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 tha

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.