Twenty years later, they have built a company going far beyond even that
lofty goal, providing individuals and businesses alike with email, file
sharing, web hosting, home automation, smartphones and countless other
services. The playful startup that began as a surveyor of the web has
become an architect of reality, creating and defining what its billions of users find, see, know or are even aware of.
Google controls more than 90 percent of the global search market,
driving users and companies alike to design websites that appeal to the
company’s algorithms. If Google can’t find a piece of information, that
knowledge simply doesn’t exist for Google users. If it’s not on Google,
does it really exist at all?
The intimacy machine
Despite its billions of answered search queries, Google is not just an
answer machine. Google monitors what responses people click on, assuming
those are more relevant and of higher value, and returning them more
prominently in future searches on that topic. The company also monitors user activities on its email, business applications, music and mobile operating systems, using that data as part of a feedback loop to give users more of what they like.
All the data it collects is the real source of Google’s dominance,
making the company’s services ever better at providing users what they
want. Through autocomplete and
the personalized filtering of search results, Google tries to
anticipate your needs, sometimes before you even have them. As Google’s
former executive chairman Eric Schmidt once put it, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Twenty years from now, with two more decades of progress, Google will be
even more accomplished, perhaps approaching a vision Brin expressed
years ago: “The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God.”
People are coming to rely on these tools, with their advanced
artificial intelligence-based algorithms, not just to know things but to
help them think.
The search bar has already become a place people ask personal questions, a kind of confessional or stream of consciousness that
is deeply revealing about who users are, what they believe and what
they want. In the future, Google will know you even more intimately,
combining search results, browsing history and location tracking with
biophysical health data from wearables and other sources that could
offer powerful insights into your state of mind.
A new kind of vulnerability
It is not far-fetched to imagine that, in the future, Google might know
if an individual is depressed, or has cancer, before that user realizes
it for herself. But even beyond that, Google may have the crucial role
in an ever-tightening alignment between what you think your needs are,
and what Google tells you they are.
Beyond its effects on individual people, Google is amassing power to
influence society – perhaps invisibly. Fiction has a warning about what
that might look like: In the movie “Ex Machina,”
an entrepreneurial genius reveals how he assembled the raw material of
billions of search queries into an artificial mind that is highly
effective at manipulating humans based on what it learns about people’s
behaviors and biases.
But this situation isn’t really fiction. As long ago as 2014, researchers at Facebook infamously demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate userswith
positive or negative posts in their news feeds. As people hand
algorithms more power over their daily lives, will they notice how the
machines are steering them?
Surviving the glorious future
Whether Google ultimately exercises this power depends on its human
leaders – and on the digital society Google is so central to building.
The company is investing heavily in machine intelligence, committing itself to a highly automated future where
the mechanics and, perhaps, the true insights of the quest for
knowledge become difficult or impossible for humans to understand.
Google is gradually becoming an extension of individual and collective
thought. It will get harder to recognize where people end and Google
begins. People will become both empowered by and dependent on the
technology – which will be easy for anyone to access but hard for people
to control.
The
amount of control Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their company exert
over individual people’s lives has grown since this photo was taken in
2000.AP Photo/Randi Lynn Beach
Humans will need to find ways to collaborate with – and direct the
activities of – increasingly sophisticated machine intelligence, rather
than merely becoming users who blindly follow the leads of black boxes
they no longer understand or control.
Based on our studies of the complex relationships between people and technologies, a critical key to this new understanding of algorithms will be storytelling. The human brain is bad at understanding and processing data –
which is, of course, a machine’s core strength. To work together, a new
human-machine relationship will have to depend on a uniquely human
strength – storytelling. People will work best with systems that can
work through stories and explain their actions in ways humans can
understand and modify.
The more that people entrust computer-based systems with organizing
culture and society, the more they should demand those systems function
according to rules humans can comprehend. The day we stop being the
primary authors of the story of humankind is the day it stops being a story about us.
September 26, 2018 6.23am EDT
