Slashdot Mirror
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.
I believe we've found the answer.
...why they do not use it to drive Google's development itself ?!?
George Orwell was a visionary.
Google and Youtube already "nudge users into alignment with their goals" by manipulating search results, pushing sites/producers with opinions they prefer and hiding those they disagree with.
I suppose 2018 is the future they were thinking about in 2016.
Start with "don't be evil"
ends up with a terrifying Big Brother-y quasi police state* 'managing' everyone's behavior "for the public good, of course Mr Smith"
*you might say that Google is merely gathering data and at most 'nudging' behavior. I'd say that when Google can concatenate & save forever EVERYTHING YOU DO to a degree that would make FB and Cambridge Analytica (you know, the guys being publicly lynched for doing exactly this?) blush, and use that data against you in ways ranging from subtle to blatant including simply handing your data over to authorities, then yeah, I'm going to call that a quasi-police state whose 'public/private' partnership borders on Fascism.
-Styopa
So they finally switched to "Be evil?"
There's an old saying about democracy being "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch".
The point being, the republic was set up to aspire to higher goals than can be achieved by pure democracy alone. We have people in power who are not bound by the will of the people, they can vote their conscience based on what they think is right. We take guidance from a bunch of enlightened people 250 years ago who set up basic guidelines to do this.
The idea of a bunch of like-minded people getting together and trying to "nudge users into alignment with their goals" is the same thing, it's "two wolves and a sheep" writ large.
We're seeing this today with the changes in user policy. YouTube used to be a bastion of free speech, everything that wasn't explicitly illegal was allowed... until that changed, and you can no longer talk about guns, or have conservative views, or cast aspersions on certain races or religions. (But it's OK when those races or religions cast aspersions back.)
Their goals are well-meaning today so that people will get behind the efforts and help, tomorrow their goals may be different.
Even when you agree with their goals, not everyone agrees with their proposed solutions - and yet they still try to influence public debate. Climate change is one of these issues, where a lot of people would agree that it's a problem and something should be done, if only the solutions weren't politically motivated.
What they are proposing is control over social thought. Unlike PACs or advertising, it's done without oversight or transparency. We complain about PACs not having enough transparency, and not knowing who pays for political ads - are we going to allow Google to be similarly opaque?
Next election it won't be "Russians hacked the election", it'll be "Google hacked the election".
Nudging behaviour like this is insidious and evil.
Is Hari Seldon running Google now?
Life is too short and too important to { take seriously | use windows }.
Why would the superwealthy want to implement communism or soviets? The current plutocracy is the safer bet.
Back in the 1970s they said that the United States of America would combine information and capitalism to create a paradise.
In fact they built a brutish hellhole.
1.) Run your own little server behind your DSL Modem. Starts at $30, called Raspberry PI.
A littlebit under powered, but still good for many non intensive use.
(Been there, still doing that sometimes).
2.) Store your data on your private server. Control access/encipher via SSH/SCP.
Oh, common. It's 2018. at least use rsync.
(Also, if you want good resilience against damage/corruption, you'd want a base with a tad bit more sata ports, and running RAID5.
Just saying)
3.) Run your own discussion forums.
...but be prepared to not have the richness of interactions currently found on the Social Networking Site du jour/whatever Zuck has bought the most recently.
You'll basically have your mom' writing you a message, every now and then, to remind you to call her.
4.) Run Linux on your PC instead of the Snoop-Ware of MSFT.
But be prepared to spend time on stack exchange just to learn how to make your touch pad work* ~~~
5.) Run your own Jabber server instead of Corporate-Controlled Whatsapp and the like.
And you'll have exactly 1 single user registered on it :
you.
Because most of the people you know won't bother installing yet another client (but it's opensource) just to send messages to you, when all their friends are on Skype/FBMessenger/WhatsApp/Snapchat/whatever is popular next (hint: look at what Zuck is trying to buy next).
---
* - Disclaimer: Proudly written from a Linux running laptop
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Poor white guys. The centuries of constant oppression they have faced must be unbearable.
Spotted the racist.
