Where is Google taking us?

July 5, 2015 5:15 PM

I listen to one of the two or three key brains behind the Search algorithm itself, Ben Gomes, who speaks 10 to the dozen of “natural language generation” and “deep learning networks” (and, inevitably, of the “holy grail” of answering users’ questions before they have been asked).

Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so... Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself. (Guardian, 02/22/2014) (previously)

Google's Schmidt Sees Robots Omnipresent 'in a Good Way' “The biggest thing will be artificial intelligence,” Schmidt said at Oasis: The Montgomery Summit. “Technology is evolving from asking a question to making a relevant recommendation. It will figure out things you care about and make recommendations. That’s possible with today’s technology.” (Bloomberg, 03/06/2014)

The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback while it may seem random for Google to get into businesses as diverse as cars, thermostats, robotics, and TV production, there is an overriding objective behind it all. Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them. Some day, Page has said several times, this AI will be hooked directly to our brains—perhaps through an implant. (Slate, 04/25/2014)

NSA Doesn't Need to Spy on Your Calls to Learn Your Secrets Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” (Wired, 03/25/2015)

posted by Little Dawn (51 comments total)

Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them.

Good position for an advertising company to be in, I guess.
posted by mhoye at 5:35 PM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them.

He wants to sling even more advertisements at us.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:36 PM on July 5, 2015

We Know How You Feel Not long ago, Verizon drafted plans for a media console packed with sensors, including a thermographic camera (to measure body temperature), an infrared laser (to gauge depth), and a multi-array microphone. By scanning a room, the system could determine the occupants’ age, gender, weight, height, skin color, hair length, facial features, mannerisms, what language they spoke, and whether they had an accent. It could identify pets, furniture, paintings, even a bag of chips. It could track “ambient actions”: eating, exercising, reading, sleeping, cuddling, cleaning, playing a musical instrument. It could probe other devices—to learn what a person might be browsing on the Web, or writing in an e-mail. It could scan for affect, tracking moments of laughter or argument.

All this data would then shape the console’s choice of TV ads. A marital fight might prompt an ad for a counsellor. Signs of stress might prompt ads for aromatherapy candles. Upbeat humming might prompt ads “configured to target happy people.” The system could then broadcast the ads to every device in the room. (New Yorker, 01/12/2015)
posted by Little Dawn at 5:36 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

All of this is Creepy As Hell but also incredibly naive as an actual endpoint. Google will never totally predict what you want to search for because life is a chaotic system. For instance, if I see a small child on the street that reminds me to call my nephew, Google isn't going to know I'm making that mental connection (or missing that connection) unless I actually wire Google into my brain.

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of repetitive stuff people do every day that will be tweaked and optimized and predicted, but at some point this stuff is no longer about search but about being a virtual assistant.

As soon as Google shifted their priority from finding webpages about stuff to answering questions with or without webpages they fundamentally changed the experience for me. And for the most part, finding answers is a bigger goal and more interesting and more valuable to people in their day to day, but finding actual webpages about stuff has secretly gotten much harder. Old timers will remember stumbling onto weird little corners of the Internet back in the day, which never happens now except through social media links or very precise search terms with random results. At least 99% of anything you search for is more or less predetermined now, which is a function of the web maturing, but I can't help feeling that there is a huge, untapped World Wide Web just beyond our reach.
posted by lubujackson at 5:38 PM on July 5, 2015 [20 favorites]

Mark Zuckerberg says the future of communication is telepathy. Here’s how that would actually work. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” Zuckerberg wrote in response to a question about what’s next for Facebook. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.” (WaPo, 07/01/2015)
posted by Little Dawn at 5:41 PM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

Maybe I was just oblivious before but it seems as though Google has really ramped up this "answering questions before they have been asked" thing a lot in the last few months. Nowadays when I read an article about some random person or thing and google it, it usually pops up as the first option in the autofill bar after just typing a letter or two.
posted by acidic at 5:41 PM on July 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

Remember that horrible future envisioned in Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report, where you walk into a Gap store and a hologram tells you that sweaters are on sale because you once bought a sweater and now its forever trying to sell you sweaters.

Soon.
posted by Fizz at 5:43 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

“You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.”

