" I’m an engineer who builds robots; I don’t know why people would be interested in my views on the ethical question "
[..] soon the company started to work with Sony on its Aibo robot dog, developing a control system that allowed it to run. After that, it continued in the same vein, with a tool for Sony’s Qrio humanoid robot, allowing choreographers to design dance routines.
[..]listening to data geeks salivating over prospects of ruling the world by 2015 using large scale automated analysis of Web content, I’ve realized that it is up to us bad punners, over-clever reference droppers and metaphor-mixers to prevent the data geeks from accidentally creating Skynet. Or at least delay the takeover. Giving up a few ounces of SEO juice and some traffic is a small price to pay. Call it the Skynet Resistance Tax.
Darpa director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon’s premiere research shop to take a job with Google.
“The only reason” she decided to leave the Pentagon was the allure of working at Google.
Spanner isn’t quite Skynet — the self-aware artificial intelligence system in the Terminator movies — but it does show how far we’ve come at building connected systems and databases.
“When there are outages, things just sort of flip — client machines access other servers in the system,” Google software engineer Andrew Fikes told Wired. “It’s a much easier service story. … The system responds — and not a human.”
“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”
“Imagine your brain being augmented by Google,” the search engine’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Larry Page, said in a 2004 interview. “For example, you think about something and your cell phone could whisper the answer into your ear.”
Yesterday, the United States Department of Energy announced that national research laboratories had finally created a bionic eye to meet Food and Drug Administration standards. And so our transformation into human-cyborg hybrids takes another giant step forward.
Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year
These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them – or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
Biometric data gathering, facial recognition technology, domestic drone surveillance, and the strategic interception of all private communication: these are the four horsemen of Assange’s apocalypse.
[..]African countries are getting entire spy network infrastructure as a gift from the Chinese, who expect to be paid back “in data, the new currency.”
Like it or not, science fiction is becoming science fact.
The Terminator was, of course, a work of fiction, but the idea of cyborgs and killer machines is not all that farfetched. In fact, the danger is becoming so real that the Obama Administration found the need to spell out explicit rules that specify under what circumstances machines are allowed to kill humans.
Former CIA director George Tenet says,
We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered ... In-Q-Tel. ... While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology ...
Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore.
'We have to make it happen'.
Because Google operates the most widely used search engine in the world, and has hundreds of millions of Gmail, YouTube, and Android users as well, the company has a profound advantage when tuning its artificial intelligence approaches in response to people. It's as though every user of Google services is checking and rechecking Google's AI techniques, correcting the search company when it gets something wrong, and performing an action when it gets it right.
We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames likeTrailblazer, Stellar Wind, andRagtime -- deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computerfacility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.
as housing prices rise in the San Francisco Bay Area, angry activists are targeting those shuttles to protest the region's gentrification.
"We want the ruling class, which is becoming the tech class, to listen to our voices and listen to the voices of folks that are being displaced," said one SF protester.
Kurzweil's goal is to build a search engine that's so smart it'll act like a "cybernetic friend". We're sure that's what Skynet's creators thought before the Terminator appeared on the scene. And with Google's purchase of (primarily military) robotics specialist Boston Dynamics last month we're genuinely starting to get a little worried.
All the pieces are now in place for a Google-created Skynet and the robotic Judgment Day apocalypse that would surely follow.
Yes, Google might become the first big corporation to enact Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
"IF WE CAN PROTECT INNOCENT CIVILIAN LIFE, I DO NOT WANT TO SHUT THE DOOR ON THE USE OF THIS TECHNOLOGY." Ron Arkin
"this isn’t about killer robots or killer soldiers, this is about disaster response,’ but everybody knows what the real interest is," MG
"Either we're going to decide not to do this, and have an international agreement not to do it, or it's going to happen." MG
a lot of that kind of thing seems to be happening, between the NSA spying and Google (GOOG) Glass, which apparently has a new app with facial recognition software, designed to look at you and then your face compared to millions of others in the database, including social networks, and it comes up and tells the person who you are, where you live, and so forth and so on, and all the information that’s available to you in the Internet. Here we are, welcome to the future.
