Google Is About to Change the Whole Internet -- Again [View all]

[usonian]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-overviews-search-engine.html

Opinion:
Will "synthesized summaries" replace all those " links and clues" you scoured to get diverse answers, AND OPINIONS?

What will happen to the idea of a gateway/switchboard to many writers trying to share their ideas? And what will happen to all those writers when we get summaries of their work, ahead of or instead of, their online writing, and links to buy their stuff? (Amazon' shenanigans are for another article)


More opinion below ... ⬇

In the past, Google has resorted to fairly unconvincing arguments to make its case for collecting data about its users — that it’s necessary to “help show you more relevant and interesting ads,” for example. Mostly, it has made its arguments in the form of software, and its users have responded with adoption or rejection. In contrast, AI assistants make a more direct case for the necessity and payoff of user surveillance. The assistants obviously work better if they can see what the user can see or at least what’s on their screens. The fact that they’re not quite here yet minimizes the tension that users might feel, if and when they actually arrive, between an ever-smarter and more humanlike assistant and its demands for access to ever-more intimate material.

In the same way that years of data collected from the web through Google Search gave Google the ability to start simply generating plausible results itself, AI assistants purport to be able to help you as you — to operationalize the vast trove of data that Google has long been collecting, with your technical consent, for purposes beyond marketing. In a narrow sense, this sounds like a better deal, in which at least some of the value of the immense personal corpus accrues back to the user in the form of a helpful chatbot. More broadly, though, the illusion of choice should feel familiar. (There are signs that Google is aware of and attentive to privacy concerns: It emphasized that its call-screening feature, for example, would rely on on-device AI rather than sending data to the cloud.)

The popular notion that the AI boom represents a disruptive threat to the internet giants deserves more skepticism than it’s gotten so far — the needs of the tech industry past, present, and future are neatly and logically aligned. These are companies whose existing businesses were built on the acquisition, production, and monetization of large amounts of highly personal data about their users; meanwhile, the secret to unlocking the full, glorious potential of large-language-model-based AI, at the level of the personal assistant or in service of achieving machine intelligence, is, according to the people building them, simply more access to more data.

It’s not so much a conspiracy, or even a deliberate plan, as an aspirational vision of a world in which traditional notions of what belongs to us have been redefined beyond recognition. AI firms have asserted that they need to ingest enormous amounts of public and private data in order to fulfill their promise. Google is making a more personal version of the same argument: Soon, it’ll be able to help with anything. All it needs from you in return is everything.

Personally, I think I could use more friends, so that we can exchange different viewpoints, ideas and experiences rather than a mirror of myself. (harken back to the "Life Imitates Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry falls in love with someone who speaks very much like himself (OOPS) ). And as for an omniscient assistant, I've enjoyed lifelong learning, and rather than farm that out, maybe a little help with the weed-whacking, or in my wildest dreams, lower electric rates, might make me happier.