Artificial Intelligence - A close future...

• "Eric Schmidt said that the supreme product of the company, the one he 'always wanted to create', wouldn't wait to answer his questions; it 'would tell me what to type'. In other words, it would give me an answer without hearing the question. The product would be an Artificial Intelligence. Could even be, quoting Sergey Brin once more, 'an artificial brain more intelligent than ours'." [The Big Switch - Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. Book by Nicholas Carr. Free translation of this excerpt from Portuguese Version].
  

Do you remember Hal, the computer that goes bezerk and tries to kill the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick's master piece "2001 - Space Odissey"? Or else, who can forget "A. I. - Artifical Intelligence", movie made by Steven Spielberg? Well, what seemed to be something far away from us is being thought by Google and other technology companies as the future. The idea is creating something so great that will foresee what we want, think, desire... And it is already happening on the Web. 

Whenever you leave a trace it is being used to feed a supercomputer as an information about yourself on internet and elsewhere too, even in the real world. All the sites you visit and on passing by leave comments, personal data or even buy products are being used right in this moment to make someone else, anywhere in the world, find out who you are, where you live, your job and occupation, the tastes you have, sports you practice, movies that you love our hate, music installed on your computer... 

This gigantic supercomputer, which is responsible for more and more power usage everywhere, is making us loose completely our privacy [beyond other thinks...]. The most impressive thing is that we are not even paying attention to it or else, billions of computer users in the world don't even know that this rippage is going on... We must open our eyes as wide as possible, just to remember other movie's title by Kubrick...

By João Luís de Almeida Machado