Google wants your data to do great things. That's not such a bad deal.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — As I watched Google's many unveilings this week, I could sense a certain confidence in the proceedings. That was no doubt partly because the company was, for the first time in 10 years, hosting its Google I/O developer conference at its headquarters in Mountain View instead of San Francisco, so the executives and project managers were literally playing in their own backyard.
But I think there was something else at play. Looking back at the opening keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai decided to kick things off with two interesting — and related — products: the so-called "assistant" that seeks to proactively offer help as you navigate Google's many services, and Home, an Amazon Echo-like speaker that infuses the assistant in your house as a kind of ambient presence, ready to help the moment you utter the activation phrase ("OK, Google," of course).
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It's hard to imagine two products that better epitomize Google itself. The assistant, which is powered by Google's artificial intelligence platform, can ingest and analyze your data, compare it to data from the world, and suggest actions. These can range from the trivial (figuring out you're looking at a picture of a dog, and coming up with phrases to respond with) to the practical (nudging you about when it's time to leave for a flight).
Image: Google
Taking it to the next level is Home, which gives Google's assistant a place to live. Talk to Home, ask it the weather or how to translate a word or what your calendar has today, and it'll just tell you, connecting with Google services and the web as necessary. It can even talk to other devices, changing the temperature on your Nest thermostat and relaying YouTube videos to a Chromecast.
Creepy much?
It all sounds fantastic, until you take off the Google goggles and look at it from another perspective. With Home, you're giving Google a permanent physical presence within your home. It connects to an AI-driven assistant that sees and analyzes all the data in your Google account. And it's always listening.
Creeped out yet? Justified or not, that fear leaps to many people's minds when you bring up Google, and it's arguably been the source of many of its bigger legal troubles in Europe. From its mining of keywords in Gmail to privacy facepalms like the Buzz fiasco, Google has certainly tripped over some privacy issues while running toward its stated goal to organize the world's data.
The thing is, that was always a worthy goal, and we're now starting to see the clearest — and most powerful — benefits from it. In a session at I/O that explored Google's vision for machine learning, SVP of Product Aparna Chennapragada talked about applying AI to smartphone data to optimize traffic patterns and improve health care.
Those kinds of societal improvements are on a whole other level from suggesting the right dinner reservations or organizing your cat photos, so you can see why Pichai is excited. Certainly, the harvesting and analyzing of data on such a grand scale brings up equally weighty privacy and ethical implications. But that's not a reason to turn away. And turn away the company isn't — if there was a message from I/O, it's that Google is fully embracing its identity as a data-crunching hive mind, with all the wondrous powers and baggage that come with it.
By contrast, Apple holds user privacy sacrosanct, so much so that it goes out of its way to not know certain things about what you're doing with its products (e.g. Apple Pay). But that's also limited the company's efforts in AI — you don't often hear about image recognition in Apple Photos, for example.
Putting trust in the future
None of this is to say we should automatically put all of our trust in Google or that keeping your data to yourself is in any way wrong or irrational. But if you interact digitally at all, you're already bestowing that trust, just in smaller ways. Every interaction you have with a digital service is logged somewhere ("ephemeral" services like Snapchat are largely a myth). Even your phone is locally logging your keystrokes in some way or another.
Allowing Google to take a more holistic, further-back view of your digital self isn't the same as throwing away privacy, and, with AI, it could finally unlock lots of hidden potential. In fact, it's an essential step toward the future where intelligent systems — be they virtual assistants, smart homes, self-driving cars, robots or some as-yet-uninvented technology — take the reins on most if not all of the mundane tasks in our everyday lives, simultaneously solving some larger organizational problems.
That's a future worth considering. And if its big unveilings at I/O pay off, Google could be that future's chief architect. As long as we let Google be Google.
