Slashdot Mirror
How Google Is Becoming an Extension of Your Mind
An anonymous reader writes "An article at CNET discusses Google's ever-expanding role in search, and where it's heading over the next several years. The author argues it's becoming less of a discrete tool and more an integrated extension of our own minds. He rattles off a list of pie-in-the-sky functions Google could perform, which would have sounded ridiculous a decade ago. But in 2012.. not so much. Quoting: 'Think of Google diagnosing your daughter's illness early based on where she's been, how alert she is, and her skin's temperature, then driving your car to school to bring her home while you're at work. Or Google translating an incomprehensible emergency announcement while you're riding a train in foreign country. Or Google steering your investment portfolio away from a Ponzi scheme. Google, in essence, becomes a part of you. Imagine Google playing a customized audio commentary based on what you look at while on a tourist trip and then sharing photo highlights with your friends as you go. Or Google taking over your car when it concludes based on your steering response time and blink rate that you're no longer fit to drive. Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged.'"
How many times a day does the average man think about sex again?
When looking at women, wearing Google glasses?
If you drive on a daily basis the car is an extension of your mind. Same goes for weapons or tools.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Good article
In time, we will come to love Colossus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)
E Proelio Veritas.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks. Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills. The with ever acclerating speed GPS killed our map reading abilities and PDAs and smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers. I could see eventually being connected to all the stored information of mankind all the time, and being able to store individual experiences cheaply will allow us to outsource most of our brain functions. But brain is not a factory where the released capacity will be put to some other use. Brain and muscle atrophy without usage. What we don't use, we lose, we don't redeploy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Indeed, proof of this is the fact that ever since man stopped hunting dinosaurs, civilisation has been on a steep decline!
Look, I hate driving almost more than anything else in the world and I can't wait to have a society where it doesn't have to be part of my life *at all*. Unfortunately, that won't happen in my life time. I think it will be at least a quarter of a century before any sort of vehicle we have does not require a *licensed* driver to be on-board. Period.
Think of Google using tracking tools, GPS location data, street-level video surveillance, analytics and pattern recognition/machine intelligence to figure out precisely where you've been, what content you've been viewing, what you've been doing, with whom you've been doing it with, and what you're spending your money on, on a 24x7x365 basis stored permanently and mined continuously for hidden behavioral patterns using server farms running MapReduce applications. And since Wall Street demands public corporations post ever-increasing earnings per share even as Google hires thousands of new employees, Google needs to find ways of monetizing that incredible hidden (to you) web of information.
Google is becoming your Big Brother.
Except for people still need to use critical thinking, really the only truly useful brain function. The problem is schools don't teach it, schools focus on teaching just the "facts" which are pretty much worthless since even today any fact you might want to know is just a Google query away.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nonsense. The brain has a huge degree of plasticity. If you have a stroke, fresh neural pathways will form and route around the damage. If you don't learn how to read an analog clock, the neurons will be used for something else instead. The idea that not being able to read a map is a form of brain damage is one of the most ludicrous things I've ever read on here.
It's analogous to developer frameworks (bear with me). Because developers can leverage stuff other devs have built, it frees them up to concentrate on higher order functions. THAT is what GPS, google search etc does for us. You should applaud it, it's what we've been doing the entire time we've been on this planet - building and building and building on layers of others knowledge and technology.
I use IXQuick for quite some time now. Google not only tried to be my brain, but my room mate, blind helper dog ("Did you mean ..."), stalker, mother and a lot more I never asked for.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
How google has made a generation forget how to use book indices. How Calculators mean the mental arithmetic is disappearing from the average person. Hope that extra mind space isn't just used to remember brand names and apps!
I would love to live in a world where we are integrated with our devices like some futuristic sci-fi story. Where we remove our hands from the wheel and the car takes over, or it automatically taxis us home when we're drunk.
I just don't think I could put that amount of trust into any corporation. With the massive amount of password leaks lately and just the general track records of greedy corporations, they would need a HUGE incentive to get me on board.
For instance, if they were transparent with their security protocols, showed that they followed them, and held themselves to a much higher standard then just the bare minimum that most corporations seem to.
Even Google which has been a pretty great company has begun it's decline and is losing it's grasp of the "Don't Be Evil" slogan. I guess they are getting to big for their own good and probably won't change their path (eg. the removal of the option to remove their tracking data on your google account, the almost forced use of G+, and the discontinuation of Google Labs).
So if somebody steals my Google Glasses, will they then proceed to run around town shouting that they're Manfred Macx, while I wander around in a functionally retarded state?
Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged.
Or to the secret service when you are criticising the government. Or to the RIAA when you make an open invitation to come and watch a video at your house (an unlicensed public performance).
Advertisements on slashdot aren't supposed to terrify me, Google.
that the butler controls the master
the advisor controls the king
the henchman controls the boss
when power and control flip between superior and underling, the power inversion is based on who has the most information, and who can therefore use control of information as a means of control, period
and google has all the information
"How Your Mind Is Becoming an Extension of Google" is the real story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hmm, HUD glasses might be great, but:
"Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged."
Maybe that phrase would be "Un Big Mac s'il vous plait"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/17/0335227/man-physically-assaulted-at-mcdonalds-for-wearing-digital-eye-glasses
How many times a day does the average man think about sex again?
pr0ntillion
When looking at women, wearing Google glasses?
Huh? What was that again?
It won't be long before a combination of AI and graphics will be able to assess the woman's body type and produce a "clothes free" enhanced reality image. .... Just don't look at Ann Widdecombe
Imagine a tool that cuts paper called scissors. You now have scissor hands. You are a monster! Imagine walking on stilts. You now have 6 foot peg legs. The horror! Imagine using a pen. You spew ink everywhere! You are a God Damned SQUID!!!
Cmon, is this a joke? Just because you have a tool, does not mean that said tool is a part of you. Let's just turn down the Kurt Vonnegut vision for a minute and cool off.
"Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills."
Really? Perhaps you're simply aware that most people don't do math very well and having calculators around has made this more visible. People who are math inclined often do the numbers faster than it takes to even reach for a calculator never mind punch in the digits. Most people were never like that. Astonished me when I found out.
Imagine that the government is curious about your activities of late. At the press of a button, Google transmits everything you've said, heard, everywhere you've gone, the people you've met and/or telephoned, the stores you've visited and what you've bought. . . the possibilities are endless. This should free everyone from worrying whether the police consider us criminals. They won't have to guess, they'll know.
In fact, we'll need fewer cops. With Google in proactive mode, it simply routes your car to the nearest fine or detention center whenever you commit a crime. The trial will be over before you arrive--Google transmits the data to the magistrate computer, which validates the offense and assigns the standard penalty. At that point only Google will be evil. Well, and maybe a few government people.
NR
Most USA'sian brains are destined to be fucked up by the illogical measuring system so don't blame it all on the digital clock ....
http://www.addfunny.com/funnypictures/usa/12/usavsrestoftheworld.jpg
Google is evolving. The search engine is becoming more like a a human and how he would rate a random website based on how useful it has been for him. The other applications that Google has though will be a lot useful if we can integrate them freely into our programs through code schemes that we can get from Google.
http://www.mitprof.com
Imagine a fork being stabbed into your eye, over and over and over. Then realize that's not a fork, it's just a really skinny, really cold finger.
I'd like what you propose as much as you'd like the above. I guess it's good we talked about this though.
It all sounds so rosy and wonderful... provided we can trust Google. They used to claim to do no Evil but that was a thing of the past. They've biased search results, stolen intellectual property and any number of other Evil things. I long for a Go(d)ogle who is Good(gle).
Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when it decides you are doing something suspicious.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When was the last time you read a sundial or navigated by the position of the stars - both a mostly lost art.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Google is more evil than Microsoft ever was.
How that is different from having access to an (enhanced) library? or an encyclopedia? Having "offline" storage for knowledge has been with us since the stone age, and probably made civilization possible. In fact, your very concience could be a consequence of mankind having that kind of enhancement. Internet (and google, but could had been any search engine or way to pick from that amount the information the one that you want) improved things, but is just another stage of a very long process, and not the last one.
Popular Science magazine came up with all these grand predictions about how were were going to use personal computers. At the time, PC's were clunky 8-bit CPUs with blinky lights in front and had to be programmed by flipping switches on the front panels.
Needless to say, Popular Science Magazine got nearly every prediction wrong. They never figured on videogames, BBS's, graphic design, video editing, youtube or facebook. About all they got right was word processing.
This idiocy regarding Google is about as correct. It also assumes Google is even going to be here in 20 years. Furthermore, something will come along to shake up the entire computing paradigm so that when we look back on 2012, we'll wonder why things were so primitive.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Yeah, I know with every new leap in technology someone comes out and claims that it going to make us dumber, but something like Google Glasses is one of those cases.
Do you need persistent feedback on everything you are looking at?
I certainly don't. I could do with less situational advertising in my life and I generally don't find it difficult to get around town without some constant reminder about where I am and an arrow to where I am going. I can read signs and understand the concept of street addresses pretty good. And I haven't reached that level of chronic social lethargy that makes pulling a phone out of my pocket a tedious chore or think it's uncool to hold a phone.
