6 ms·

Google CEO Schmidt: "People Aren't Ready for the Technology Revolution"

40 points by collistaeed 16y ago

pierrefar 16y ago
Finally someone from Google said it: "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go." No wonder people worry about the privacy implications of their Google accounts.
- pavs 16y ago
  Is it unique to Google?
- axod 16y ago
  A very small niche worry about things like this. Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit. I'm really excited about all the fun things we'll be able to do and have. I wonder how long it'll be before we're all wearing augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising/help/wiki etc. You could be walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today". It could show you customer ratings etc. You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face and so on. Having the future we want means we have to allow people access to some information, like 'where we are', where we've been, messages, demographics etc. Either you get cool stuff, or you get privacy - up to you.
  - alecco 16y ago
    > Most people just don't care one bit. Most people don't know about the issue and it's implications. It's not the same. Also, most of the few that do know are filled with FUD from people with economic or political interests in destroying privacy.
    - axod 16y ago
      I disagree. There's a pretty clear trend of people actively making more of their private life public. The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to. The FUD I've seen has been from the other side. "They harvest your personal details and then sell them". That's just idiotic. Why should I care if a company collects some data on me and sells it? (As long as it was collected via legal means). Them selling information on me doesn't affect me in any way.
      - Herring 16y ago
        http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/faceboo... >Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.
      - gvb 16y ago
        The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to. What really annoys me is when my family and friends post many of the minute details of my life on their pages (e.g. Facebook, twitter). Welcome to the wonderful world of "collateral damage." :-(
  - MisterWebz 16y ago
    That's absolutely not cool. Instead of seeing the world as it is, you'll be seeing numbers, urls and random ads. You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you, thus leaving the owners of the content that is being displayed in a position of power. Sure, i may have dramatized it, but i certainly don't like where we're headed to in terms of privacy. The sad part is, the next generation of people won't give a damn about privacy, because they'll be accustomed to the lack of it. I think it's already a bit like that.
    - axod 16y ago
      >> "You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you" I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance. I believe the reality will be that we can stop thinking about useless wasteful mundane things, and spend more time thinking about things that really matter.
      - protomyth 16y ago
        Like where you are walking perhaps? I keep getting an image from Wall-E stuck in my head. The carts aren't there because they are fat. They are there because with all this distraction you can't walk straight.
      - MisterWebz 16y ago
        I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance. Turns out they were partially right about the television, weren't they?
        axod 16y ago
        No. TV is great (Not in US).
  - narrator 16y ago
    I think the analyze emotions thing might work. Everyone with a facebook/twitter profile will have a little floating icon above their head in augmented reality world though.
  - pierrefar 16y ago
    A very small niche worry about things like this. And rightly so. Have you seen Erasing David? http://erasingdavid.com/ http://erasingdavid.com/ .
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Imagine the futuristic world of 1890! You walk past a cafe and outside is a big sign, "Half off coffee!" And the awesome thing about Big Sign Technology is that it doesn't break your concentration: If you are intently listening to the organ grinder on the street corner, or talking with your friends about that new Oscar Wilde play, it does not interrupt you. Then you meet a person on the street. For a whole millisecond you don't know who they are. But then your built-in mechanism for recognizing human faces - which has been QA tested on monkeys for millions of years - kicks in and tells you that this is a friend, analyzes their emotions based on their face, clothing, and tone, and shows you details about their life which you have been storing in your long-term "memory", along with (among other things) customer ratings for that cafe you just passed. This amazing internal "memory" is searchable and is indexed according to useful criteria like place, time, emotional state, and relevance - for example, as you are about to take a bite of that apparently tasty snack, your "memory system" will helpfully remind you that the last sausage you ate made you violently ill. --- For all its amusement value, though, this comment is certainly a pitch-perfect illustration of the Google mentality. It's like watching Martians learn to dance. "We do not understand the odd periodic motions of these hu-mans, but we believe that we can reduce their motivations to a series of ones and zeroes." This attitude is undeniably effective, sometimes, but it has real limitations. As when, for example, Professor Frink tries to exchange all of my privacy for a bunch of "features" that my great-grandparents were born with.
    - axod 16y ago
      boring! I forget faces. I forget if I liked a certain place to eat. I want to see what the people inside think of the food. I want to see someones face, and a summary come up next to it saying "You forgot to reply to their email, their husband just left them, they know java, they're conservative" etc Human memory is really pretty sketchy and lame. It worked well when all we had to do was hunt and have babies, but it simply doesn't cut it any more.
      - pierrefar 16y ago
        Why don't we just chip everybody? It would save us carrying the gadget that helps us remember people. Also, there is a reason you didn't reply to their email. No use pretending otherwise for you or them.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit. Among my set of friends, I saw a lot of people remove personal data (e.g. employer, location, mobile number), clean up their friends lists and generally tighten things up. People have expanded their sphere of privacy to include their friends - e.g. like living in a village where everyone knows all the gossip. But it's a village, not a city...
  - starkfist 16y ago
    ...augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising... ...walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today"... ...You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face... That's nice, but I'm holding out for the flying cars and warp drive.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  They can learn and predict a lot, but that is boasting -- quite a bit of the time I don't know where I am going to go.
  - lnguyen 16y ago
