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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.'"
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!
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 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).
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.
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).
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
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
"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
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.
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.