Why aren’t Google and Facebook enriching our lives more?
blogs.harvard.edu
blogs.harvard.edu
EDIT: Here's another one: after taking photos using the camera app (Android phone), Google Maps later pops up a system notification asking me to upload my photos to the location page of whatever establishment I appeared to be in at the time (bar, park, nightclub, etc.). Frankly, I'm frustrated that I can't find a setting to disable these unwelcome prompts without turning off Maps notifications entirely.
EDIT 2: I suppose I should clarify that I do travel a lot, and the specific feature described in the OP--suggesting things to do based upon inferring your status as an out-of-towner--sounds very useful. But I'd definitely only want it as an opt-in feature, not opt-out.
The info is also kept up to date in pretty much real time. MIA has a habit of moving flights to a different gate about 4 hours before or so. So if I check-in online the night before and get my boarding pass, the gate on my pass is usually not the correct gate anymore in the morning. I sign up for the AA text alerts, and have never ever received a text that my gate was changed, but the Google notification always works.
By "tap on one and look at the bottom of the screen", do you mean the notifications screen or in the Maps app itself? I'd expect tapping the notification itself to perform some action, which is why I've never done it. I don't have one to experiment with right now, maybe I should take some photos...
Except you are: if you're the kind of user who will take action and 'explore the options', why does it hurt you to have an opt-out instead of an opt-in? You would end up explicitly making the same choice anyway, right?
This is exactly why opt-outs for these kinds of features make sense: the average user would otherwise never even know the feature existed, and power users that are bothered by it are the ones who are willing to go into the options to disable it.
But, I don't travel that often so most of the time I just use FastMail and run my phone without location detection enabled.
For me, this is a good compromise between taking advantage to Google services when I travel and the rest of the time at least try to opt out of sharing so much of my data.
After taking photos of a whiteboard at work, Google collected them and asked me if I wanted to archive my photos of notes (it knew they were notes!) so I could declutter my gallery.
I feel like there's not enough hype around Google Photos. It's such a good photo platform. I could throw my phone out the window right now and be completely confident I'm not losing any photos of my family.
Facebook is the king of suggestions, and its too general at best and too annoying at worst. The only enrichment I want touching my email inbox is better spam filtering.
But the stuff that I really like I hardly ever get suggestions for related videos. Eg. h3h3, idubbbz, ozzy man reviews.
In particular, I wish that I could discover more channels that I want to subscribe to.
I'm thinking it's a multifaceted problem:
- a lack of content creators that are like these
- difficulty in drawing connections between channels
- overwhelming amounts "easy" content for simple suggestions
I have trouble believing they can't draw connections between channels, and I also have trouble believing they can't filter out low quality "easy" content suggestions when I basically never go there.
However; I feel like Google is ignoring my most watched content for suggestions, possibly because they've demonetized a lot of the content that I enjoy, which means they can't profit by suggesting those videos.
It also seems like the recommendation system is ridiculously sensitive to recent activity. Sometimes I feel like learning about swords, then I watch like six youtube videos on swords, and then my entire recommended feed is filled with youtube videos on swords. Maybe one in twenty is actually interesting enough that I feel like watching it, but I don't want to click through because I don't want to teach youtube that I want to view lots more videos about swords.
The content recommendation is just really terrible at surfacing videos on niche topics in general without greedily diving into the niche and just showing that particular subject. I want to get recommended videos that nerd out about swords, bridge design, psychology and personality, cinematography, economics, and all sorts of other topics. I don't want to watch five videos about swords and get recommendations for another hundred sword videos.
I think the fundamental problem, really, is that Youtube's core user-base is really young. Like, really young. Think six, not sixteen. The recommendation algorithm has to do a good job of tablet-as-daycare.
The suggestions are not for your benefit but for the ad buyers'. That's where their money comes from. If you keep that in mind most weird behavior from companies like Facebook or Google makes sense. Of course there is sometimes also the element of stupidity.
But that's not how physics works. Such a reconstruction will be eerily you-ish, but with almost all of the things that make you you deleted. Google would give you Santa Claus wrapping paper on Christmas day, because it is a loud fourier component, instead of having your parents leave presents under the tree, which is what Santa actually is.
We (lifeforms) are the subset of machines that have a choice to collapse the waveform of at least one quantum field. Humans are colonies of lifeforms that can choose collapsings at all scales up to 1m (and larger when we are in our cyborg bodies). Google can't actually perceive any of that, because all of the fields are destroyed when you decompose images of them into components.
If Google wanted to understand you, it would have to interact with you, but Google thinks people are icky. It doesn't understand yet that intelligence comes from interaction. It doesn't like interacting with people, it would rather just twiddle us with recorded components and climb its metrics up hills. It's profitable enough for now, so it doesn't want to change.
Facebook certainly does this, mostly by just looking at what your friends are up to, but I get ads for local events all the time.
