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At I/O, Google showed its willingness to change and shape our lives

At I/O, Google showed its willingness to change and shape our lives

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How personal can Google get before it all becomes too creepy?

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Every company in Silicon Valley will tell you, with operatic grandeur, that it aims to change the world and make it a better place. But set aside the pretenders trying to sell you $400 juicers, Google happens to be a company that can actually alter the way we, as a global society, interact with and understand one another. Google has control over the world’s dominant search engine, web browser, video and email platforms, mapping service, and mobile operating system. The decisions made by this company have far-reaching effects, and Google I/O 2018 presented a vision of the future that makes Google even more personal, influential, and essential in our daily lives.

One of Google’s promotional videos during the event concluded with the tagline “just make Google do it.” As with the very name of the Google Assistant it was advertising, this promo positions Google’s services as your servants, the Alfred to your Batman, as it were. But I feel like this deliberately benign portrayal masks a huge number of proactive decisions that Google makes every day on our behalf, and it’s useful to revisit those in light of the latest announcements from the company.

Google News

The new Google News is my pick for the most important announcement from I/O 2018. Building on the Google News Initiative, I think it’s the most ambitious project that Google has embarked on in recent times, mostly because it’s not the typical Google venture where just throwing more AI at the problem will eventually perfect its solution. (For examples of such efforts, look at Waymo self-driving or the evolution of Google Photos.) Google has long had the power to affect the news we see on a daily basis, but it’s only now that the company is proactively embracing the responsibility to do so.

Google News is an aggregator of news stories that Google thinks you might find interesting, providing a single point of access for information that was previously scattered across Google Newsstand, Google’s News & Weather app, and other sources like YouTube. You can also opt to just look at the most widely read stories of the moment, independent of your personal context. A new developing-story format called “newscast” will provide something akin to Twitter’s Moments. And there’ll be a fact-checking component to every story, addressing the fake news problem that’s plagued social networks like Facebook. At a superficial level, it all feels like a welcome reprieve from the (mis)information bombardment we face online every day.

But there are a ton of underlying issues. My primary worry is that we have to necessarily trust Google to do this correctly. Anyone engaged in any form of journalism knows that it’s impossible to remain neutral — even our choice of language to describe an issue betrays a particular perspective on it — and there are many polarized questions in modern politics that simply don’t have a fixed right answer. Who are “the good guys” in the Syrian conflict? Is Donald Trump a decisive leader that keeps his promises or a reckless warmonger? Which of those takes will Google deem worthy of its quality journalism label, and will it give them equal prominence if they appear in the same publication, such as the The New York Times?

Just “letting Google do it” is fine when the matter is daily chores and reminders, but it should give us pause when the job is to curate news and pick good and bad news sources. Apple and Facebook face many of the same challenges with their news services. We know what we don’t want: people shouldn’t immerse themselves in an echo chamber of agreeing voices, but neither should they have stuff forced upon them by a paternalistic news overseer. But where do you strike the balance between the two? The fact is, the news media today does a terrible job of conflating news and opinion, and I’m not sure Google’s machine learning, as great as it is, will be able to delineate between the small linguistic biases that distinguish good-faith journalism from deliberate propaganda.

Smart Displays

Google’s Smart Displays, which will go on sale from its hardware partners in July, are a direct response to Amazon’s Echo Show, basically a smart speaker with a screen. During a meeting with Lenovo and Google at CES in January, I was struck by how proactive Google planned to be in curating the Smart Display experience. Most of the Smart Display interactions will be based on web technologies, but Google expressly said it will not provide a web browser, arguing that it would hamper the simplicity the company is going for. That’s a peculiar thing for Google to say, a company that’s long championed the openness of the web, and it does create a situation where only Google-approved partners will get their content onto the Smart Display.

If you’re a big media organization or an influential YouTuber, Google Smart Displays don’t have to worry you. Google will probably be coming to you to discuss collaboration opportunities like Smart Display-optimized cooking recipes and life advice series. And, if we take Google at its word, the user will be better off by having a trustworthy custodian discarding unreliable and false information and leaving us only with quality content. As Smart Displays are more of a kitchen gadget, however, I again see many potential pitfalls. What actually is a good diet? The official US dietary guidelines between 1977 and 2015 advised everyone to avoid consuming cholesterol, however that diktat was dropped three years ago when it became clear that there wasn’t enough scientific evidence for it.

