Google's Selfish Ledger is an Unsettling Vision of Silicon Valley Social Engineering (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X), and shared internally within Google. It imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

Comments

Re:1984

[houghi]

People forget that in 1984 the power was given to Big Brother. It was not taken.
How we give so freely what others have fought for so hard.

Re:1984

[Riceballsan]

Orwell's books were typically set in place long after everything was concrete and unchangable. As far as I know he didn't write a whole lot on how we got there, just where we wound up. Propoganda usually starts out subtle and slowly builds its way up to in your face you can't miss it unless you've never lived away from it.

Re:Insidious and evil

[TheRaven64]

There's an old saying about democracy being "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch".

The old saying is from someone who doesn't understand game theory. The outcome of such a vote would be that the stronger wolf would be eaten. The weaker wolf knows that it would be dinner tomorrow if it eats the sheep, the sheep knows that it has a better chance of running away from just the weaker wolf than from either both wolves today or the stronger wolf tomorrow.

Re:Gandalf took the Ring

[spire3661]

Tolkien's contemporary and friend C.S. Lewis said this. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Re:1984

[RobinH]

1984 was about absolute and total control through fear, whilst Brave New World was all about social engineering. In 1984 there's also some controlling of what people thought too, but Brave New World is much closer.

Re:Silicon Valley creepers are anti-human

[Falconnan]

Here's the real problem: Utopian and Dystopian systems are going to use the same tools. The big divide between them will be motive and power. To illustrate, an app (really a giant AI in the background) providing alternative solutions that you can decide between could be Utopian. However, if the AI is programmed to consider the good of its creators above the good of its customers (individuals and the general society at large), this rapidly becomes Dystopian. The same is true if a political agenda outside of the consideration of individual/societal benefit is considered. And we have carefully avoided the notion of applying any generic rules to the development of AI.

We are in uncharted territory here, with private entities having this kind of information capabilities. It is nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle here, so we need to figure out how to control the genie, rather than it controlling us. As to how, I haven't a clue.