I definitely think there are niche markets for Google Glasses but for general public consumption I think these will be even more annoying then some smug hipster walking around with their "Bluetooth" lit up and dangling out of their ear talking louder then they need to about nothing at all.
Putting on a pair of Google Glasses is claiming to the world that you are too dumb and insecure to function in society without a trendy gadget of the month...where's my coffee
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've always assumed that I will not have uploading available to me, but that rather as I get older and (probably, unfortunately) more and more mentally infirm more and more of what I need to get done to live will be taken over by expert systems that know how I like things and otherwise react like me...the onion will grow so, that the fact that the centre were hollow might not matter to the outside world, and by then I should be past caring.
Or, imagine Google Shopping Bot running down the aisle at the store, throwing products on the shelf based on your interests and things you've already seen. You'd never have to see a new or random item again!
There's a lot of doom-and-gloom being thrown around here... about how Google is going to destroy us, that we're becoming less intelligent, that we'll stop learning and thinking and Google, like some benevolent tyrant, will answer all our questions, and our thinking faculties will atrophy and wither away.
No.
Google is a tool, like a pencil is a tool. And from the very first human, we have been integrated with our tools. Are we the lesser for our use of pencils to store our information? Are we the lesser for using cars to convey us places our feet cannot? Ask any expert craftsman, driver, programmer - the tool becomes an extension of who we are and what we are.
That would be before stars faded into the city glare.
Bases on that summary, Google is fast becoming God so they should be tax exempt as a religion.
I'd have no qualms with these scenarios if they only were ever used to aid the people. But the problem is that as has been pointed out, this is unlikely. It will be used as a vehicle to monetize people, and the government and various entities will want unrestricted access to it for the most trivial of "offenses" if they can even be stretched to fit the definition of the word. Big Brother and Big Business would love nothing more than to be able to get inside your head.
Kind of sad that some of the greatest ideas and inventions cannot come to fruition or likely won't see widespread use because of the ways they could be abused far outstrip the legitimate and helpful uses.
Navigating without electronic aids is still taught as a basic part of maritime training, in bushcraft and military training too.
I think the article is a bit heavy on the hyperbole, Google and the entire internet is a tool that can be used just like any tool. I've internalised it as much as I've internalised my keyboard or toaster.
If Google's doing it for me, then why bother doing it at all? Do I have a choice?
It is true to say that google is an app that extends the cabilities on the human mind; but this is not news and not new. The hoe was an extention of the human arm and hand that broadened out abilities. The abacus and the calculator enhanced our ability to do math. Telegraphs and phone wires and electromagnetic squeaks allow us to communicate far behind the physical limitations of our vocal chords. Google is simply the amalgamation of many minds into a common memory store. And this will progress as the scale of technology is further reduced and literally disappears inside our bodies through nanotech, without so much as a scar (yes, implants are essentially obsolete even before they've gained much traction.) We'll be dreaming together and having conversations in our heads with folk over the internet, witnessing events with our own eyes as they occur on the other side of the globe, et cetera, within just a couple decades, if not less. The point is; we have essentially been cyborging ourselves since the invention of technology itself. It is nothing new.
Most USA'sian brains are destined to be fucked up by the illogical measuring system so don't blame it all on the digital clock ....
I used to think that when I was younger. But I've decided that it keeps our brains more active as we can't simply look at our fingers to convert measures like the rest of the world. It also has the additional benefit of making it easy to tell when someone is from another country or really stupid.
Hmm, HUD glasses might be great, but:
"Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged."
I'd be worried about getting my safe-word mixed up and accidentally uploading audio and video of my wife telling me what a bad boy I'd been.
Or Google cloning your interests onto a cyborg that drains your bank account by as it surfs pay sites pesky human.
Of course cloning you is redundant if they can just reprogram your brain as you sit idyly staring at your computer awash in media streams carefully selected for you....
Oh wait.....!
; )
I've internalised it as much as I've internalised my keyboard or toaster.
I haven't RTFA of course but in my experience it's a little different for more complex tasks. I find I remember where to find things, and/or how to find things, instead of remembering things. Typing or toasting bread are lower level tasks than that.
It's like not memorising phone numbers, I store them in my phone instead of in my head. I used to know people's numbers off by heart, now I don't ever bother learning them except for one or two key people. I don't feel the loss of this, I still have the ability to memorise phone numbers, I'm just spending that time doing something more interesting these days (like working out how to back up my phone's contacts list...)
With the information Google can access, Google can run things 900 to 1200 times better than any human.
