HAVE YOU EVER THOUGH THAT GOOGLE CAN READ YOUR MIND?
In 2008 someone told me that Google is trying to reach the point to read minds, and It wasn’t about finishing the sentences. At that time my skeptical mind could’t accept that it can be possible by using algorithms. And I simply forgot about it. But recently I have seen things that made me reconsider thoes words.
Youtube suggestions and relativity to our thoughts: For a few years now Youtube is my main source of entertainment and education. I have watched videos and on many different topics. However, recently I noticed a trend in the way Youtube suggests videos to me.
Sometimes in a conversation a topic comes up about a previously watched video years ago. And surprisingly that night I get a suggestion from the same video or similar topic. Recently this phenomenon has happened so many times, that I can’t ignore the hypotheses that Google can read minds. For example, two days ago I was walking in the supermarket with a friend of mine and we passed by the cheese section and there were a big wheel of Parmesan and it was obvious that they didn’t know how to cut it. It looked like somebody without any skills hacked into it with a knife. So I turned to my friend “look how they are destroying the Parmesan” I pointed out. And I was shocked when I saw that my friend didn’t know either the correct way of cutting it. However that night Youtube gave me a video suggestion “how to cut Parmesan”. So I could show it to my friend.
Thoughts and considerations: Personally I have mixed feeling about this, on one hand I’m still so skeptical that I can’t believe it, on the other I see it as a good thing, because it can help me to navigate trough Internet much faster and easier.
Now I want to know your opinion about this matter. Can Google read minds? What are your experiences about this kind of things. How often it happens to you. Do you think it’s bad of good? Is there any explanation for it?
Not mind reading (yet, at least...). You have your phone with you when these coversations took place? Do you have any kind of active listening feature turned on, like “Ok Google” or “Hey Siri” or anything like that? Your device is listening for keywords and then responsing to that. You can turn these features off.
Yes you are right ,but i do not use any smart phone
More likely they're listening in on your phone's microphone. But I'm sure they're working on reading minds.
To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:
Hi! I'm a bot, and this answer was posted automatically. Check this post out for more information.
They aren't reading your mind just yet...
But they do listen to you, sometimes even watch you.
Their algorithms are designed so well that they know what your going to want to see before the thought has even entered your mind... Or did they plant the seed to lead your brain to that thought?
They are programming people, most people just don't realise it.
I have definitely had experiences where I was thinking about something and sometime shortly after, an ad for what I was thinking about appeared while online. I know its pretty much common place that Google and other organizations such as the NSA are listening to us, but not many bring up the fact that they could already be reading our minds.
Not so much "reading our minds" as just predicting our minds based on psychological profiling. If you've been following the revelations about Cambridge Analytica, you'll know that this is confirmed, but CA is far from the only application of this. It's just the one that's happened to be exposed, and is being especially criticized for helping Trump win. Yet Wikileaks is tweeting out articles, emails and videos about how the Democrats used very similar tools in 2012 and 2016 as well. The media just isn't as concerned because it's mostly pro-Democrat.
Businesses do it for marketing. The tools they use may not be quite as sophisticated, but it's the same basic idea. Collect as much data as you can about your target, then use psychological profiling to predict their needs/wants/interests/etc. Write an algorithm or two and boom... you got an automatic system for analyzing and responding to everybody's every whim.