Google’s big principled stance against surveillance is honorable — or it would be, if the company wasn’t so deeply involved in the very thing that it claims to be against.
what few people realize is that Google has also been using its wares to enhance and enrich the surveillance operations of the biggest and most powerful intelligence and DoD agencies in the world: NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA and NGA — the whole alphabet soup.
Après plusieurs mois de discussions avec les trois principaux réseaux sociaux (Facebook, Twitter, Google) qui s’entêtent à maintenir des clauses que l’association juge abusives ou illicites, l’UFC-Que Choisir les assigne en justice devant le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris et, plus généralement, appelle les consommateurs à la mobilisation pour qu’ils gardent la main sur leurs données.
Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, "What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?"
«Google est une société magnifique. Pourtant, si elle devient leader en matière de lutte contre la mort, d'intelligence artificielle, de robotique, de domotique, de voitures intelligentes, il faudra vraiment réfléchir à la démanteler! Elle pourrait devenir plus puissante que les États.»
Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks, says a group of leading scientists
Le principe technique de l’internet, c’est le contournement des obstacles, il doit bien être possible de contourner Google.
Hier donc, on s’est aperçu qu’un monde sans Google était un monde possible. Monde souhaitable ou désirable, c’est une autre question. Mais au moins, c’est un monde possible.
"The Jetsons" gave us the dream of a robot designed to help.
"The Terminator" gave us the nightmare of a machine designed to kill.
The future is apparently here.
Even if you're careful about choosing how and where your email is sent, chances are you reply to plenty of messages sent from Gmail. And, as it turns out, that probably means that Google has most of your email, whether you like it or not.
Around 7AM on January 21st, 2014, a small group of protesters gathered in the driveway of an understated $1 million four bedroom family home in Berkeley and unfurled a hand-painted banner that read "GOOGLE’S FUTURE STOPS HERE."
... celebrating an imaginary Google service allowing the public to ride the private shuttles, "Google Buses," for free since MUNI is in crisis, and a fare hike is imminent.
Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless
Over the past few years Google has made strides into robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles... and that's just the secret projects we know about. Watching the pieces fall into place, it's hard to not see a certain pattern emerge. One that matches a familiar sci-fi world that filmmaker James Cameron first envisioned 30 years ago. One in which AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicles all unite in a winner-takes-all battle against humanity itself.
MUSK: YEAH. I MEAN, I DON'T THINK – IN THE MOVIE "TERMINATOR," THEY DIDN'T CREATE A.I. TO – THEY DIDN'T EXPECT, YOU KNOW SOME SORT OF TERMINATOR-LIKE OUTCOME. IT IS SORT OF LIKE THE MONTY PYTHON THING. NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION. IT'S JUST – YOU KNOW, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL. YEAH, YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT –
the project will collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from 175 people—and later thousands more—to create what the company hopes will be the fullest picture of what a healthy human being should be.
Google entered the lobbying rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012. Boeing and Northrop Grumman also came below the tech...
Self-driving cars sounds great until you start to think about it.
The results over robots taking jobs over has created a split in the scientific community. Forty-eight percent of respondents say that they will destroy more jobs than they create. Fifty-two percent have the opposing view
Google actively scans the images that pass through Gmail accounts..
"There will of course be some who see it as yet another sign of how the twin Big Brothers of state agencies and corporate behemoths have nothing better to do than delve into the private lives of all and sundry, looking for dirt,"
To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period.The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”
"San Francisco’s minimum wage is nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage, yet it is three-and-a-half times less than what is needed to afford a decent two-bedroom unit in this expensive jurisdiction"—or $37.62 an hour. Or, $78,250 a year. Either way: Time to blockade a Google bus.
Google can collect real-time analytics on us, after all, but there’s almost no way to track how their decisions hold up or undermine their “don’t be evil” ethos. What’s trust without transparency?
