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.
This is exactly as dystopian and deeply creepy as you think it is. My biggest concern is not that this video exists or that companies such as Google are thinking about this – my biggest concern is that a whole generation of people already seem to accept this as the new normal even before it’s a reality.
They seem to be using a very heavy analogy to make it all sound more impressive and powerful than it is. But there’s one fundamental problem with the approach, and I don’t mean its, evidently totalitarian, connotations.
As a human being, you live with the world of externals, and the world of internals. The externals are all things which can be looked at from the outside, and is what is called “objectivity”. You can see a rock, you can measure its weight, and so on. Its largely the world of science and technology.
Meanwhile, we also have a world of internals. This is the world not of objects, but of what philosophers call qualia. These phenomena are all subjective, in that, you need to be a subject in order to experience them and understand them. Someone has to ask you, how do you feel? And then they have to refer to their own internal qualia in order to begin to interpret what you said and what it might mean to you and to them.
Simple example, take a book of Shakespeare, and science can tell what the book is made of, the ink on the page, etc. all the objective measurements. But you need to be a subject, a human with human experience and an inner-life, in order to begin to interpret and understand its meanings, like, you need to be a human being in order to comprehend the dilemma, to be or not to be, or to understand why the character of Falstaff is weak and yet popular.
Psychology tried at one time to be scientific by going down the behaviourist route. But by doing that, you actually miss, you are not allowed to observe or even ask about, all the actual inner life and subjective experience of a person. People are not black boxes.
So yeah, you can observe objective properties about people, like, what did they click on, what did they buy, etc. And maybe you can build a model about that, to predict things. Sure.
But your model will miss all the important stuff, because your model was never able to observe that important stuff in the first place. You can only “observe” the inner life by being someone with a similar inner life, and then spending a lot of time interpreting meanings. It’s inter-subjective. It’s hermeneutics and art.
This is why big cultural revolutions, like the 60s, were not predicted by anyone. Maybe a few very intuitive people felt it coming, but for the most part, the meaning of the 60s was novel, unpredicted, and out of nowhere. (Of course in retrospect everyone can have an explanation.)
Google can build this impressive sounding system, but it will predict squat of any importance. It is seriously blind. It just does not have access to the real phenomena which matter. It can only record data.
As Picasso said, computers are useless, they can only give you [rational] answers. All the important human stuff is subjective.
I would be surprised if anyone in the ad industry actually buys into this Google idea.
As for the costs of custom manufacturing an item based on my habits and stated goals, ha ha ha, yeah I bought a jacket that was not quite the colour I wanted, and would it have been nice to have seen one exactly the right colour, but you know what, a hundred other subjective things influenced my decision to buy, so that custom perfectly predicted jacket would likely still be sitting on the rack. Data is useless.
Good analysis.
I would add this is the age-old fallacy that measuring more allows you to predict more. It opposes a deterministic paradigm to a chaotic one. And while there is knowledge to be gain, to a certain degree, collecting more often lead to more noise, the known paradox of information theory.
As for the fear that free will will be impacted, I am not too worry yet about that.
Some research might suggest that free will is just an illusion – fMRI researchers are able to predict answers before meanigful questions were asked…
“If we have free will, so do electrons.”
Well, with many disorders, behaviourism / cognitive-behavioural therapy is one of most effective approaches…
only that most of the population don’t realise it yet.
Facebook is BB Light but catching up fast.
Can you explain how Google is worse than FB ?
Most of Google services can be used without being locked-in. You can use search without cookies or through anonymiser, gmail is a webmail among many others, you can use Android and use alternatives to Google apps…
FB, to the contrary, is a crazy manipulative social engineering experience, it is Big Brother merging with the STASI…