End of Line
> When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks.
Good riddance. The method was an artifact of an archaic technology. Our way of denoting time is also archaic and at some point in the future, might also be considered for revision, in order to harmonize it with other types of measurement.
> Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills.
Arithmetic is a means to an end, not an end in itself. During this time, our math curriculum has also become more advanced than it was from before when there were no calculators. As a society, we have a greater statistical sense than ever before (and need to further improve, a lot more). As a side note, look up "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart.
> The with ever acclerating speed GPS killed our map reading abilities
As maps and even address systems killed our need for honing our instinctive positioning skill.
> smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers.
As did Gutenberg press of oral traditions. Also, before smartphones (and speaking as a guy who is still suspicious of smartphones, as they stand), we used paper address books for that, not memorize them all. And before automobiles came along, our address lists were a lot smaller.
> I could see eventually being connected to all the stored information of mankind all the time, and being able to store individual experiences cheaply will allow us to outsource most of our brain functions.
Kind of already happened. Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Mechanical Turk. Unless you mean cybernetic cognitive integration with the cloud (shudder: not for atrophy fears though).
> But brain is not a factory where the released capacity will be put to some other use.
On what do you base that assertion on? The human brain is remarkably plastic. There is a lot of neuroscience research to back that up. The contrary is exactly what happens.
> Brain and muscle atrophy without usage. What we don't use, we lose, we don't redeploy.
So what parts of our brain have been documented to have atrophied so far? None, of course. Muscle is a different matter. I won't get into the reasons, but the mechanical revolution and the information revolution differ in certain respects.
We are cognitively consuming and processing more information than ever, not less. Whether this is mostly useful or simply information pollution is another matter. But we do think more of many different things now than we ever did. When the computers do our work, we take on more work... either to fully live, according to new expectations... or expect to be paid by showing value in tasks beyond the capability of computers. As computers progressively take on mundane and repetitive tasks, our tasks have become complex, not less.
You doubt you are one... but that is a Luddite argument.
It is no particular insight that Google is an extension of your mind.
Any tool that can manipulate symbols is an extension of your mind. Abacus, stick and clay tablet, and so on.
Where Google is different is that it is a step forward in the evolution of a hive mind for humanity. The first library was a start down that path; Google plus the content it indexes is currently the most encompassing, friction free implementation of humanities long trail towards ultimate shared thought.
I'm sure it's all perfectly accurate, but do we need to point it out? Googasm? Orgooglism?
The computer screen has become the retina of the mind's eye. That's why I refer to post on the internet... except on the internet. Of course, swampfriend was not the name I was born with. That's my internet name. Soon all of us will have special names - names designed to cause the 1080p flatscreen to resonate.
I couldn't agree more. I can't wait until 140Mandak262Jamuna's line of thinking has vanished and then we can embrace things that help us much faster.
I don't agree with that at all. My kids probably couldn't identify what local plants they can eat and which ones they should avoid (a skill that was arguably of tantamount importance to our ancestors) but then again, our ancestors that depended on those skills to live probably weren't spending much of their time doing Calculus and discussing world politics, either.
Ignoring the fact that everyone I know is fully capable of reading an analog clock, over 30 years after the first digital clocks were hitting the market, even young children, tell me, how would society fundamentally be harmed by this if there were no more analog clocks to read? If the skill was no longer relevant, why the hell are we keeping it around? Nostalgia? What a waste of energy and those precious brain cells.
I will admit that filling our brains with useless pop-culture trivia is a waste, and I'm not innocent in that regards (I've pretty much become a walking encyclopedia of Star Trek: The Next Generation which is absolutely useless to me outside of playing "name that episode" with friends) but I'm not going to go into hysterics over the fact that our kids have no knowledge of, say, what it's like to operate a rotary telephone, or fiddle with a pair of rabbit-ears trying to get a better TV signal, or how to properly behave on a party-line. It's useless knowledge to them.
I'm sure there are lots of things our own parents learned that we blew off, and they probably had the same worries about kids getting stupid, too. Now that we're parents, the cycle continues...just as it will when our kids start having kids of their own, freaking out about the fact that they're not teaching kids home-row typing skills (which are probably already on their way out, honestly) in an era where 95% of written communication is being done on touch-screen interfaces.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
If Google does it, the system will only identify people who have opted in for facial recognition. This is exactly how it's been implemented on Google+, and it seems like the ideal balance between utility and privacy.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
Indeed they are. The combination of distributed sensors, always-on data links and massive centralized processing power is going to change our world in dramatic ways. It can clearly be used for great good or great evil... it's going to be on all of us to keep a careful watch on the trends and to act, individually and collectively and through various channels, to make sure there's much more of the former than the latter.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
However, the *quality* of the information returned from a search is often questionable. So many of the "facts" presented on the web are really biased opinion these days and usually presented in a rather shallow format it seems.
Good highly detailed information is still mostly found in books I think. I don't see much replacing it on the internet except as shallow treatments of a subject.
You can get the summary of relevant information really quickly, get the gist of a subject effectively, but to get really good detailed knowledge of some specific subject - thats why I have a library at home and the public library or university library available elsewhere in the city (granted the data there is often dated by contrast).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Our basic cell phones track us and that gives others a lot of information about our habits. With a cell phone turned on the company knows where you are, when you get home at night, that you made a late night trip to the drug store, and much more. Then you add the smart phone apps and the personal details that the company knows get even more specific? Are we willing to let companies know the personal details of our life so that we can have a personal digital assistant? Is it worth the cost?
It's full of dirty pictures?
Or when you're entering a McDonald's in France, I guess. Just in case.
It can be. There are various different types of brain damage which will screw with the interpretation of visual data. A fairly common one is when there's a problem in the hemispheres communicating, it can lead to a situation where a person can easily draw an object they're looking at, but can't recognise it as, say, a wine glass. Or where they can look at a building and recognise a spire, windows and flying buttresses but not recognise it as a whole building (ie Notre Dame). Not being able to read a map could well be a sign of brain damage, if not in the way the GP means - I think the original reference was to lack of learning rather than physical or biochemical damage.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
guess im missing a piece a my mind ....i know all i want to do instead of what they allow you to do...
oh noooooo
what will i do
Google might only do it for people who opt in, but I could easily see Facebook going the other way, given how they behave, or other groups finding ways to use it.
Right now, with google image search/search by image you can do some interesting things - the tech will only get better, and I can quite easily imagine that by the time this kind of thing really takes off it will only be easier to have software on these things that is home grown and doesn't give a whit about privacy options people picked.
I've long been one who feels that privacy, as we usually mean it, is dead, and has been replaced to some extent by anonymity. I live in Chicago and am probably on hundreds of video cameras every day - some for the police, some private - but nobody really cares enough to dig through that footage and figure ut what I'm up to. But eventually, when cameras are even more ubiquitous and are even more tied into networks, and we have even better tools for searching, I can really easily imagine a scenario where it's possible for anyone to put together an idea of where one has been and what one has done without much effort.
The nightmare scenario with these would be enabled in part because when you are in physical proximity to a person you could watch them, get the system to give you whatever information there is available about them (and information it thinks might be theirs, with an estimate of the match) and basically make stalking trivial and safe for the stalker. Or you could have a system to search through the sea of imagery out there looking for someone who doesn't want to be found by you (say a domestic abuse survivor being sought by her abuser...)
I think there will be solutions to problems, but it would require a cultural shift to valuing privacy more and to putting more protectins in place for citizens rather than the current system we seem to have where companies are basically allowed to own the digital you in exchange for your using their services. It will be interesting times for sure.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Gave up using Google about two years ago and have never looked back.
I'm all set with dealing with their arrogance anymore.
Good riddance.
if you dont like what the technology is doing or will do to you then dont use it! the point of technology was never to take over, it was to assist. feel like your cell phone has become a tether? use a land line! think your lawn mower is making you lazy? break out some scissors! scissors cutting into your sense of being? start ripping stuff with your hands!
frankly, i like the idea of technology making sure that when i say, "i think i'm having a heart attack" and fall over my roomba comes out with a defibrillator. it would also be nice to know that when i get shot, my cloths can communicate to get me help or possibly tell my car drive me to the hospital if i'm far away.
technology is a tool and if you dont understand that, so are you.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's not GOOGLE that causes this. It's just the internet.
And libraries before that.
Sadly, the Google and most other commercial entities on the internet have gone from being a genuine provider or host of unbiased information to a system that "guides" you to what's "best for you."
So when that concerned father wants to read more about his daughter's debilitating illness, he will have to struggle to find strong resources.
Funny that there's a parallel going on in Television over then last 10 years as well... information must be entertaining first, stylized second, and factual 3rd.
History channel, Discovery channel... google.
I just thought of a perfect, real world example I ran into a couple years ago when attempting to get a tune-up on my mid-80's Buick daily driver (it was a rust-bucket beast, but the winters here in Wisconsin are harsh and it handled great in the snow)...I had a ton of trouble finding someone that could even do a tune-up on it. Why? Because it was a carbureted engine, and in this era of fuel injection, it's a skill that hardly anyone except for hobbyists uses anymore. I was incredulous, but according to several shop managers I spoke to, they haven't even had a carbureted engine come into their shop in years. I think it took me 4-5 different tries before I found a place with an older mechanic that could do it...and they charged me a premium on the labor to boot.