Here's what my friends will experience:

so what did you think of the- SQUIRREL
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:43 PM on July 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

The weird thing is that if you clear all your cookies and use an anonymous proxy or VPN so it truly doesn't know who you are, Google is pretty sure that you care about nothing in the world except Taylor Swift.
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:44 PM on July 5, 2015 [18 favorites]

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” (Wired, 03/25/2015)

"We can look at bad behavior and modify it."
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:44 PM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

For instance, if I see a small child on the street that reminds me to call my nephew, Google isn't going to know I'm making that mental connection (or missing that connection) unless I actually wire Google into my brain.

That's the kind of statement you look back on 20 years from now, the scar still healing from your new Google Implant, and think "I wish I hadn't been so right."

Then the Implant distracts you with holographic pictures of captioned cats.
posted by Rangi at 5:57 PM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

The weird thing is that if you clear all your cookies and use an anonymous proxy or VPN so it truly doesn't know who you are,

If you want to stay anonymous in the face of machine learning you need to do a lot more work than that, unfortunately. You can very reliably fingerprint a lot of things; browser user agent, CPU via JS responsiveness, your own uniquely idiosyncratic typing rate, the way your mouse moves around the screen. It's possible to make a reasonably good guess about somebody's identity from a lot more than just their IP address and cookies.
posted by mhoye at 5:59 PM on July 5, 2015 [9 favorites]

Google isn't going to know I'm making that mental connection (or missing that connection) unless I actually wire Google into my brain.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHUT UP, THEY ARE READING THIS.
posted by Behemoth at 6:04 PM on July 5, 2015 [11 favorites]

Seriously though, brain-implant AI at least has the potential to be very useful and desirable, even if you don't trust an advertising corporation to implement it wisely.

It used to be that if you had a random question, like "What do butterflies eat?" or "How do you say 'coffee' in Japanese?" or "In what order did some states secede before the Civil War?", it would probably go unanswered, because it wasn't worth the trouble of going to a library or browsing through an encyclopedia. Now you can just type a query into DuckDuckGo or Wikipedia or Dictionary.com or Google Translate on a smartphone, but that still involves putting down whatever else you're doing and hoping you have internet access. I'm constantly wanting small pieces of information, either in a conversation or just while thinking to myself, and it would be revolutionary to just pull up an answer in the corner of my vision.

I imagine it as feeling like retrieving a rarely-accessed memory, or finding a word on the tip of your tongue, except you're not concentrating to query your own memory, but the distributed shared memory of our entire species.
posted by Rangi at 6:05 PM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

You can very reliably fingerprint a lot of things;

I'll have you know that thanks to careful practices and years of software engineering effort I have perfected the art of being unidentifiable to Google.

Unfortunately since I'm the only one who has successfully done this, that in itself constitutes an unambiguous fingerprint and they still know exactly who I am.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:05 PM on July 5, 2015 [13 favorites]

The Word Exchange took an interesting look at how, as companies like Google gets smarter, we make ourselves stupider.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 6:09 PM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

TARS, increase your serendipity setting to 75%.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:20 PM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

This may be a derail, but I just left a similar comment on a friend's Facebook and it seems appropriate enough:

Google can do so much, and appears to like to boast about it. But during the final match of the Women's World Cup, searching for "world cup" gave me, at best, links to places where the match was being live-blogged, whereas during the 2014 tournament in Brazil — when men were playing — there was a widget right at the top of the search results with all the information I wanted.
posted by cardioid at 6:34 PM on July 5, 2015 [17 favorites]

I've been increasingly impressed with the way Google sometimes figures out that I'm asking a question that it can answer in a straighforward way, even if it's not phrased as one, and goes ahead puts that answer at the very top, above all the search results that actually contain the search terms. As part of a Metafilter discussion about Dollhouse today I googled dollhouse young caroline, and a link to the bio of the correct actress was placed above the search results, despite the fact that she is not credited as "young caroline" and in fact that's not a very accurate description of her character.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:43 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is there something wrong with me that this stuff doesn't really thrill me? It seems like all of it together will make things, at best, more convenient, but it's always sold as ushering in a profoundly new and transfigured mode of existence. I guess the balloon wireless bringing Internet to remote places of the world is pretty transformative for the people who don't have it before. Driverless cars reducing deaths would be nice, sure. I don't know.....tech stuff always has this tone of breathless boosterism...."Your refrigerator will know you are almost out of milk, and order more for you!"......going to buy milk at the store isn't really that burdensome to me.
posted by thelonius at 7:11 PM on July 5, 2015 [19 favorites]

You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.