« Megan has spent her career leading talented teams and taking cutting-edge technology and innovation initiatives from concept to design to deployment. I am confident that in her new role as America’s Chief Technology Officer, she will put her long record of leadership and exceptional skills to work on behalf of the American people. » -B. Obama
Meanwhile, former Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray will be joining the White House as Deputy CTO, replacing Nicole Wong (who, as it hapens, was previously part of Legal at both Twitter and Google.)
[Google] wants people never to leave the internet at all. But then there are the self-driving cars and the drones; there’s Baseline Study, a project to collect blood, saliva and urine from hundreds of anonymous volunteers to try to predict the likelihood of heart attacks and other life-threatening conditions; and Calico, a biotech subsidiary that aims – in the words of Time magazine, anyway – to “solve death”. Are these all just the hobbies of astonishingly rich men who’d like to find a way not to die (and a good place for dinner)? Or is there a masterplan? What does Google want?
The notion that the world outside its homepage remains anonymous is increasingly untrue. Millions of internet users voluntarily give Facebook, Google, and others access to their movements across the web and on mobile when they use “social log in,” or the ability to sign in to a website using credentials from the big identity providers.
Au milieu des multinationales tentaculaires, quelques organisations non-lucratives continuent de lutter activement pour un Web ouvert et respectueux des internautes.
Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth.
Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist PZ Myers, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." Or Jaron Lanier, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age".
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction.We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it.
Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator. Taken together, the “scientific revolutions” catalogued by the NDU report—if militarized—would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) “disruptive new capabilities” of a virtually totalitarian quality. Pentagon-funded research on data-mining feeds directly into fine-tuning the algorithms used by the US intelligence community to identify not just ‘terror suspects’, but also targets for the CIA’s drone-strike kill lists.It is far from clear that the Pentagon’s Skynet-esque vision of future warfare will actually reach fruition. That the aspiration is being pursued so fervently in the name of ‘national security,’ in the age of austerity no less, certainly raises questions about whether the most powerful military in the world is not so much losing its edge, as it is losing the plot.
Enter Skynet. Along with his tech-savvy partner on the project, the electronics engineer Grant Bajema, Burchat has designed a barcoded and GPS-tagged net that he believes could be mounted on the homes, balconies and backyards of the near future.
The opulent gulf state wants to lead what it predicts will be a $10bn industry by 2025, and has offered a US$1m prize to the most promising concept.
I think one disappointing thing about the Terminator franchise is that I often feel as though it’s cooked up by people who have no background in science. In order to always up the ante and make the system more frightening and powerful, they go completely off the deep end until it’s not credible at all. Then, it’s just disappointing for people who’d really like to find it provocative, and stimulating, and scary.
Hal Varian, chief economist for Google: “By 2025, the current debate about privacy will seem quaint and old-fashioned. The benefits of cloud-based, personal, digital assistants will be so overwhelming that putting restrictions on these services will be out of the question. Of course, there will be people who choose not to use such services, but they will be a small minority. Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great.”
On Christmas day, 2011, LulzSec defaced the site of Strafor, a “private intelligence” multinational. By way of a homepage, there was now the scrolling text of The Coming Insurrection in English, and $700,000 was transferred from the accounts of Stratfor customers to a set of charitable associations – a Christmas present.
When we’re told what the future will look like, we always see the version where everyone lives like Minority Report’s John Anderton. Played by Tom Cruise, Anderton is a wealthy police chief, the kind of person who can afford a summer house on the lake or the newest Lexus model. But unfortunately, if the future is anything like the present, his will only be one side of the story.
Le projet Google Nest se décompose en quatre sous-projets : Google TRUST (google confiance), Google HUG (google embrassade), Google BEE (Google Abeille) et Google BYE (Google au revoir).
The human-fueled automations I saw at Google are also largely out of sight in current international debates about the relationship between digital technology and the future of work. Will technology produce new jobs, new industries, and new forms of comparative advantage? Or will technology take away jobs and concentrate wealth among those who own the machines?