Bit deeper then that. I don't know what group of people are driving it but I can describe it. The more I look at especially some of the "synergies" between laws in countries that would otherwise be completely opposite, the more it becomes obvious there has been a serious push for globalization. It's to the point we don't have one, but MANY draconian laws straight out of batshit crazy countries, being passed with little to no discussion. It's like we're being prepped for habitation by the "royal families".
I've been thinking about that, and have a possible answer.
For context, I started thinking about this when I heard that London is now 42% foreign born. (Here's info from 2011.) England used to be predominately white and very conservative, but it's now peppered with no-go zones and full of foreign workers. Germany and Sweden are even worse, and are *still* importing refugees.
Why is this happening in Europe?
My best guess has to do with WWII, and the genocide of various peoples: Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, Afro-Germans, homosexuals, Jehovas Witnesses, and others. Hitler made WWII essentially a war on other races.
That incident (WWII) has become so abhorrent in the collective psyche that people will do anything to escape the barest hint of being associated with it. The people of Europe are killing themselves trying to prove that they aren't racist.
We now have British police choosing not to prosecute Muslim rapists, while threatening prosecution for the fathers (of the raped girls) for Islamophobia for speaking out. We see the police suppressing reports of Muslim crime, but going after "hate speech" crimes from regular citizens.
We're seeing a little bit of that here in the US, where putting our own citizens first is called out as racist.
It seems kinda scary that a big brother org could shape the environment of information so as to influence people's behaviour.
But then I remember that humans are not so simple. To us the world is not a mere stream of information, rather, it is a world of meanings which we create and organise, where meaning is within a context which is within a context and so on. Just think of a famous piece of art, and all its parodies. Consider fashion and how it changes. The way that people's aspirations and goals, their likes and dislikes, their moods and opinions, all flow in an ever-changing, re-created anew, stream of reactions and counter-reactions. Life is change. And the "facts", the "data" which tech people are so enamoured of, is only one half of reality. The other half is inter-subjective re-creative re-authored re-organising meaning-making. Today you love X and feel it is the best person or thing in the world, tomorrow you're bored with X. Show me an AI that can cope with that, and then I'll say you've passed some kind of fancy test. An AI that understands new ironies. What a joke.
Of course. I have been modded down to oblivion whenever I have pointed it out, but this is sociopathic behavior, and we are training and indoctrinating kids with this sort of crap for decades now.
This country was formed to prevent precisely this, and to favor individual liberty over the "collective good", precisely because at some point, someone or some group will come along and attempt to define "collective good" for everyone else - which then has to be enforced at the point of a sword.
Liberalism/"progressivism"/socialism can only end in totaltarian behavior, it is part and parcel and the end game of any socialist activity.
It's not 1:1 but some aspects like exploiting groupthink to "do good", "nudging" people to conformity etc. are common.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
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.”
Good-bye
Liberalism/"progressivism"/socialism can only end in totaltarian behavior, it is part and parcel and the end game of any socialist activity.
Been saying this for a long time.
It's even my /. sig.
"Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce."
Google/FB/twatter/et al provide the surveillance state, the Feds provide the police state.
Fascism refined for the information age. It's an authoritarian's wet-dream.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
an app (really a giant AI in the background) providing alternative solutions that you can decide between could be Utopian.
I would suggest to you that even this level of choice is going to be largely an Illusion. The AI will simply give you a choice, one that it has identified the most likely decision you will make already (95% confidence level), the choice being an illusion of control, when the reality the AI doesn't really need your input, but asks just to be "nice".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Knowledge is power. As Google knows you better and better, they have more and more power over you. This video shows they're already considering how to exercise this power. This is the obvious next step for them (and, FWIW, I had already called it: https://slashdot.org/comments....).
Google, Facebook and the other data vampires really need to be stopped. The EU GDPR is a step in the right direction (though I, personally, would prefer both companies, and other privacy infringers, like Equifax, to be dismantled, or broken up). Unfortunately, the US government is already in Google and Facebook's pockets (it's not for nothing that Google is the largest corporate lobbyist in the USA), so I don't expect any useful legislative action.