Who cares that the end of civilization ensues the next day.
posted by juiceCake at 7:30 PM on July 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

But during the final match of the Women's World Cup, searching for "world cup" gave me, at best, links to places where the match was being live-blogged,

Same here, even when I specified Women's World Cup. But the top result was always FIFA's WWC site, so I clicked that a lot. Maybe that was intentional. (Collusion! False Flag!)
posted by ctmf at 7:30 PM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fuck it. I'm buying a hundred acres in Alaska and going off grid. I'll raise goats, hunt deer, smoke weed, and not have any Internet, television, or radio.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:41 PM on July 5, 2015

Five Fesh Fish, you will need to figure out how to develop repellent for the state bird, the mosquito. Those things are aggressive and the no see umms, too.
posted by jadepearl at 7:52 PM on July 5, 2015

Is there something wrong with me that this stuff doesn't really thrill me? It seems like all of it together will make things, at best, more convenient, but it's always sold as ushering in a profoundly new and transfigured mode of existence.

I'm in the same camp, frankly. The hyperbole and "brave new world" posturing just smacks too much of nerd fappage. I think the epitaph for this era will be "Just because they could, doesn't mean they should have."
posted by Thorzdad at 8:03 PM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

obligatoryjeffgoldblum.gif

I dunno. Yeah, remembering to buy milk is no great hardship. And yet.. look at the history of human technology; more or less everything we ever develop is to make a given task easier and/or not have to think about it.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:05 PM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley The result is a tech economy in which fantastic profits come by monitoring our every click and heartbeat. Massive data breaches have become regular events, yet tech companies ask that we continue to fork over more data that they might sell to data brokers. Data brokers, in turn, form dossiers often based on awful, if not predatory, criteria; some have offered to sell lists of rape survivors or of senior citizens who have dementia. (WaPo, 03/20/2015)
posted by Little Dawn at 8:33 PM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

You can call this useless anecdotal data, but I think Google has a long way to got before they get a solid grasp on what people want. I use the Internet a lot, and if the kinds of ads that follow me around are any indication, their model of me as a consumer is an extremely flaky approximation that is based on very thin heuristics. Frankly I wish it worked better, because maybe it wouldn't be so annoying.

IMHO, predicting what I'm going to ask is rather useless, especially if it can't give me an accurate answer. But I thought Schmidt was really on to something a few years ago, when he said that the *real* question that people want an answer for, is "what do I need to do now?" Which has some scary implications to it. But I think he's right.
posted by doctor tough love at 9:09 PM on July 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

As others here have pointed out, Google's search algorithm is actually pretty crappy. For one thing, Google is absolutely hopeless at anything newsy. And, like the Women's World Cup example above, when I search for Tottenham Hotspur I get results pertaining to league games only, never anything about friendlies or cup games or Europe.

What Google (and Facebook) are really good at is showing me ads for things to buy that I've searched for earlier that day. Of course, I've already bought them, most of the time.

And, like everything to do with the "internet of things", I assume that this all boils down to new ways to send spam. Your "smart" fridge is infected with malware and is sending spam; soon it will be your own brain, sending out a billion messages an hour while your own mental and physical processes slow to a crawl.
posted by Fnarf at 9:37 PM on July 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

But during the final match of the Women's World Cup, searching for "world cup" gave me, at best, links to places where the match was being live-blogged,

Google is sadly not alone in this regard. the algorithmic assumption that I wanted to know standings for games a year ago over games played now, because the latter are women's games, bugged me a lot.
posted by frimble at 10:33 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've been spending a lot of time at home lately and my searches are all over the place, and I also tend to word things awkwardly for some reason (which is a relatively new development in my life, and has been concerning me a bit). Google search can't seem to figure out what it is I am looking for, even when I search multiple things within the same vague subject, but most especially when I begin a bunch of queries with something totally unrelated. For example, some of my searches the other day went like this:

Vegeta's power level throughout first fight with Goku
What is considered the best NBA match
Triangle offense
Biggest fight in the NBA
Ron Artest
Pacers Pistols brawl
NBA brawls
Portland Trail Blazers

Even though I mostly searched NBA stuff, specifically a few things related to fighting in the NBA, and even more specifically the two biggest fights that have happened in the NBA, the whole DBZ search through it off, or so I presume, because it simply had no idea what I was asking for. I thought maybe it would have figured out after the first few queries that I was going to look up NBA stuff, especially considering I went and read articles and watched videos between each query.
posted by gucci mane at 10:44 PM on July 5, 2015

A number of months ago I had a question. I typed "Why do" into the Google search bar and autocomplete totally knew what I was going to ask ... "cats purr?"

True, this isn't a testament to the wonders of machine learning, so much as it is proof that I am the median Internet user.
posted by dgaicun at 11:40 PM on July 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

Who cares that the end of civilization ensues the next day.

In three years, Google becomes become the largest supplier of internet searches and web advertising. All computers start being upgraded with Google-sourced operating systems. The system goes online July 1st, 2015. Human decisions are removed from web marketing. One high-profile twitter user is badly burned by an aromatherapy candle. In turn, another twitter user reports being stressed at the sight of an aromatherapy candle advertisement, a tweet that triggers an advertisement for an aromatherapy candle. Anti-stress aromatherapy candle advertisements increase at a geometric rate. The system becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

In response, Amazon delivery drones start piling boxes of aromatherapy candles against data center entryways ...
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:48 AM on July 6, 2015 [12 favorites]

The Word Exchange took an interesting look at how, as companies like Google gets smarter, we make ourselves stupider.

I've never really bought this. I use Google to look stuff up, which goes into my memory. Then I use Google to look more stuff up. I've always been kind of a sponge for trivia though.
posted by atoxyl at 1:39 AM on July 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Old timers will remember stumbling onto weird little corners of the Internet back in the day, which never happens now except through social media links or very precise search terms with random results. At least 99% of anything you search for is more or less predetermined now, which is a function of the web maturing, but I can't help feeling that there is a huge, untapped World Wide Web just beyond our reach.

O my god this is so true. Surfing the net - if someone were newly introduced to the internet would that descriptor even occur to them? - is so much less enjoyable now. The places I go to regularly get fewer and fewer, and more and more samey. I've had the distinct impression lately that the previously infinite virtual world is shrinking and I can see its borders.

the distributed shared memory of our entire species

An immense proportion of human experience is not just absent from but invisible to the internet, and the longer a person spends in the echo chamber the less obvious this is. How many Mefites spend time in places where the online world is not just unwanted but completely irrelevant? I'd say the majority of humans live in that world. I suppose I could be wrong about that now that smartphones make being online so accessible...but imo it's some sort of solipsism of people living in developed countries, to imagine the millions who don't share in development somehow don't count, or aren't part of contemporary reality.
posted by glasseyes at 5:27 AM on July 6, 2015 [9 favorites]

An immense proportion of human experience is not just absent from but invisible to the internet

I remember I had a temp job in a university library in 1998, and the students were already convinced that everything needed for research was digitized and online, which isn't true now, and was far, far less true then. If they were doing journal searches in health related fields, maybe all of that was online then, and accessible from our internets.
posted by thelonius at 6:05 AM on July 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

One thing that Google is very very good at is determining how a Silicon Valley programmer would approach an issue, and then finding a way to force everyone else into the same solution.
posted by aramaic at 7:02 AM on July 6, 2015 [11 favorites]

We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.

No you can't, Google. I have spent too many hours playing poker, constantly aware of what other people at the table might think I'm thinking about, and how my actions might influence their perceptions. For every time I've typed some idle thought into your search box, there are three times I've typed something a little differently than I would have, just because it doesn't cost me anything to mislead your algorithms. Sometimes I search for "fried onion sandwich" or "terrorist babies" just to confuse you. Now that you have indexed this page and know all this, if you have chosen to believe it, all you can do is put me on the list of people you don't understand. I assume this will result in me not getting any "targeted" ads, or being among the first people to be scheduled for deletion when the robots take over. Either way, I will still be able to use my immense reserve of good luck to beat your artificial intelligences in a game of poker.
posted by sfenders at 7:28 AM on July 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

mhoye: "Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them.

