Google

Still thinking about Google I/O…

Google presented “AI agents” capable of doing people’s work in countless scenarios, none of them very believable for real people. (Who needs AI to organize a neighborhood block party?) At TechCrunch, Sarah Perez writes a solid critique of this questionable utopia that Google is trying to sell us.

On my end, I think we’re living a “Groundhog Day” moment of that Google Now feature from ~2012, which would notify you via push notification that your flight’s gate had changed. As if that information wasn’t already on your face the whole time at the airport. For 15 years Google has been using different technologies, each increasingly complex and expensive, to try to solve problems that no human being has ever actually had.

Google wants to be the interface for the web

The opening of Google I/O this year (35-minute video recap) showed a Google less shy about transforming the web into raw material for its AIs.

Search will become (even more) a souped-up ChatGPT, and also the checkout counter for every online store, and YouTube will use video clips to create answer pages.

Notice that in all these announcements, Google/YouTube transforms itself into a curator and interface for web content, without attribution or with minimal credit given. You won’t visit websites anymore; you’ll visit Google — and you’ll stay there. On the flip side, whoever calls themselves a “content creator” is actually a content supplier for platforms. It’s always been that way for Meta (Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube; now it’s also the case for Google, even if unintentionally (myself included!).

All of this amounts to a complete betrayal of everything Google once stood for (and was) back then. Maybe people like this new incarnation because the web, poor thing, has long suffered from the pernicious incentives and destructive influence of Google itself, but nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

By the way: Manual do Usuário project offers an instance of SearxNG, a metasearch engine that displays ten (or more) blue links to actual websites. It’s free. Use it and spread the word.

Android 17, Gemini Intelligence, and Googlebook: My first impressions  youtube.com

Google announced Android 17 and a new line of laptops in a pre-recorded video shown “live” (?) on Tuesday (12th). The Android 17’s highlight is artificial intelligence agents, which has elevated Gemini to “Gemini Intelligence.” (more…)