Google Now: wrapped around its finger?
Call me old-fashioned, but there are still things out there that can surprise me.
The illustration shows a Google Now screenshot taken from my smartphone; I’m sure you’ve all seen something similar on your devices from time to time: an automatically generated notification from an email sent, in this case by a student of mine, asking for an appointment to discuss an entrepreneurship project.
So far, so good: I have been a professor at IE Business School for the last 25 years, and my students often write to me to arrange such meetings. Now let’s follow the sequence of events that took place after the mail was sent:
- Gmail looks at the email. No surprise there: one of the terms and conditions of the service is allowing it to do so, in order that it can match up with appropriate advertising.
“Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”
- Google then processes the content of the mail, detecting that it is about a meeting. How it does so is not so clear: it could be based on the message’s heading (“Do you have some time this week?”), the use of certain key words in the message (“meet”), or the reference to “this week”, “early in the morning” or “around noon time”, or all of the above. In case anyone from Google is reading this and wants to shed some light on the topic, it would certainly be appreciated.
- In any event, Google decides that this is a request for a meeting, understands that noon is the best time, and suggests today, possibly even using my Google Calendar to see if I’m free at that time.
- It allows me to follow the event, which would probably lead to an invitation to a meeting being sent to my student and myself that would be placed in our Calendars.
Many of you will think this is perfectly normal, that this is what is supposed to happen, but I have to say that I am amazed, first by the processing capacity involved, and secondly that a machine can analyze my information and my life to that degree. It isn’t perfect, obviously: Google knows perfectly well that I am on the other side of the world because I am using my usual smartphone, and there is a clear record of where I have been in my Location History, so proposing a meeting in Madrid today doesn’t make much sense (unless you are offering a Google Hangout). But those are quibbles about adding a few extra rules and information to the system, and that Google already has. As a digital secretary, it’s not bad. Not as good as my human assistant (insert bad jokes here :-) but I have to say it’s not a bad start.
Do I like it? Does it bother me? Well, I already know that Google has all my information. That it’s able to process it to such a degree was something I could certainly have imagined, but I had never seen it in action to this degree. By now, everything seems to suggest that Google wants to be my assistant, a digital secretary, a means to organize my life. But at the same time, Google knows who my students are, since all of them use the Google accounts that we provide them with when they join IE Business School. In this particular case, Google knows who the student requesting a meeting is, where he lives, and pretty much where he is at any moment. And of course, the content of all his emails.
In which case, Google is much more than simply my digital assistant: it is also the digital assistant of a very important part of the population of a large number of countries, with all that means in terms of consolidating information. This makes it much more like Horus, the all seeing, all knowing eye. In which case, perhaps we’d better ask ourselves, before it’s too late, if this is really what we want, otherwise, to put it as one of my favorite groups once did: “then you’ll find your servant is your master”…
(En español, aquí)