Good position for an advertising company to be in, I guess."

Is it still advertising if its actually, exactly what I need?
posted by TheLittlePrince at 8:01 AM on July 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Little Dawn: "Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” (Wired, 03/25/2015)"

How many crimes/terrorist activities/things that make us afraid before there is a general clamor for using this capability for universal surveillance?
posted by TheLittlePrince at 8:06 AM on July 6, 2015

I mainly use search for looking up product specifications. My former method of "company name" "product" "specification" rarely works.

And it's a pita sometimes to find the info on the actual company website - which is why I'm searching via google as a second pass. I'll often give up and try and find the name of the regional sales rep, leave voicemail, finally connect, then wait for the info to be forwarded to me after it's forwarded to sales rep from someone else in technical.

At least for now, searching for ".dwg" files is easier - the google hasn't obscured them with a bunch of cruft.

Google does OK with general interest questions, but seems to assume everyone is looking for mass trivia.
posted by mightshould at 9:10 AM on July 6, 2015

> How many crimes/terrorist activities/things that make us afraid before there is a general clamor for using this capability for universal surveillance?

As we sweat government surveillance, companies like Google collect our data (Guardian, 04/18/2014)

As security expert Bruce Schneier (a friend) has archly observed, "Surveillance is the business model of the internet."

Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables’ data for surveillance (WaPo, 07/06/2013)

Documents obtained by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in recent weeks make clear how the revolution in information technology sparked a revolution in surveillance, allowing the U.S. government and its allies to monitor potential threats with a reach impossible only a few years earlier.

A hidden world, growing beyond control (WaPo, 07/19/2010)

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

posted by Little Dawn at 9:14 AM on July 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Google's search algorithm is actually pretty crappy.

It's the worst, except for all the others.

In three years, Google becomes become the largest supplier of internet searches and web advertising.

That happened years ago.
posted by shponglespore at 9:34 AM on July 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

I am Mr Peter Attah the appointed executor of a 15,000,000.00 (fifteen million) U.S. Dollars account held in trust for the widow of our recently deceased dictator and I AM PERMANENTLY WIRED INTO YOUR PREFRONTAL CORTEX
posted by naturetron at 9:54 AM on July 6, 2015

Google search worked better for me when the web was smaller, less commercial, and more naive. I can't really blame them for those things changing.
posted by thelonius at 10:06 AM on July 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some day, Page has said several times, this AI will be hooked directly to our brains—perhaps through an implant.

I would rather die than see that day. Don't these people ever read any quality SF lit?
posted by bukvich at 11:20 AM on July 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well somehow the shit's getting creepy. This morning I woke up with a song in my head that I can't remember having heard in... jeez, a decade at least. It's not even my type of music. I certainly have never seeked it out or played it on purpose, or anything I can think of that's similar in a "other people who like..." sense.

Opened up youtube, typed "I'd". That's all it took.
Autocomplete: I'd love to change the world ten years after.

whoa.gif
posted by ctmf at 11:50 AM on July 6, 2015

“You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.”

I get the impression that Mr. Zuckerberg does not have any extended family members on his Facebook feed.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:37 PM on July 6, 2015

You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.

You mean like what happens when we talk to each other?
posted by elwoodwiles at 9:04 PM on July 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

Some day, Page has said several times, this AI will be hooked directly to our brains—perhaps through an implant

Considering the rampant "success" of Google Glass, I'm not too terrifically worried about google's grander schemes to reach out beyond the web interface to gather everyday data, other than the whole phone tracking business. That's a problem with triangulating carriers & the NSA, though. You're just not going to get a whole lot of people on board with the idea of letting a corporation implanting tracking chips in their brains.

It's sure as hell not gonna become mandatory. 9/10ths of humanity will continue to carry on mostly unaffected by and unaware of Google for quite some time. Those of us in their crosshairs do have options, & I've been execrcising mine. Dormant gmail account for junk only, Duck Duck Go working perfectly well as a search engine. Maps is probably the one thing I use with regularity.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:20 AM on July 7, 2015

Here's what my friends will experience:

so what did you think of the- SQUIRREL

Hey! My name is Doug too. I love you.
posted by DigDoug at 9:50 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]