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