Maybe I was just being bullshitted, but my own ignorance in car repair and maintenance precludes me from making a judgement call on that one way or the other. Logically speaking, though, if they just don't see carburetors anymore, what the hell is the point of learning how to repair them? I can't see one...
Basic arithmetic is NOT a means to an end. It's actually required to live day to day life. After all, if apples are $2/kilo, and you only have $5, how much can you buy including sales tax?
Can you calculate what your shopping cart should cost you, or are you going to rely on the store's calculation? (Yes, taxable, non-taxable and partially-taxable items complicate matters). It doesn't have to be down to the cent, but would you notice if instead of charging you $50, they charged you $55 because they screwed up?
And trust me, screwups are more common than you might think.
Even handling money requires math - quickly add up the change to make sure it's correct, or to ensure you paid enough (the 1-2-5 system makes it easy, but it's still math). Or calculating the tip.
While these examples don't require exact figures, they require getting a feel for numbers so you can say your groceries should not cost more than $50 including tax, that your tip on a restaurant bill of $75 should not be $25, but should max out around $10-11 or so. Or your change for $12.35 worth of stuff is a bit more than $2.50 so you know to get 2 $1's and 2 quarters and then some.
Or even just calculating the best deal - is $1.25/each (regular $1.50) on sale a better deal than the pack of 5 for $7?
Yes, you can pull out your calculator and figure it out in the store, but I imagine tasks like these are dull and boring enough that most people want to get in and get out, and it's either wasting time punching it into a calculator (thus making the chore even more of a chore) or wasting money (stores often price stuff funny to get people too lazy to figure it out for themselves).
Actually, I've read sundials fairly regularly - If I have a compass but not a watch, or vice versa, knowing how to read a sundial allows you to approximately determine either the direction you're travelling or time of day based on the shadow of any convenient tree. I would have made use of stellar navigation just last night if there had been less light pollution - I'd gotten slightly lost, and was basing my turns on my estimates of which direction I was facing. Had I seen either of the Dippers, I'd have been able to determine where I was trying to get to.
But I have to admit I've never made a flint spearpoint.
I am officially gone from
It was all good, for me.
When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks.
My kids didn't. I still have an analog clock on the wall (they're grown now).
Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills.
If that's true, is a black mark on teachers, not the calculators. I was never any good at rote memorization, and we didn't have calculators back then. So I bought a slide rule to keep from having to learn multiplication tables. Why would one need to memorize tables when you can look it up?
PDAs and smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers.
Again, that's a GOOD thing. Rote memorization has nothing to do with intelligence, and usually gets in the way of understanding. I have better uses for my brain than storing phone numbers.
As to GPS taking away ability to read maps, I'm doubtful. It hasn't been around long enough yet to see, and making a blanket generalization that "we lost the ability to read maps" is a bit premature. I know few pwople who even own one.
Free Martian Whores!
Progress is inevitable. Your feelings on the matter cannot halt the advance of this technology. Throughout history (and in the present as well) governments, churches, and other vast entities have done their best to restrain technologies deemed dangerous. Those attempts failed. They may have put it off for awhile (the church vs. Galileo) but they didn't stop it. Now, this is not to say that nothing can be done about new technologies. We as a race are capable of manipulating the flow of tech. We can put resources towards developing it, or point it in a direction, or discourage growth in a certain direction. In this way we have limited control over how tech. will develop.
My watch is dual digital/analogue, I can read a map, GPS only gives the coordinates one is at in longitude/latitude which is not useful for an ordinance survey map in the UK. And I do arithmetic in my head as well as on the calculator. Oh, and finally I'm part of the generation that grew up with this technology, I do use it all, I can do all mentioned both the old way or with the new high tech gadgets. The advantage of the new gadgets is I can do them all at once or offload some of the work and let my brain work on other stuff.
As someone almost like that, if it's likely I can do it quicker in my head, the calculator is just time used confirming the answer, just cause someone is using a calculator don't assume they aren't doing arithmetic too.
How a SHOE becomes an extension of a human FOOT!
Whoa! Dude!
What ATOMS are like, you know, LITTLE GALAXIES!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez for some of the best use of this technology I have seen in recent fiction. Noting, of course, that Google was credited on the project (along with others)...
;)
This page also discusses the technology used in the books.
This page and this page are examples of the sort of dialogue ensuing from these books. Everyone I have suggested them to is now dreaming of life in D-Space.
