Is Google Making Us Stupid?

You should welcome it into your mind
 
The use of technology to track and treat mental illness is deeply worrying but sadly necessary 
 
 Next week, Dr Tom Insel leaves his post as head of the US National Institute of Mental Health, a job that made him America’s top mental health doctor. Dr Insel is a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist and a leading authority on both the medicine and public policies needed to deal with problems of the mind. He’s 64 but he’s not retiring. He’s going to work for Google.
 
More precisely, he’s going to work for Google Life Sciences, one of the more exotic provinces of the online empire. He’s going to investigate how technology can help diagnose and treat mental health conditions. Google doesn’t just want to read your mind, it wants to fix it too. 
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/1...-mind.html
 

How will this work?  Will google nofity any kind of 'so-called' mental authority to come and take you away to the funny farm if the machine decides you're broken?  It would certainly make it easier to monitor your thoughts.  Any bad thought will be recognized as such and added to your virtual avatar...

 

What the Internet is doing to our brains
 
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
 
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
 
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
 
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
 
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
 
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
 
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
 
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
 
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
 
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
 
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
 
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...id/306868/
 

What do you use google for? 
 
A quick gateway to a myriad of entertaining choices? 
 
Research into new projects?  
 
I find it easier to focus when I read from a physical book. I do find myself jumping around a lot online. Too many variables that can distract away from specific focal points. I guess it's important to keep that in mind and remain as focused as possible when studying new things. 
 
BTW, the spell checker wants to capitalize google... 
 
:tongue: 
 
 

It's just a tool. Nothing more.

Is it going to fix mental health by sending out beams of images into the brain? 

 

:funny-chicken-dancing:

 

Google will gather every click and keystroke just like windows. Shopping habits will be scrutinized. Little usb plugins to monitor heart rate, brain frequencies, etc. It'll also gather data on speech patterns and physical movements. All wireless of course. Making little cyber avatars animated to mimic your behavior then sending out recommendations to change symptoms should the need arise.
Kind of like being connected to the borg hive mind.

 

That's what this sentient world will be used for - That and more!

 

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

 
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.
 
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
 
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
 
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.
 
"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".
 
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
 
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest
 
Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
 
"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
 
Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.
 
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
 
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
 
The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
 
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens
 
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23...ds/?page=1

Remember 1984?
 
In Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future, there was a huge difference between “truth” — what actually is — and “facts” — what a consensus has been led to believe.
 
Now the search engine giant Google will be delisting and censoring content that doesn’t follow “well-established” scientific, medical, or historical “facts”. Check out the company’s newly updated quality raters guidelines.
 
The guide also specifically mentions giving the lowest rankings to what they deem “conspiracy theories”.
 
http://truthstreammedia.com/2017/08/09/g...ells-1984/
 
https://youtu.be/vrKs_vduiKU
 
https://youtu.be/vrKs_vduiKU
 
Google And YouTube Target “Conspiracy Theories” in New Quality Control Update
 
The guidelines instruct raters to directly confront “unsubstantiated conspiracy theories” by looking for a source that debunked them, The Sem Post reported.
 
However, who decides what is and what isn’t real?
 
Who are the companies behind this valiant effort to police Google’s search engine, and who watches the watchers?
 
Well according to Search Engine Land, “Google contracts with over 10,000 search quality raters worldwide to evaluate its search results. Raters are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that happen on Google.”
 
None of the companies it contracts with were named.
 
Under section 7.10, Google goes on to crucify “unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”
 
Meanwhile, YouTube a Google parent company, is planning on crucifying anyone who doesn’t upload fuzzy cat videos and puppies; in other words, all their controversial content creators under the guise of getting rid of “extremist content.”
 
These organizations to police YouTube’s content include the No Hate Speech Movement, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and the Anti-Defamation League.
 
But don’t worry, Google won’t ban controversial conspiracy content altogether only if you’re not looking for it. As the document noted, “unless the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”
 
We are further witnessing the YouTube, Google and Amazon adpocalypse against the alternative media and it’s far from over.
 
http://www.activistpost.com/2017/08/goog...ories.html
 

Bookmark This: Over 400 Links Google Doesn’t Want You To Visit
 
The war on truth has reached a fever pitch as Google has made it their mission to annihilate the independent media. The ‘New Media’ lead by the likes of Infowars, Breitbart, Natural News and many other great independent sites will have an uphill battle when it comes to getting their content in front of readers. Google has announced they will be doubling down on their ‘Orwellian’ practice of making stories disappear from their monopolistic search engine. Outlined in their Gestapo like 160-page handbook, Google describes exactly how they plan to suppress any information they deem unfit for readers.
 
https://youtu.be/vrKs_vduiKU
 
Below you will find a comprehensive list of great sites broken down by category that do an excellent job in their respective field. I urge everyone to bookmark this page and make it their go to when searching for news on politics, health and prepping.
 
By no means is this list complete, there are thousands of great independent sites out there that I have inadvertently missed. 
 
http://govtslaves.com/2017-08-29-bookmar...visit.html