    But eventually you do make a decision and go somewhere/do something. The prediction algorithm is concerned with that end result, not the process you've used to reach it.
- buro9 16y ago
  http://www.google.com/latitude/apps http://www.google.com/latitude/apps Turn on Latitude, enable friends alerts in Latitude Apps, and you'll see that the alerts only happen when you go outside of the predicted pattern... meaning that they can already do this if you want them to.
- 9oliYQjP 16y ago
  I worry about Google. But then I remember that they can barely return relevant search results these days without getting confused by keyword farms. Remember that Schmidt has to talk up Google's capabilities. In reality, he's oversimplifying the situation and Google's shear size and age will be its demise just as it was for Microsoft. Google's 20-something and early 30-something employees who had no problem working for 10-14 hour days this decade will begin to pull back and/or leave the organization. This will be followed by a slew of lacklustre product and service launches (e.g., Microsoft Vistas) until Google is but a mere shadow of its former self. Of course, that does leave another company or government to actually do to Google what it in turn did to Altavista. And it's that entity which scares me because it might be a foreign government or corporation with a completely different culture and set of constraints around freedom, privacy, and ethics. We know how bad companies/governments act in the Western World where we try to uphold individual rights. But what if another government or company in an area of the world where individual rights aren't respected gets there first?
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Gets where? In search? What! Its the freaking internet man. You wanna use google, or type here the bad government or whatever, you use it. You don't want to use it, you use someone else or do without it or build a copycat of it.
  - maxharris 16y ago
    "But what if another government or company in an area of the world where individual rights aren't respected gets there first?" I wouldn't worry about this at all. Technological advances such this are not possible without individual rights. The reason for this is that the mind cannot think under force.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
A quibble: he says "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003". But this is misleading, far more than 5 exabytes of "information" were created during that time, but only about 5 exabytes of it was stored for posterity. This is an important distinction, I think. Also, as to technological revolutions, nobody is ever ready for them. Revolutions are disruptive, no matter how prepared you are your life will be disrupted by them (if you are lucky it will be for the better).
- protomyth 16y ago
  It also kinda ignores many of the people with oral traditions. Some of those stories that were carried down for generations have been lost do to colonization. Let's also not forget a certain library that went up in flames.
c1sc0 16y ago
"The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it." I'm torn between thinking "wow, that's scary" & appreciating how much potential for good there is in a completely transparent world. I've been thinking about (genomic & medical) identity: research could benefit massively from a world of total transparency. 23andme is sitting on a growing collection of personal genomics data which they are trying to use for research purposes through their 23andwe program. That's great, but that is still a massive collection of data locked up in a single company. Imagine a world where every single individual is sequenced at birth & his data is made publicly available for research purposes. Total transparency. Kind of the polar opposite of the current situation where the patient owns his data & permission needs to be gathered to use of that data for research purposes. We're forgoing massive progress for fear of an artifact of current society (a.k.a. insurance companies).
- weavejester 16y ago
  The problem with utopian ideals is that they are often open to abuse by immoral individuals. We should be careful we don't make ourselves more vulnerable in our quest for efficiency. However, I doubt that it's fear of insurance companies (by which I assume you mean medical insurance) that is holding back society from totally transparent world. The EU has stricter privacy laws than the US, but also has universal healthcare.
- cageface 16y ago
  In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. What does he mean by "asynchronous" threats? Did he mean to say asymmetrical?
jorangreef 16y ago
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Ben Franklin
hackermom 16y ago
Is that a bulletproof vest he's wearing in the picture in the article?
- bd 16y ago
  Yes: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/eric-schmidt-twitter-picture/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/eric-schmidt-twitter-pictur...
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
So there's so much data out there and one of the most important uses for that data according to Schmidt is to predict where I am going next. If that's Google's best thinking about data, it shows very well why they have so far not managed to make money on anything outside their original ad business model. And I have to say, if everything they are able to come up with is new ways of spying on me in order to create information that is useless to me then I'm going to prevent them from getting access to any of my data.
- cake 16y ago
  I wouldn't say they have not managed to make money on anything except ads. For example, you have to pay for Google Apps for business and they say they have more than 2M customers. At 50$ per year per users, that's not negligible.
  - ktsmith 16y ago
    You are assuming that all 2 million customers are on the premiere edition I know at least a dozen businesses using google apps for business with less than 50 users and the standard version which they are paying exactly $0 for.
    - cake 16y ago
      Agreed that this is not a reliable number, they also say 2M businesses and not the detail of end users. But what I meant to say is that they do have other sources of revenue outside of ads that are not negligible.
      - ktsmith 16y ago
        You are probably correct that the other revenue sources are not negligible. I do wonder however how Google would fare if their ad revenue took a major hit. I don't think their other offerings could sustain the current juggernaut that they have become. I suppose given their cash reserves they could figure something else out. It certainly seems though that most of their new products are just more ways to push advertisements and of not that much utility in the first place.
bhiggins 16y ago
5 exabytes of mostly useless information. Information is not an end unto itself.
bhavin 16y ago
The reason why I get too uncomfortable around this kinda stuff is that they seem to treat human-beings like machines.. These entities seem to say, we know what you do, what you like, when you're hungry, what you're supposed to do... etc. We're gonna get you so bombarded with stuff that you lose whatever little consciousness you have and start spending wherever we ask you to.. From movie Network (1976): "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value."

