Google knows my kids want to go on a hotdog

Nothing, no new feature from Google, but it crumpled me, like an electronic media market after the collapse of Silesion.pl.

Well, when I picked up my Sons from tennis, I looked at the notification that caused the vibrations on my wrist watch Apple Watch, I saw information from Google Maps that the route to Sienkiewicza Street 3 in Sosnowiec will take me 7 minutes.

I admit, it froze me when I realized that there is a gas station at this address, where tennis is often used by my children to roast hotdogs. The first sentence of my younger son, when he packed himself into the car two minutes later? - Daddy, stick it on hotdogs!

I know, hotdogs at gas stations, there is generally nothing to brag about, but I think that every parent will understand me - take here to refuse the child, the more requests for food. And it's not about the fact that at home later you do not have to do dinner anymore ... Well, maybe it's almost not about that at all.

Pale six, however, sausages in a bun, more important here is Google's shocking knowledge of my life

And it's not even that Google Maps suggested help for which I should be grateful - in the end he informed me what is the estimated travel time to the destination I was actually going to.

This is obviously not a new feature. For a long time Google has known that on Monday morning I go to the gym, and on Tuesday evening to basketball, suggesting me directions and informing about the estimated time of arrival. These are my usual regular activities that I do weekly in a week.

In this case, the point is that Google is able to recognize also those activities that are not something important, just a cut-back on the return journey home. None of us probably exaggerates the visits at the gas station as important events in everyday life, even those that we enter in the calendar (trainings and children already).

This Google Maps prompt gave me a lot to think about

If Google knows I will go to a gas station even before I actually make that decision, are my decisions really fully autonomous? And how many such everyday activities, which I do not completely endorse myself, and Google knows about them and on the basis of them profiling me, anticipating my next actions.

And this is happening today, in 2019, when the Google Maps project is only 14 years old. What will happen in ten or twenty years? How far will the computer intelligence that shapes my life go? Do my decisions - both the small ones: going on a hotdog or not going, and the big ones that have a decidedly greater impact on my life - will be autonomous or planned in advance by artificial intelligence? When we understand how extremely serious this question is, we will come to us even more serious reflection - and what if, in fact, everything has been planned for a long time and we are only one element of one big simulation.

Of course, I'm not the first to pay attention to this kind of philosophical-existential doubt. In Silicon Valley, there is a prevailing conviction that our entire civilization, and maybe the Universe, is one big simulation, something like Sims in the version 1,000.001. Recently, Elon Musk even suggested that there is only one in a billion opportunities that we do not live in a simulation ... Well, the trivial situation with hotdog and Google Maps gives food for thought.

Someone may say - what a problem, throw out Apple Watch, log out of Google

Well, it is not so easy. Today we do not live in a vacuum. Technology, including profiling, tracking our movements, whether we like it or not, is getting stronger and stronger in everyday reality. Today, it's not enough to throw away your smartphone, log out of sensitive social accounts, because we're part of a great data ecosystem. And it can not break out of it anymore.

Marek Falenta recently became convinced - wanted by an international arrest warrant and a political swindler hiding in Spain. According to unofficial information, Falenta was tracked thanks to various digital traces, even though the pursuer himself did a lot to keep invisible online.

Along with the development of profiling technologies, artificial intelligence on the services of the largest technological companies in the world, what we call privacy or the right to be invisible, forgotten is also changing dramatically. What for many today seems to be a violation of basic human rights, too far-reaching interference of technology into our lives, will soon be something absolutely normal, which no one will question.

Let only this generation, which (almost) is born with smartphones in hands, will enter adulthood.



Google knows my kids want to go on a hotdog

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