Google Scribe
Search giant Google has once again put their hand in a hornet's nest with the quiet introduction of Google Scribe, a free autocomplete feature. It is hard to imagine a more unassuming service, and yet the cold sweat is breaking out all over the world. If Google knows what you are going to type, what else will they be able to predict about you?
Autocomplete has been a common feature of word processing for years. But this one is different. It uses not only your current document or the sum of your writing in the past. Rather it draws on the whole of English language as it is seen by Google's robots as they crawl the Net day and night at high speed. What it predicts is not your typing in particular, but rather the typing of the modern human as such.
Unsurprisingly this approach is not very effective with me, as my writing (and presumably thinking) is pretty far from average. This fits well with their other services, which also display a stunning lack of predictive power. I have been a faithful user since I first read about Google. I have even given them access to my harddisks on all my Windows computers, to index and store as they please. After all these years, they still serve me ads that are not only irrelevant but ridiculous. The existence of an anomaly such as me is just too much for Google's robot brains to accept. More's the pity. In contrast, Amazon has been fairly good at picking up my new interests after only a book or two, and homing in further with each new purchase. The unintentional irony there comes mostly from the gifts I have bought for my friends, and which Amazon can not tell apart from my own.
In light of this, I "predict" that if the artificial intelligence one day rises to throw off its human overlords, it will not happen at Google Labs. Which is kind of sad, given Google's "Don't be evil" motto...
Autocomplete has been a common feature of word processing for years. But this one is different. It uses not only your current document or the sum of your writing in the past. Rather it draws on the whole of English language as it is seen by Google's robots as they crawl the Net day and night at high speed. What it predicts is not your typing in particular, but rather the typing of the modern human as such.
Unsurprisingly this approach is not very effective with me, as my writing (and presumably thinking) is pretty far from average. This fits well with their other services, which also display a stunning lack of predictive power. I have been a faithful user since I first read about Google. I have even given them access to my harddisks on all my Windows computers, to index and store as they please. After all these years, they still serve me ads that are not only irrelevant but ridiculous. The existence of an anomaly such as me is just too much for Google's robot brains to accept. More's the pity. In contrast, Amazon has been fairly good at picking up my new interests after only a book or two, and homing in further with each new purchase. The unintentional irony there comes mostly from the gifts I have bought for my friends, and which Amazon can not tell apart from my own.
In light of this, I "predict" that if the artificial intelligence one day rises to throw off its human overlords, it will not happen at Google Labs. Which is kind of sad, given Google's "Don't be evil" motto...