wireless Internet access and productivity applications (think Microsoft Office). Second is AdWords, a vast network of advertisers participating in a real-time auction that is already the second largest market ever created, after the New York Stock Exchange. And third is a brand that, for now anyway, is one of the most trusted in the world.

Now apply those assets to Google's rather immodest mission: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." How does it all fit together? It's simple, really: take each core asset and scale it to infinity. This possibility is what has been generating all the recent scare headlines about Google as a rising threat to all manner of rivals in many fields, from Wal-Mart in discount retailing to eBay in auctions, Microsoft in software and the entire publishing and advertising industries.

Achieving Google's mission might be broken down into three steps. First, get everything of value into the Google index. That means the Web, but it also means all "information"--the location of your children at any moment, or the price of a box of pasta at a store in suburban Detroit. The fact is that just about anything of value can be recast as information. Then create a platform over which this information can interact (some pundits call this the Google Grid). Finally, offer a commercial environment that can price and clear all those interactions, and is universally trusted (this is where that brand name comes in).

When you look at Google's most recent moves, a clearer picture emerges. It has not only introduced Google Print and Video (with the goal of entering all books and video into the index), it has also begun testing Google Base, "a database into which you can add all types of content," and Google will make it searchable free of charge. In other words, step one is well underway. So is step two. The company's capital expenditures-the amount it spends on building out infrastructure--have increased to nearly $1 billion a year (on par with rival Microsoft, and on pace to surpass it by 2006). Google's vast computing platform is just getting started.

Step three is the subject of intense speculation: when will we see Google Wallet, a trusted system by which anyone can buy and sell anything? I'd say we already have it in AdWords. In less than a second, AdWords reads your search query, compares it with a massive database of intentions created by hundreds of thousands of marketers and comes up with the most profitable possible ad to display. Every time you click on one of those ads, Google gets paid. AdWords accounted for more than $6 billion in revenue in 2005, at an average of about 50 cents a transaction. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says his goal is to make AdWords a platform that allows every single item--worldwide--that might be for sale to be found, then matched with a buyer. Sure, it's complicated. But Google already views the AdWords system as "one of the most sophisticated artificial-intelligence systems ever built," according to a recent New York Times article.

And there you have it--the connection between raw commerce and science fantasy. Another clue comes from author George Dyson. On a recent visit to the Google campus, Dyson asked about Google Print and Google Library--the company's controversial programs to scan every book on the planet. Given lawsuits from authors and publishers, was Google going too far? "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained Dyson's unidentified host. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI." That's AI as in artificial intelligence--be it AdWords or, perhaps, something else, something that might arise from the incalculable complexity of an infinitely scaled computing system.

PHOTO (COLOR): THE CRUCIBLE: One of the meeting rooms at Google

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By John Battelle

Battelle is author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Reinvented Business and Transformed Our Culture."