“Average sentences for manslaughter and murder”“Fatal digoxin doses”“Could you kill someone in their sleep and no one would think it
was murder?”The Apple privacy dustup of 2016 will seem trivial as Google’s
precog powers grow. This will come when a thin layer of AI on top of
search queries and a few other data streams, including our
movements, are used effectively to predict crime, disease, and stock
prices. The information on a smartphone can already put a criminal in
prison. But the string of search queries that come barreling out of our
lizard brains... that’s where the really crazy shit can be found. The
temptation to create predictive links between intention and action will
be irresistible to governments, hackers, and rogue employees.
Look at your recent Google search history: you reveal things to
Google that you wouldn’t want anyone to know. We believe, naively,
that nobody (but the Big Guy) can listen to our thoughts. But let’s be
clear... Google too is listening.
To date, Google has been masterful at keeping this fear in check
and not exploiting—as far as we know—the predictive power of its
algorithms. Even the company’s initial motto, “Don’t Be Evil,”attempts
to reinforce the divine benevolence of this near-supreme being.^19
Moreover, you can be banished: Google has cast out payday lenders,
white supremacists, or any firm that charges an interest rate greater
than 36 percent. They have been, to recoin a phrase, “cast into outer
darkness,” the unknown.
But perhaps the greatest sin is to attempt to fool God—that is,
game Google’s search algorithm. There are 3.5 billion search queries a
day,^20 so in essence the search algorithm gets one three-billionth
better every time you search.^21 But that’s not always the case. In 2011,
a New York Times investigation revealed that a consultant working for
JCPenney had created thousands upon thousands of false links to
make it seem as though the JCPenney site was more relevant (that is,
had a greater number of other sites linking to it). That false evidence
led Google’s algorithm to rank the site near the top of its search