The New York Times | Keep calm and carry on buying
March 9, 2013
Source: The New York Times — March 9, 2013 | Evgeny Morozov
A future of frictionless, continuous shopping fits with Google’s vision for a world where we no longer need to search for anything, since we ourselves are perpetually monitored, with the relevant product or information sent to us based on perceived need. “Autonomous search,” they call it.
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, even wants to give us a “cybernetic friend” that could satisfy our wants before we are aware of them. By monitoring our conversations, e-mails and reading habits, he said, “it may pop up and say: ‘Well, you mentioned two weeks ago you were worried that vitamin B12 isn’t getting into your cells. There was new research just released two seconds ago that speaks to that.’”
To Mr. Kurzweil, who once confessed to taking 250 nutritional supplements a day, this might be a useful service. As for the rest of us, I’m not so sure: according to Google Scholar, 13,000 scientific papers and books that mention vitamin B12 came out last year alone. [...]
Comments (1)
by Cybernettr
Obviously, the usefulness of this will depend on how smart the technology is. If all it can do is bombard us with irrelevant information, then it will be more annoying than anything else. If it’s smart enough to notice that we’re struggling with the name of that book or actor and prompt us on it, than it will be very useful indeed. This is one technology that will be easy to do poorly but very hard to do well.
It has been argued convincingly that Apple’s sales-based revenue model is going to work better as time progresses than Google’s ad based model. As tech becomes increasingly integrated into people’s lives, we’re going to have less patience with ads constantly pushed in our faces a la Google.