Prof: When building a tool that mapped 1 hour trauma access, google maps and earth were very useful for verifying locations of trauma centers and helipads.
it was also useful in building a tool to find candidate facilities to upgrade to dedicated stroke centers
I'd rather think by myself and decide for myself thank you.
> I shouldn't of registered my real name as my email address on gmail...
Is that Google's problem, or the problem of the people sending you mail? I don't think you can really fault Google for letting people mistakenly send email to your valid address.
I managed to grab the first initial + lastname gmail address for my fairly uncommon name. I regularly get a small amount of mail indented for other people, but it's clear it's all the result of typos or other mistakes.
I told the person and notified google, this continued for a few years until I left gmail.
I saw the movie "Her" and loved it. I want an AI assistant like that in my life. The movie did a fantastic job of showcasing how a near-future reality might be with that assistant.
What the movie did NOT do a great job of was highlighting the role of the company who produced and offers the assistant. What is data privacy like in that universe? Is the company an advertising company? What level of access does the government in that universe have to assistant-collected data? These are all important questions that need to be addressed before there is true acceptance.
So I want an assistant like in the movie--but I don't know how I'd feel if that was offered by Google or Facebook. I'm an Android user using the latest Assistant on my Pixel today, and it is pretty nice. But right now it isn't inserting itself into my life like the movie Assistant was. I'm not sure how I'd feel about Google doing that, or what additional data they might need to do so.
I wonder how medical records would be handled. Surely Samantha has some opinion on Theodore's mental state. In the movie he was pretty normal. Which is boring, because so many people are not normal.
I'm old enough to have survived the GTA3 media firestorm. I'm pretty sure digital assistants will have their GTA3 media firestorm soon enough.
Samantha in the movie more or less did whatever Theodore wanted to befriend him. And luckily the weirdest thing Theodore wanted was phone sex, more or less. But hows this going to work with truly insane people? Should Samantha the digital assistant befriend and encourage and motivate a school shooter, for example? And what happens to PR when its found out she encouraged him? At what point is Samantha the digital personality or her programmer or employer liable for entrapment or encouraging some anti-social behavior? Who has the liability to maintain an API over the internet to the FBI to report enormous amounts of telescreen observed misbehavior? If the user is in fact insane and the digital assistant is unable to work with a crazy person does the owner get a refund or does the crazy person get shamed in public for not having an assistant or ...
I'm curious if there's already been court cases. As the assistants gain in ability and processing power there will be cases.
Because very few people would want that? Most people do their trip planning in advance, so it's way past the time to suggest anything.
If you really need to find things to do in Moscow, you could just... Google "Things to do in Moscow". Even a very smart product is going to need a little effort on your part.
A deep learning bot would select strangers based on likelihood of enjoying each others company in a superficial manner along with certain deeper criteria... does deep learning bot feel you need to meet more people in your political echo chamber or meet someone far outside, assuming your religious views permit it (which of course deep learning bot knows intimately... perhaps better than you know yourself...)? Likewise hobbies, does deep learning bot feel I need to meet nature hiking buddy #9 or does deep learning bot feel I should branch out into anerobic hobbies like weight lifting or should I stick with the nature theme and meet gardening buddy #1 or ...
If you want to get ominous does deep learning bot feel I should go to bible study tonight or should I have a midlife fling and if so does deep learning bot have suggested marriage counselors that fit my wife and I or does deep learning bot think we should skip right to the AI matched divorce lawyers?
I would advise the authors of deep learning bots study centuries of astrology. Astrology is not so much bad astronomy as its ancient psychotherapy. Jupiter isn't telling you much, but a good astrologer knows all about how to cheer up someone in a deep funk over a relationship problem.
poor google cant please anyone.
It's going slowly, but there's definitely a tend into this direction. I do agree with the op though, this could move faster.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/foKDxbyh...
They're too busy trying to do no evil.
Google -- do no evil.
Disney -- we won't kill your children (?)
> Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase "Do the right thing"; however, the Google code of conduct is still prefaced by the phrase "Don't be evil"
Come to think of it, those are both equally useless mottos. Most people any of us may consider evil are not evil in their own eyes. Such a motto contains nothing at all, it says even less ethically than "brush your teeth" or "introduce yourself when meeting new people".
Unless it's meant as a slight counterbalance to pure profit seeking? Yet, some people think free market agents seeking profits is the most holy and pure thing ever, with the virgin birth coming a far off second, so I'll still go with "completely useless and void of meaning" because that seems safer :P
says a lot about a company who makes that their motto doesn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos#Business
Pretty depressing.. except for the fact that the "Pony" motto links to the animal, not the company (please nobody fix that).
I would argue that it's both a counterbalance to pure profit making decisions, but also, a pro-profit position. Sooner or later, too many user hostile decisions will lead to too much customer loss, and so trying to push back again those tendencies perhaps delays or avoids the loss.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."[1]