What is amazing is that he wrote the first book in 2004 and saw so much of this coming... It reminds me of Ender's Game and its predictions of the common use of tablets, web forums, anytime/anywhere connectivity, adaptive learning systems, etc... even though it was written in the 80s.
Come play Moral Decay!
How a HAMMER becomes an extention of a human HAND
Stop! You're assuming you can touch that.
How a SHOE becomes an extension of a human FOOT!
Wait, so does the sidewalk become an extension of the shoe? Do I become one with the city with every step I take. With every breath I take and every move I make will the city be watching me?
My goodness, I'm just musical today. :-D
SKYnet
bonus captcha: peaceful
I was trying to put in a cross connect for a ds0 in a Titan 532L, but was having no luck as I didn't have a Waddel cheat sheet.. I was putting a dacs II type command like
TCON::FROM 15602,TO 15602,TRSP, MUX
but had no joy, yielding an obtuse error message. So after bang my head against my desk and getting help from two co-workers I finally googled the machine and found "Chris Deputy's" page on Comcast with a command saying to loopback the ds0, but I knew it was actually to put in the cross-connect. Sure enough
TCON::FROM 15602,TO 15602,TRSP
is all it took.
google is not a proper synonym for this! You can kill google, and another company will take that place.
..Do I become one with the city with every step I take. With every breath I take and every move I make will Google be watching me?...
FIFY
(insert picture of overly obsessive girlfriend wearing a Google tee shirt)
When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks.
Have you ever met a real kid? They can read analog clocks just fine.
Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills.
There is no evidence this is true. Math and thinking skills have been improving for decades.
The with ever acclerating speed GPS killed our map reading abilities
I know several women^Wpeople who would never use a map because it was too difficult to orient and figure out where they are. But by using a GPS, which automatically orients and shows their position, they have become more comfortable using maps and thinking in two dimensions. So GPS has increased their map reading abilities by giving them a shallower learning curve.
and PDAs and smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers.
Before PDAs: people memorized a half a dozen numbers and kept the rest in a paper notebook.
After PDAs: people memorized a half a dozen numbers and kept the rest in a PDA.
What we don't use, we lose ...
And Socrates believed that written language would destroy everyone's brains.
What a load of crap. This sounds more to me like those morons back in the 50's and 60's who proclaimed that the 21st century would bring about floating cities, flying cars and moving sidewalks down every street. Get a fucking grip.
Google's search, over the last few years, has gotten less and less helpful, as advertising became more and more big business. Try to find someone who's last name is hyphenated, or a product model with a hyphen in it. Or something with punctuation in what you're looking for, such as a period. There have also been plenty of searches that include, in the visible paragraph, exactly what I told it I did *not* want to see.
Google as an extension of our minds? Pardon me, but maybe some other search engine will not be coming down with ADHD.
mark
I believe the title is misleading. It is not that Google becomes extension of our minds, it is us, humans, who become non-paid extensions, building blocks, contributors and teachers of the Google Proprietary Supermind.
Wow
give you a reach around as it fucks you in the ass. If that's where you keep your wallet.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Google these days is only good for two things: checking a search that failed on Bing and digging up decades old dirt on someone using Google Groups.
s-- What if we could bypass that whole screen&keyboard thing, Larry?
l-- How so, Sergei?
s-- By directly connecting implants on their brains, of course!
l-- Hmm, that could make things a lot more convenient, now wouldn't it?
s-- Yeah, but people wouldn't accept it, so easy, Larry... unless we used a gradual approach, like going for glasses and VR first...
l-- Oooh, just like Star Trek! They will love it, Sergei... it would really sell like hot cakes. We'd become rich if we could make and sell them. A pity we're not into hardware.
s-- See this?
l-- Yeah, I got a Motorola phone, too. And?
s-- What if we could integrate it with our glasses link and have instant communication?
l-- It would be interesting. Hmm, there was that Android thing... and we could... yeah... and then... yeah, they would definitely fall for it... and then we... yes!
s-- What, Larry?
l-- We're gonna have our own OS, Sergei... and later, our own phone factory! And then we'll be able to connect your glasses idea with an embedded phone, so that we can have more efficient communication.
s--Great, Larry, well thought, but why not step it up afterwards and make those glasses become brain implants -- that would give us even faster communication.
l-- Yes, I was thinking the same... and we could mirror our PC node structure and make a network of human nodes. Think about the possibilities!
s-- Indeed, but that plan would face a major hurdle...
l-- Which one, Sergei?
s-- Hmm, there is one occasion people would have to remove the glasses.
l-- What for?
s-- To drive their cars, for instance.
l-- That's it, we're going to create cars that drive by themselves, so that people can keep connected all the time. BTW, Do you know someone blind dude for, erm, some car tests?
s-- Yeah, that would give things a human touch. Congrats, Larry, it seems a nice plan...
l -- Likewise, Sergei, I really like your ideas...
both -- Mwahahahahahaha!
