Google “wants to guess the question before you ask it.”
Ask yourself: how well must a company know me to do that? What else can they do if they know me so well?
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-post-truth-santa-claus-and-the-concealed-present/ (video)
https://www.fsfla.org/~lxoliva/fsfla/Santa.en.pdf (slides)
@aral the thing that bother me most is that they kept saying "you are in control" during the whole keynote like if they wanted us to believe it...
@aral "And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know."
Wendell Berry
@aral
FUCK
THIS
SHIT
I want a future which increases human agency, which doesn't consider free will to be a bug. If the computer system has already anticipated everything I say or do before I say or do it then am I living an authentic life, or merely a charade?
@aral There is value in training systems with aggregated scrambled datasets. I know of a few companies that are offering benefits in healthcare space using that. Maybe that is the way to go - even then, difficult to sort out ownership/benefit/business triangle from a company's point of view.
@demirhere Check our the paper Apple just released on differential privacy :)
@aral Thanks for pointing out the article. I meant to point out that even with differential privacy, you can gain enough understanding to guess motive, whether a question, search query or a diagnosis.
@aral it may be easier to fulfill this prophecy not by knowing what you want but by making you want a finite number of things curated for you.
Like, this is a really stupid example but, in practice Google may be able to kill every business following a specific pattern by just not showing it on Maps.
Imagine if Google just wanted for some reason to make every fallafel restaurant disappear? How hard would that be for them?
@aral AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA