A NOTE ON PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

This week the New York Times reported that Silicon Valley tycoons like Google are working on a new ‘thing’ called predictive search. These tools will ultimately act like a pocket PA from your iPhone, anticipating what you need or where you need to be before you’re even late. Creepy:

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

Engineers explained that it’s such an advanced ‘search’, it doesn’t require people to enter a search querie – the querie is the users individual context (location, time of day and digital activity).

On the creep factor, experts said it might be great for 30-something Silicone Valley geeks, but not so much for 60-something executives. Still:

The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information, and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.

A great example of speculative thinking.

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