When reading Marcus Wohlsen’s article for Wired, “Google’s Grand Plan to Make your Brain Irrelevant” it did make me think back to a time when everyone thought Google was the nice internet company compared to Yahoo, eBay, Amazon or AOL. People feared the final three companies for gathering information on them and possible exposing a side that is private to them that they want no other eyes to see. Google was the ‘don’t be evil’ company and was considered safe by many who feared that Lycos and AltaVista would place ads on the sides of their opening screen that could ruin one socially, or if a boss in an office saw, professionally.

Google had the nice clean what interface and did not distract like the other websites, overloading their main page with weather bags, news, ads giveaways etc. all. Its interface was main page was clean and its reputation was clean as well.

Nowadays Google has grown from a simple search engine to being one that can do math and show you a street in a country thousands of miles away. As a company it’s grown into one of the largest corporations of all time. What was once considered a friendly country to some is now considered a corporation that intrudes on privacy and has no respect for it.

Though Marcus Wohlsen’s article is of our current time, a company collecting people’s personal information was predicted in popular mainstream media as far back as 1978. In the NBC-TV series “The Rockford Files” private investigator Jim Rockford (played by James Garner) stumbles upon a new company in one of his investigations that is using a computer system to collect information of people around the world and then sell the information to large corporations looking for new ways to sell their business, burrows looking to find someone they cannot locate or a business or someone looking information that may ruin someone’s reputation. All of this being done for a large profit.

I find it interesting that people could see this coming from a time when all businesses still used type writers and White Out. The episode “The House on Willis Avenue” originally aired on Friday February 24, 1978 and came and went without much fan fair at the time. People of that era, though some skeptics and conspiracy addicts, probably did not think too much of companies gathering their personal information and perhaps just thought of the episode as springing from a script writers mind and need to create an episode that week.

Marcus Wohlsen’s article for Wired shows us that what was predicted in that episode was only the tip of the ice burg. With AI a program will be gathering information on people and do not have basic human emotions as artificial intelligence can only mimic or do the jobs of a human being. It cannot, at this point, start to have emotions like compassion for other humans. Even if AI can eventually have some sort of compassion programed in, it still will not have the human experience to make moral decisions based on the general morality of the society it’s in.

“The Rockford Files” episode that evening ended with a disclaimer, an odd move for a mainstream television series then and now. The disclaimer stated “Secret information centers, building dossiers on individuals exist today. You have no legal right to know about them, prevent them, or sue for damages. Our liberty may well be the price we pay for permitting this to continue unchecked. Member, U.S. Privacy Protection Commission”.

I have posted a scene for this unusual, for it’s time, episode below:

https://youtu.be/ibsEWajsrfk