Fair enough. *Very basic* arithmetic (coarsely dealing with 1-3 digit numbers) is not just a means. But I am not convinced that calculators destroyed those elementary skills.
If a person neither wants to do mental arithmetic nor wants to pull out a calculator, it just means that he is either plain lazy or simply trusts that the incidence of errors to be small enough that an occasional error does not merit review every time. And don't forget that the same technology that gave us calculators also gave us bar codes & electronic sales registers and online shopping, where arithmetic accuracy issue of store is close to irrelevance. Checking if the price on bill matches what you saw on shelf is a different check. This is the only error I had to concern myself with.
> While these examples don't require exact figures, they require getting a feel for numbers
Math is very much about getting a feel for numbers and their wonderful properties and concepts. I am not suggesting that people stop learning math. Quite the contrary, I think we should learn more and get an even better feel for numbers. It's the focus on old mechanics that is a dialectic consequence of the technology of the day that I object to. Take the carry over method in arithmetic where students spend most of their time. It is only useful when you have a paper and a pen (or something similar like maybe some sand and a twig). It assumes a non-computing, physical external representational medium and is not useful in mental arithmetic instances that you list. If you have the initiative to pull out your pen to apply the method you learned in school, you have the initiative to pull out your smartphone and tap them in. And these days, I can be caught more often without a pen than I can be without a device that can calculate. Logarithmic tables are another example where the look up technique is best forgotten by all, except by math historians. Again, I am not suggesting that we not understand the concept of the logarithmic scale, but that we should not waste time on learning the old table method.
I prefer to think myself. I prefer to keep private data, well, private. The scenario given by the OP rather sounds like a dystopic horror: how long would it take until "The Bad Guys" find a way to exploit the data via Google? Always remember: Knowledge is power. Knowledge about you is power over you. Has not Facebook already proven that a central hub of knowledge about people can badly hurt those people?
I like my spaghetti with source.
The books vs internet dichotomy is false. You can read books on the internet.
Dilbert RSS feed
- Or google closing all of your accounts because you don't fit in the TOS ...
- Or google reporting all of your moves to your boss
- Or google deciding your company is worth nothing and its stock going down leading to bankruptcy
- Or google refusing to drive you somewhere, and refusing that you drive yourself
- Or google
Well, yes, I did imagine all of them, and it scares me.
Charles Stross covered this in his book Accelerando. There's an interesting chapter where Manfred Macx gets mugged and loses his cyber processing and memory. He basically becomes a retarded version of himself who doesn't even remember who he is.
The book is an interesting take on the singularity, both pre and post.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
But brain is not a factory where the released capacity will be put to some other use
The brain is not like a factory, no. But it very specifically does use any "released capacity". What we do not use, we lose. What we do use, we gain more of. If you assume that we spend the time previously used looking at maps staring blankly into space, then yeah - net loss. If we instead assume - and I do not think I am being overly optimistic here - that we are going to do other stuff then we have no loss. Oh, except that if we do new, more interesting stuff, such as more interesting stuff that the computers cannot do yet, we will have a net gain.
The ability to read an analogue clock is a complete waste brain-space, in a world with digital clocks. There is no now-unused bit-that-only-reads-analogue-clocks-part of our brain, which is tragically atrophying. It is being put to better use, don't worry.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
You can only read *some* books on the internet. Say I am interested in the history of the KGB. There is an excellent source book called "The Mitrokhin Archive" (archives of the KGB preserved and smuggled out of the USSR). I have a paper copy and am slowly working my way through it. Go ahead and find me a copy to read online, please.
Now, I can find out about how to get the book, read the Wikipedia article on it etc, gaining a shallow knowledge of what its about, perhaps read some articles supporting its validity or criticizing its accuracy etc, and I can get a good idea what other books people who read it also liked but that doesn't get me the data inside the book.
I can of course read lots of information about the history of the KGB as well online, but as I said most of it is far shallower than the contents of the book I specified above.
I fail to see your point.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
"The Mitrokhin Archive" is not a book. If you mean the book written by C. Andrew from those notes, here:
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7264478/The_Sword_and_the_Shield-_The_Mitrokhin_Archive_and_the_Secret_H
2 minutes. You're welcome.
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