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I want technology like this in my life. I mean what Google Now ultimately could become. A personal assistant powered by near-magical machine learning. But I

I want technology like this in my life. I mean what Google Now ultimately could become. A personal assistant powered by near-magical machine learning. But I don't want to sacrifice my privacy to companies that have proven untrustworthy. More so than that, I don't want to invest a piece of my life into a service, when Google has a track-record for either A) abandoning the product, or B) mucking it up. Let's talk about the future, where Google Now feels like a human secretary in its capacity for intelligence. One day you ask it to schedule an appointment for a Friday lunch. Instead of the usual friendly acknowledgement, (s)he asks you if you'd like to share this appointment on Google Plus. Suddenly you can't make reservations at a restaurant, without having a Google Plus profile. They wanted to abate abuse of the system by linking reservations to real people. Now you have to "fire" your secretary, and spend weeks training up a new one. And (s)he'll never be as good as the old one. Hopefully you understand the point I'm making. It wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the tendency of all these modern services to form their own little monopolies. Take YouTube for example. I want to switch away from YouTube. But the content creators I love don't have their content available elsewhere. We talk about all the freedom our modern internet enabled society brings ... but yet most of what we create these days gets linked inextricably with some walled garden. I want a technology like Google Now, but I want the data it learns to be stored in an open format which I can port around as I see fit. I want to be married to my data, not to a service provider. Having said all that, I know my dream won't come true for quite some time. Non-trivial technology almost always breeds walled gardens, due to the expense required to develop and maintain them. We likely won't see open standards here until the technology is old enough to be implemented well in an open source project.

NicoJuicy 13y ago
They won't abandon Google Now, but i do see the advantage of Google Now as an open format..
- xerophtye 13y ago
  His point isn't just abandonment. His point is that what if tmrw they introduce some new restrictions (like the g+ profile needed), that would mess things up. He doesn't want a situation where he has to comply with google's whims or be forced to leave the tech he loves. Not to mention all the effort put into training that tech. So he wants the data google collected on him to be portable. So that if tmrw he decides to use some other service in place of google now, he can just take out his data, and plug it into the new assistant. Now wouldn't that be cool? PS: i understand google has absolutely ZERO incentive to do something like this. But hey, just explaining GP's point

NicoJuicy 13y ago

They won't abandon Google Now, but i do see the advantage of Google Now as an open format..

xerophtye 13y ago
His point isn't just abandonment. His point is that what if tmrw they introduce some new restrictions (like the g+ profile needed), that would mess things up. He doesn't want a situation where he has to comply with google's whims or be forced to leave the tech he loves. Not to mention all the effort put into training that tech. So he wants the data google collected on him to be portable. So that if tmrw he decides to use some other service in place of google now, he can just take out his data, and plug it into the new assistant. Now wouldn't that be cool? PS: i understand google has absolutely ZERO incentive to do something like this. But hey, just explaining GP's point