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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: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:34PM (1 child)
I guess we are going to find out just how well people passively accept slow, gentle. unnoticed guidance to their behaviours and beliefs. People seem to conform to their environment and peers over time, despite their claims otherwise. It takes years. I think power to control populations like this is certainly possible but it will require long-term effort and an uninterrupted system that also provides the population with the majority of their news, information, and contact with others. Simply joining a book club or something that facilitates free and open exchange of ideas not controlled by "the system" would seem to disrupt the entire effort.
Maybe that's we are seeing an internet-wide crackdown on "wrong thinking".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 20 2018, @01:13AM
As if we didn't already have thousands of years of evidence to support this. I think one can't eliminate it, but one can widely greatly the field of parties who can participate.