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from the totally-just-a-thought-experiment dept.
Google's Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering
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 a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, 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.
When reached for comment on the video, an X spokesperson provided the following statement to The Verge:
"We understand if this is disturbing -- it is designed to be. This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as 'speculative design' to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It's not related to any current or future products."
7m53s explainer video. The Selfish Ledger is embedded on The Verge or can be found elsewhere. Also at Business Insider.
See also: Philip Bloom is Angry at Google for Using His Work in an Internal Video
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Saturday May 19 2018, @09:24AM
I recently read a short story by David Marusek: "Getting to Know You" [wikipedia.org] and it seems that someone at Google must have been reading it. It was published in 1998, interestingly enough, the very year Google was founded. The protagonist has been given an artificially intelligent gadget by her employer for testing. It’s not very intelligent at first, until she finally consents to let it get to know all about her and read all of her otherwise private records, and then it turns into a terrifying entity that seems to know her better than she knows herself. Google seems to have ambitions to make Bug/Nicholas a reality with this.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.