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Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

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Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#2
> “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,”

It would be of particular to entrepreneurs, exactly how search constrains thought. Vernor Vinge has pointed out that search is the proverbial street lamp in the joke about searching for your keys. Figuring out what it's hard to search for would be a way of finding the unturned stones.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#4
You know, that friend who you're nice to and all but deep down you don't really trust, but you don't want to unfriend because that could set them off and you suspect they could do you great harm, and might just for the hell of it. Your, not quite a psychopath friend but with enough clues that you find yourself wondering how to create an opportunity to add distance without calling attention to yourself kind of friend? I can totally see it.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#6
post #4

You know, that friend who you're nice to and all but deep down you don't really trust, but you don't want to unfriend because that could set them off and you suspect they could do you great harm, and might just for the hell of it. Your, not quite a psychopath friend but with enough clues that you find yourself wondering how to create an opportunity to add distance without calling attention to yourself kind of friend?…

A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#7
post #3

Do we have any privacy in future?

Do you have any privacy now?

[1] http://datasift.com/platform/data-sources

[2] http://gnip.com/sources/

[3] http://klout.com/how-it-works

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint

[5] http://www.lexisnexis.com/backgroundchecks/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#8
This has a flavor of reviving some ideas on how search will change that had been popular in the late 1990s / early 2000s. There were a number of proposals that "search engines" as a tool that users use to query for information should be replaced with a paradigm of "software agents" that build a model of what the user is looking for or trying to do, and which then roam around the web on the user's behalf. Here's a survey of some of those proposals from a 1999 Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/agents/agents.html

This isn't meant to be a criticism, because implementation makes a huge difference, so it's quite plausible that a proposed-and-didn't-catch-on idea could catch on in another form. For example, Google has much better profile data on you than late-'90s research systems were able to collect. But I think looking at the previous iteration of attempts is still interesting.

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#9
post #4

You know, that friend who you're nice to and all but deep down you don't really trust, but you don't want to unfriend because that could set them off and you suspect they could do you great harm, and might just for the hell of it. Your, not quite a psychopath friend but with enough clues that you find yourself wondering how to create an opportunity to add distance without calling attention to yourself kind of friend?…

[deleted]

Re: Ray Kurzweil Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

#10

> “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” It would be of particular to entrepreneurs, exactly how search constrains thought. Vernor Vinge has pointed out that search is the proverbial street lamp in the joke about searching for your keys. Figuring out what it's hard to search for would be a way of finding the unturned stones.

Hmm,

When you put it that way, it sounds unlikely.

I think neuroscience has found that while the potential for an action begins before a person realizes it, the fully formed action only happens in your hands or your mouth as you type or say something.

Anyway, something that somehow predicted even most of things you query for wouldn't feel terribly pleasant and probably wouldn't get all of your choices.

A search engine that could let say "word1 is a category, word2 is an adjective.." etc but that would require more, not less thought.

Really, you could talk to Google in full sentences "like a person", would you want to? For most your searches would you want to? For some of them, yes.

Hmm...

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