Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
It’s interesting how we use individual-inspired predicates when refering to the complex identity “Google” in this thread — “Google wants ...” “Google should ...” —- would Google get mad at you and stop talking to you when you do something bad? I guess it would.<p>Who is Google? The alignment of the agency, benefit, desires, ... seems to lie among various “actual” humans, it’s a distributed system across human identities much like its actual software is distributed across servers.<p>I keep wondering whether interacting with it while assuming it to be motivated in similar ways that individuals would be is a sensible approach in general, and how we have constructed it to be so given our incentive and preference systems (buying products, paying for services, etc.) It’s very much a mirror of the human self: self centered, attached to its ego.