All the examples I can find seem to be around levels of privacy preservation that I just think if i was that concerned i would not risk sending it to anyone else anyway.
I think most of society would be happy with regulatory changes. Preventing companies from exploiting personal data is fairly simple in a democratic legal framework.
There are yes governments and states where democracy does not exist, but in that case they simply won't let me use such a search service anyway, so it's dubious the technology would be beneficial there.
Some time in the past decade I realised that software has only limited ability to change the world - it simply does not have the leverage to overcome all the politics of the world. If we want utopia, we must learn Judo to use the weight of the world against itself.
I remain optimistic that we can make this world better with these amazing new technologies, but I fear they cannot succeed on their own.
But I hope you can prove me wrong !
You gut instinct is right. The power comes from its close relation to the theory of computation. And this is the thing that drives our lives today.
The drawback is that HE imposes performance degradation. So its practical usage is somewhat limited, but still it promises immense returns for software publishers / consumers as the technology progresses.