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miss any flights yet? I find this feature insanely useful. Google is doing something useful with my email. I learn about delayed flights way way in advance o
by ryanobjc 7y ago
miss any flights yet?
I find this feature insanely useful. Google is doing something useful with my email. I learn about delayed flights way way in advance of anyone else as a result.
So let's just be clear here:
- you get an email, to you, privately
- gmail used to offer making a calendar for certain keywords in an email
- google will now automatically do said calendar entries - on your PRIVATE calendar btw
- google will also combine real-time flight info with your flight info, and tell you useful things via PRIVATE push notifications to you only.
This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric. It's totally privacy protecting - the calendar entries, push notifications are private.
This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy? Because they notified you a dozen times, via email they were going to do this, and you ignored it?
Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly.
- sbov 7y agoEmail misses most of my appointments. Doctors? Dentists? Picking a family member up at the airport? Your kids' karate classes? Playdates? Anything else arranged by text message? Although maybe the problem is they don't know enough about my and my kids' life.
- JohnFen 7y ago> This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. No, not everyone by a longshot.
- jodrellblank 7y agoI like how you redefine PRIVATE from "something I can see" to "something I can see and Google machines can add to and edit at whim, and Google employees hired by strangers for profit, an unknown number in unknown places, with no individual accountability, can potentially access" and then use your new definition of PRIVATE-which-isn't to bludgeon other people as luddites. This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric. This isn't your mind being expanded, this isn't you thinking new thoughts. This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy? Kurzweil VoicePad and Dragon Naturally Speaking tried to build Voice Recognition on-device for years and it was a bright and techno future. Then Google Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa got people to send speech samples over the internet to a foreign, perpetual-record, datacenter. The voice recognition part is better, but now it's creepy. Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly. Why doesn't Google forward their itinerary to Uber and have someone else pick them up at the airport, so you don't have to be involved in your life at all?