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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.
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
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.
Poor white guys. The centuries of constant oppression they have faced must be unbearable.
Spotted the racist.
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
The fact that you think Sweden is full of "no-go zones" (or even London, for that matter) tells me that your opinions were already manufactured by Russian troll farms.
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.
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.