After the exciting news that Ray Kurzweil has joined Google, we have finally been treated to this tidbit about their plans together: the Cyber-Friend search engine which truly knows you, and knows how to give you exactly the information you want.
Now, I love Kurzweil and Google as much as the next guy, I want the singularity to happen and I definitely see the direction Kurzweil is trying to go here (and, to an extent, the direction Google is trying to go here), but it seems to me like this particular step in that direction is a bad one.
You see, there is this phenomenon called the echo-chamber effect. If you aren't familiar with it, the basic premise is this: suppose you're a communist. You read communist blogs, follow communist news websites, and network with other communists on facebook. Needless to say, you are therefore bombarded with confirmations of your communist ideas and opinions; should a dirty capitalist pig dare to defile your facebook wall with a capitalist article, picture or joke, they will surely be deleted. Moreover, should another capitalist show up on one of the communist blogs that you frequent, they will be immediately shot down by all the communists, reminding you immediately of the superiority of your views.
That capitalist pig, naturally, in his capitalist blogs, with his capitalist facebook friends, is as sure of his opinion as you are of yours, and cannot imagine how you can be so blind to the obvious capitalist truth.
That is unfortunate but understandable. People always seek similar people, for a variety of reasons, some of which are even sensible. Facebook got some flak for enhancing this approach, but it's really no different from any club, movement, or other gathering of people offline. Facebook is, at the end of the day, a social network. It has no overarching social responsibility. Every time you blame facebook for being full of people who fall prey to stupid "Repost this if you want Bill Gates to give you free ice cream" statuses, you must keep in mind that the only function facebook provides is to let those people, who would have believed the same nonsense even without facebook, be heard.
Google is not facebook.
You just need to look at the news items related to Google to see the difference. Getting sued for allowing companies to buy ads related to trademarked terms? Outrage over blocking certain content for certain countries? Google has, for a large chunk of the population, become the Portal to the Internet, if not the internet itself. Unless you're an academic, or journalist, or lawyer, who routinely searches for specific types of information in specific repositories, when you want to know something you simply Google it.
This brings us back to Kurzweil's vision of the search engine which learns what you like and what you're usually looking for.
Never mind the communist example from earlier. This time, let's pretend you're a person from an extremely religious background, and maybe the year is circa 2020. You have somehow heard of this "evolution" thing for the first time around the age of 25 and are absolutely shocked at this sacrilegious idea. It gnaws at your mind, that people would openly speak of such blasphemy. It can't possibly be true, can it? You must find out more...
So you go to Google, and you type "evolution", and you press the button. But the year is 2020. Google has been observing your searches for years, and it knows that you're always searching for religious stuff, and reading religious stuff. It knows you, to use Kurzweil's words, better than you know yourself.
Tell me, what sort of results do you think that you'd get from Googling "evolution" with that sort of background?
The thing about the echo chamber effect is that it really is what we want. Everybody wants to be surrounded by people who confirm your beliefs repeatedly and tell you that you're absolutely right, and that anyone thinking differently is insane, or immoral, or just stupid. And a Google that knows it and gives you what you want will make sure that whenever you're online (which, as the years progress, becomes increasingly synonymous with "all the time"), you will get nothing but an eternal echo chamber, where any diversity of thought is ignored with all the power that modern technology can provide.
According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil himself enjoyed quite a diverse environment in his youth; personally, I always assumed that that was a big part of how he grew into such an exceptional person. I sincerely hope that his quest to bring the Singularity will take a different path from this flawed idea of giving the users of the internet exactly what they think they want.