40 points by collistaeed 16y ago

Finally someone from Google said it: "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go." No wonder people worry about the privacy implications of their Google accounts.

pavs 16y ago
Is it unique to Google?
axod 16y ago
A very small niche worry about things like this. Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit. I'm really excited about all the fun things we'll be able to do and have. I wonder how long it'll be before we're all wearing augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising/help/wiki etc. You could be walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today". It could show you customer ratings etc. You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face and so on. Having the future we want means we have to allow people access to some information, like 'where we are', where we've been, messages, demographics etc. Either you get cool stuff, or you get privacy - up to you.
- alecco 16y ago
  > Most people just don't care one bit. Most people don't know about the issue and it's implications. It's not the same. Also, most of the few that do know are filled with FUD from people with economic or political interests in destroying privacy.
  - axod 16y ago
    I disagree. There's a pretty clear trend of people actively making more of their private life public. The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to. The FUD I've seen has been from the other side. "They harvest your personal details and then sell them". That's just idiotic. Why should I care if a company collects some data on me and sells it? (As long as it was collected via legal means). Them selling information on me doesn't affect me in any way.
    - Herring 16y ago
      http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/faceboo... >Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.
    - gvb 16y ago
      The people 'destroying privacy' are the general population posting the minute details of their life on the internet for all to see. They want to. What really annoys me is when my family and friends post many of the minute details of my life on their pages (e.g. Facebook, twitter). Welcome to the wonderful world of "collateral damage." :-(
- MisterWebz 16y ago
  That's absolutely not cool. Instead of seeing the world as it is, you'll be seeing numbers, urls and random ads. You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you, thus leaving the owners of the content that is being displayed in a position of power. Sure, i may have dramatized it, but i certainly don't like where we're headed to in terms of privacy. The sad part is, the next generation of people won't give a damn about privacy, because they'll be accustomed to the lack of it. I think it's already a bit like that.
  - axod 16y ago
    >> "You'll be heavily influenced by these devices, and it'll be just a matter of time before you stop thinking for yourself and let the device think for you" I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance. I believe the reality will be that we can stop thinking about useless wasteful mundane things, and spend more time thinking about things that really matter.
    - protomyth 16y ago
      Like where you are walking perhaps? I keep getting an image from Wall-E stuck in my head. The carts aren't there because they are fat. They are there because with all this distraction you can't walk straight.
    - MisterWebz 16y ago
      I'm pretty sure people have said this about every technological advance. Turns out they were partially right about the television, weren't they?
      - axod 16y ago
        No. TV is great (Not in US).
- narrator 16y ago
  I think the analyze emotions thing might work. Everyone with a facebook/twitter profile will have a little floating icon above their head in augmented reality world though.
- pierrefar 16y ago
  A very small niche worry about things like this. And rightly so. Have you seen Erasing David? http://erasingdavid.com/ http://erasingdavid.com/ .
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Imagine the futuristic world of 1890! You walk past a cafe and outside is a big sign, "Half off coffee!" And the awesome thing about Big Sign Technology is that it doesn't break your concentration: If you are intently listening to the organ grinder on the street corner, or talking with your friends about that new Oscar Wilde play, it does not interrupt you. Then you meet a person on the street. For a whole millisecond you don't know who they are. But then your built-in mechanism for recognizing human faces - which has been QA tested on monkeys for millions of years - kicks in and tells you that this is a friend, analyzes their emotions based on their face, clothing, and tone, and shows you details about their life which you have been storing in your long-term "memory", along with (among other things) customer ratings for that cafe you just passed. This amazing internal "memory" is searchable and is indexed according to useful criteria like place, time, emotional state, and relevance - for example, as you are about to take a bite of that apparently tasty snack, your "memory system" will helpfully remind you that the last sausage you ate made you violently ill. --- For all its amusement value, though, this comment is certainly a pitch-perfect illustration of the Google mentality. It's like watching Martians learn to dance. "We do not understand the odd periodic motions of these hu-mans, but we believe that we can reduce their motivations to a series of ones and zeroes." This attitude is undeniably effective, sometimes, but it has real limitations. As when, for example, Professor Frink tries to exchange all of my privacy for a bunch of "features" that my great-grandparents were born with.
  - axod 16y ago
    boring! I forget faces. I forget if I liked a certain place to eat. I want to see what the people inside think of the food. I want to see someones face, and a summary come up next to it saying "You forgot to reply to their email, their husband just left them, they know java, they're conservative" etc Human memory is really pretty sketchy and lame. It worked well when all we had to do was hunt and have babies, but it simply doesn't cut it any more.
    - pierrefar 16y ago
      Why don't we just chip everybody? It would save us carrying the gadget that helps us remember people. Also, there is a reason you didn't reply to their email. No use pretending otherwise for you or them.
- gaius 16y ago
  Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit. Among my set of friends, I saw a lot of people remove personal data (e.g. employer, location, mobile number), clean up their friends lists and generally tighten things up. People have expanded their sphere of privacy to include their friends - e.g. like living in a village where everyone knows all the gossip. But it's a village, not a city...
- starkfist 16y ago
  ...augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising... ...walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today"... ...You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face... That's nice, but I'm holding out for the flying cars and warp drive.
tomjen3 16y ago
They can learn and predict a lot, but that is boasting -- quite a bit of the time I don't know where I am going to go.
- lnguyen 16y ago
  But eventually you do make a decision and go somewhere/do something. The prediction algorithm is concerned with that end result, not the process you've used to reach it.
buro9 16y ago
http://www.google.com/latitude/apps http://www.google.com/latitude/apps Turn on Latitude, enable friends alerts in Latitude Apps, and you'll see that the alerts only happen when you go outside of the predicted pattern... meaning that they can already do this if you want them to.
9oliYQjP 16y ago
I worry about Google. But then I remember that they can barely return relevant search results these days without getting confused by keyword farms. Remember that Schmidt has to talk up Google's capabilities. In reality, he's oversimplifying the situation and Google's shear size and age will be its demise just as it was for Microsoft. Google's 20-something and early 30-something employees who had no problem working for 10-14 hour days this decade will begin to pull back and/or leave the organization. This will be followed by a slew of lacklustre product and service launches (e.g., Microsoft Vistas) until Google is but a mere shadow of its former self. Of course, that does leave another company or government to actually do to Google what it in turn did to Altavista. And it's that entity which scares me because it might be a foreign government or corporation with a completely different culture and set of constraints around freedom, privacy, and ethics. We know how bad companies/governments act in the Western World where we try to uphold individual rights. But what if another government or company in an area of the world where individual rights aren't respected gets there first?
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Gets where? In search? What! Its the freaking internet man. You wanna use google, or type here the bad government or whatever, you use it. You don't want to use it, you use someone else or do without it or build a copycat of it.
- maxharris 16y ago
  "But what if another government or company in an area of the world where individual rights aren't respected gets there first?" I wouldn't worry about this at all. Technological advances such this are not possible without individual rights. The reason for this is that the mind cannot think under force.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

