In the early days, when people had question about their life and things they did not know, they would turn to God. They asked him for forgiveness, for good health, how old they would become and what they should do. This was mostly a monologue, except maybe for everyone that claims that God speaks directly to them, from the sender to God. When their wishes and conversation was heard and they received good weather, they thanked God and worshipped him even harder.
Hundreds of years later, somebody, or something took his thrown. This new ‘God’ receives 63.000 questions per second (Aleksandra 2018), and 15% of all those inquiries are completely new (FaithTech 2019). I am talking about Google, our new digital God. The search enquiries are getter quicker, more accurate and even more personalized. Every search made into Google will train the algorithm in understanding you better as a person. Our darkest secrets, the questions we do not dare to ask anybody else, where do we go? For the stupidest questions, the questions where you would be put in jail for and the questions that are so embarrassing you wouldn’t even ask you best friend, we all turn to Google.
Someday in the future, a time will come where Google will understand us better than we understand ourselves and therefore people will trust him better than we trust ourselves or our friends. But what happens when we trust a machine more than we trust our own intuition. Do we get to live in a world of self-fulfilling prophecies, where people follow the words of Google? And if so, what is the task of Google in all this, should it stop personalizing and gathering data from our searches to make our lives more convenient? Or should it keep going and create a God of knowledge?
Aleksandra (2018). 63 Fascinating Google Search Statistics. Retrieved from: https://seotribunal.com/blog/google-stats-and-facts/
FaithTech (2019). Is Google the New God? Retrieved from: https://medium.com/faithtech/is-google-the-new-god-81f26b69bf8
Photo by: Kirk Giles, Daily Life 2018
Dear Sven,
I enjoyed reading your post. Indeed, people turn to Google for almost everything nowadays. As simple and fast as it can be, the search engine poses a threat to our privacy, in my opinion. Since data is now governing the world, I believe that people will start ceasing their sharing of information in the online platform as the technology develops further. You would not want your data to be in the hands of some vicious people. Indeed your comparison of Google to God is feasible, but the question is would you share all of your private information with the online environment, taking into account all of the dangers that are out there?
Thank you for this philosophic insight into digitalisation! In a way I see your point: people trust, ask and confess to Google. Google can give answers, that is a clear thing. But in my opinion there is a big difference between the gathered support from a religion and the support provided by Google: Google doesn’t guide you in advance. You first have to have a question, before Google can give you answers. With a religion this is different, a written guideline, the Bible/Koran etc. is already there to help you in the right direction. People want to hold on to something. People want to consult omniscience. When you trying to find structure, I won’t ask Google. Would you?
Hi Sven, thank you for sharing this very interesting perspective on Google’s role and their increasing knowledge of their users. As for the personalization of search results, I do think that Google will keep evolving to personalize search results even more than it is currently doing (https://www.futureofeverything.io/future-google/ ). Moreover, since Google formed into Alphabet, the company has a significant range of products in different industries that combined form an impressive portfolio of personal data ( https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-big-4-part-2-the-future-of-google-a469483533e9). This will play an important role concerning future techonological developments in which personalization is key. However, I do not think that Google will replace our inituition. Although the search engine has proven its strenghts regarding information sharing, it does not share the ability (yet) to reasoning like humans can. What is your perspective on this?