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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.'"
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
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!
a quarter of a century before any sort of vehicle we have does not require a *licensed* driver to be on-board
Welcome to 2012, esteemed visitor. You will be pleased to know that the Cold War is over and that some of your predictions have come to pass:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17989553
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
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
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.
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.
Maybe some day Google will tell us how to reverse entropy
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.
It's a nice thought, but I don't agree. Particularly when he says he can't read long articles. I'm the opposite, when I'm procrastinating on the web and Slashdot/Reddit/Hackernews throws up an interesting article I'll read it to the end. Often it'll be a very long piece, but if I get interested, I'll keep reading. I can still read long books, but I've always struggled with boring texts even before the internet. Unless I'm hooked within the first two or three chapters, which is about as far as I can forcibly read, I'm not going to finish.
It is beautiful irony that his article is itself a good few pages of text.
What's more incipient is the need to Google things, in the past if you didn't know something, you shrugged and got on with life. Now it's a race to the search engine to find out. Is this good or bad? Google has enabled us to immediately access vast quantities of knowledge giving us a breadth and depth that was simply impossible 20 years ago. It's amazing and it's empowering, Google has fueled my desire to learn things and get answers. What remains to be seen is what sort of information we retain and thus it's important to view Google as an aide, than as the solution to the world's problems.
For example, I still insist on navigating via paper maps because the people that have switched to GPS navigation have all but lost that ability. Often GPS reception is poor or the batteries fail or the route is simply incorrect. Google Maps is a nice compromise, good route planning, written directions and a printed map to use. Similarly I buy books, I read as much as I can, and I like building up my technical library. I do this because I know that one day Google might not be around. One day Stackoverflow might die and I'll need somewhere to go for answers.
Finally don't underestimate the power of Google to help you bullshit your way into and out of situations. It's very easy to get cursory knowledge of a field and trick people into thinking you know a lot more than you do.
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
A computer (and google) are like a shovel. A shovel is an extension to your hand, Google is an extension of your mind.
It's a tool. We've had tools for thousands of years.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
That's a terrible analogy. Using the shovel does not impact the next person who uses "the" shovel or "a" shovel.
It would make more sense to say that we are becoming an extension of Google's mind than the other way around. Everything you do with Google has the potential to influence Google's perception of the world, access to information (not just data because we ADD relevant context) and value to other users.
If the shovel told you where to dig based on what it had learned from the thousands of other people who had recently dug using it, that would be a closer analogy.
Come play Moral Decay!
And, like people who rely on Google directions, you shove that spade through a gas line and go up in a ball of fire.
Don't rely on tools to think for you.