A quibble: he says "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003". But this is misleading, far more than 5 exabytes of "information" were created during that time, but only about 5 exabytes of it was stored for posterity. This is an important distinction, I think. Also, as to technological revolutions, nobody is ever ready for them. Revolutions are disruptive, no matter how prepared you are your life will be disrupted by them (if you are lucky it will be for the better).

protomyth 16y ago
It also kinda ignores many of the people with oral traditions. Some of those stories that were carried down for generations have been lost do to colonization. Let's also not forget a certain library that went up in flames.

c1sc0 16y ago

"The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it." I'm torn between thinking "wow, that's scary" & appreciating how much potential for good there is in a completely transparent world. I've been thinking about (genomic & medical) identity: research could benefit massively from a world of total transparency. 23andme is sitting on a growing collection of personal genomics data which they are trying to use for research purposes through their 23andwe program. That's great, but that is still a massive collection of data locked up in a single company. Imagine a world where every single individual is sequenced at birth & his data is made publicly available for research purposes. Total transparency. Kind of the polar opposite of the current situation where the patient owns his data & permission needs to be gathered to use of that data for research purposes. We're forgoing massive progress for fear of an artifact of current society (a.k.a. insurance companies).

weavejester 16y ago
The problem with utopian ideals is that they are often open to abuse by immoral individuals. We should be careful we don't make ourselves more vulnerable in our quest for efficiency. However, I doubt that it's fear of insurance companies (by which I assume you mean medical insurance) that is holding back society from totally transparent world. The EU has stricter privacy laws than the US, but also has universal healthcare.
cageface 16y ago
In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. What does he mean by "asynchronous" threats? Did he mean to say asymmetrical?

jorangreef 16y ago

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Ben Franklin

hackermom 16y ago

Is that a bulletproof vest he's wearing in the picture in the article?

bd 16y ago
Yes: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/eric-schmidt-twitter-picture/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/eric-schmidt-twitter-pictur...

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

So there's so much data out there and one of the most important uses for that data according to Schmidt is to predict where I am going next. If that's Google's best thinking about data, it shows very well why they have so far not managed to make money on anything outside their original ad business model. And I have to say, if everything they are able to come up with is new ways of spying on me in order to create information that is useless to me then I'm going to prevent them from getting access to any of my data.

cake 16y ago
I wouldn't say they have not managed to make money on anything except ads. For example, you have to pay for Google Apps for business and they say they have more than 2M customers. At 50$ per year per users, that's not negligible.
- ktsmith 16y ago
  You are assuming that all 2 million customers are on the premiere edition I know at least a dozen businesses using google apps for business with less than 50 users and the standard version which they are paying exactly $0 for.
  - cake 16y ago
    Agreed that this is not a reliable number, they also say 2M businesses and not the detail of end users. But what I meant to say is that they do have other sources of revenue outside of ads that are not negligible.
    - ktsmith 16y ago
      You are probably correct that the other revenue sources are not negligible. I do wonder however how Google would fare if their ad revenue took a major hit. I don't think their other offerings could sustain the current juggernaut that they have become. I suppose given their cash reserves they could figure something else out. It certainly seems though that most of their new products are just more ways to push advertisements and of not that much utility in the first place.

bhiggins 16y ago

5 exabytes of mostly useless information. Information is not an end unto itself.

bhavin 16y ago

The reason why I get too uncomfortable around this kinda stuff is that they seem to treat human-beings like machines.. These entities seem to say, we know what you do, what you like, when you're hungry, what you're supposed to do... etc. We're gonna get you so bombarded with stuff that you lose whatever little consciousness you have and start spending wherever we ask you to.. From movie Network (1976): "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value."