Practically every bit of dietary advice out there has a diametrically opposed theory to compete with. Some say we should eat lots of small meals throughout the day, others argue in favor of intermittent fasting. Low-fat diets are now giving way to low-carb ones. No one is really sure how much protein we should be consuming on a daily basis. And what about the ecological footprint of being a gluttonous omnivore? Should Google force you to care about that? Or should it just be your dumb assistant?

Pretty Please

The thing that most clearly expressed Google’s non-neutral attitude at I/O 2018 to me was the promised addition of “please” and “thank you” recognition to Google Assistant devices. Intended to help parents teach their kids the importance of manners, this feature, called Pretty Please, serves up encouraging responses from the Google Assistant when it receives a query accompanied by a term of politeness. You might think it banal, but this does exhibit a Google with values and principles. Specifically, it has the values and principles of its Anglo-American surroundings.

I grew up in Bulgaria, where the words “please,“ “sorry,” and “thank you” aren’t used like punctuation. Bulgarians talk to one another in the same brusque way that most people currently talk to their digital assistants. By integrating this more American way of interacting with its Assistant, Google is making a choice, one that serves to export American cultural values in a similar way to how movies, TV shows, and popular music have done in the past. It’s optional, of course, and I’m not criticizing Google for the addition (which I find cute), but it shows a company ready to be more assertive about the exact future it’s helping to shape.

Gmail Smart Compose

In another example of Google striding boldly into what might potentially be very personal or confidential interactions, Gmail is soon getting a predictive composition feature that will finish your sentences for you. Once again, I don’t know how to feel about that.

GIF: Google

On the one hand, we can all think of those little stock phrases that we use way too much, things like “hope you are well” or “here’s my address for shipping your latest $3,000 headphones to.” (Just me on that last one?) But, on the other hand, there’s something to be said about the social impact of not even typing out the words we send to another human being. This is only the latest step in the move from writing letters on paper to mashing keys on a typewriter to tapping out digital missives on flat touchscreens. The further we go from the mechanical and physical mode of communication, I think something personal and intangible is lost. If I take the time to scribble my thoughts on paper to you, no matter how bad my handwriting, I’m implicitly saying that you are worth the effort. If I send you a Gmail, well... you can’t even be sure I bothered to type any of it.

AI calls

The reduction of emails to a greeting-card level of convenience was accompanied by a showstopping demo of Google’s AI performing phone calls with customer service personnel. The Google Assistant was hemming and hawing in an extremely natural manner, successfully masquerading as a person. Once operational, this new Google Assistant function promises to remove yet another human-to-human interface, serving laudable purposes — such as helping a busy parent by making a call to schedule a doctor’s appointment for an ailing child — but also serving to distance and atomize us as individuals.

Like the self-checkout tills at supermarkets, this removal of social friction from our everyday lives may be convenient, but it also drains our routine from the possibility of any social serendipity. How do you make friends if you never have a random reason to engage in small talk? And, an ethical issue that Google didn’t address in its presentation: will AI callers have to identify themselves as such? What does this automation mean for the person on the other end of the line, who won’t be sure if they’re dealing with an especially obstinate customer or a malfunctioning AI.

Trusting Google

Every time Google I/O rolls around, I’m reminded of Google’s immensely powerful position in our daily lives. Only China and a few far-flung places aren’t yet under the overwhelming influence of this Silicon Valley giant. There’s a bittersweet flavor to Google’s new ventures, with the sugar kick of an awesome new convenience being accompanied by the aftertaste of ever-greater dependence on this single almighty company. Like Facebook, Google has immense influence over our modes of social interaction — and with that comes a huge amount of responsibility to “do no evil,” as the now-deprecated Google motto once urged.

What Google I/O asks of us every year is to trust Google that little bit more. Let Google handle that one more task, let it know that extra snippet of personal information so it can more intelligently assist us. As an Android, Chrome OS, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, and Google Docs user, I obviously do trust Google. But only to an extent. And while I see great potential for Google to keep improving people’s lives, I recognize the hazards along that path as well. Wherever it takes us, it seems obvious that Google’s direction will be to become ever more personal and essential to our lives.