« Cette impression de repli de la réalité à l’intérieur de la réalité numérisée, cette totalisation – c’est presque un régime totalitaire numérique –, risque de faire disparaître la distinction entre le monde et sa représentation, et donc la possibilité même de la critique. »
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— “Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community,”
Google, Apple and Facebook are highly profitable and look likely to remain so. Still, a New Yorker looking up at the Pan Am, Chrysler and General Motors buildings might recall, wistfully, that the same must once have been said of those fallen titans, too.
“I think that this technology will ultimately be one of the greatest forces for good in mankind’s history simply because it makes people smarter,” Schmidt said during a keynote address with author Walter Isaacson and Megan Smith, U.S. chief technology officer.
“I’m certainly not worried in the next 10 to 20 years about that. We’re still in the baby step of understanding things,” Schmidt said. “We’ve made tremendous progress in respect to [artificial intelligence].”
On the morning of March 18, Eric Garris, founder and webmaster of the site, received a form email from Google AdSense informing him that all of Antiwar.com’s Google ads had been disabled.
It should be noted that the robot army "may be configured to receive information from the computing component via the network associated with instructions for performing one or more tasks".
After getting a patent for giving robots personalities last month, Google now wants to unleash an army of Rodney Dangerfield bots on the world.
In a patent awarded today, the company outlines a system for “allocating tasks to a plurality of robotic devices
The patent suggests that the robots could be controlled by a smartphone—Google’s mobile operating system is called Android, after all—with tasks doled out based on each robot’s ability to complete them. Someone could theoretically control the botswarm from anywhere in the world. As the patent puts it:
“The plurality of robotic devices of the system may be configured to receive information from the computing component via the network associated with instructions for performing one or more tasks.”
They’re not Terminators, but they sure resemble those iconic killer robots from the big screen.
Think C-3PO, not T-1000. That’s the more appropriate pop-culture reference, according to Brian Lattimer, another Virginia Tech researcher working on a bipedal humanoid robot with funding from DARPA.
"If I could sit down with Google people, I would want them to make a public pledge to not become involved with autonomous killer robots".
DARPA, Boston Dynamics, and Google all declined interviews for this story.
President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January.
Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists.
“Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is making a big play for Silicon Valley startups and tech innovators that so far have shown little to no interest in working with the Pentagon.
To show its seriousness about engaging Silicon Valley, the Defense Department will stand up a permanent office there called “defense innovation unit experimental” — the first time the Pentagon will have a full-time outreach presence in the Valley. It will be staffed by civilian and military officials, including reservists with private-sector experience.
Carter also is proposing a pilot program to invest in startup ventures under the CIA’s existing In-Q-Tel technology incubator. According to a senior defense official, the Pentagon will make “small investments” in promising technologies in areas like electronics, software and automation.
* Google employees donated $1.6 million to President Barack Obama's two White House bids
* The company told Daily Mail Online that it has spoken with the Federal Trade Commission about antitrust concerns; it was investigated in 2011 but later let off the hook
* In the 2012 election, the company’s search algorithm customized results for Obama but not for Republican Mitt Romney
* Google execs who have left to work in the White House include Obama's chief technology officer
* Hillary Clinton also poached her new tech chief from Google this week
San Francisco's degree of income inequality has also increased, to levels roughly on par with Madagascar. Of the 150 largest regions in the US, the Bay Area ranked 45th for income inequality in 1979. Now we've jumped to No. 14. Across the US, income inequality has risen steadily since 1979, but in about 1999, the Bay Area's rate of increase surpassed the nation's average.
When it comes to influence, Google has now reached a point where comparing it to other major corporations hardly seems fair. On a grand scale, Google doesn’t even merit mention in conversations about traditional companies. If anything, the latest news about its lobbying efforts reinforces the idea that when we talk about Google, we might as well be talking about Google as a country of its own.
Les organisations terroristes, notamment, ont malheureusement bien compris l’enjeu de la communication et l’instrument efficace de propagande, d’endoctrinement et d’enrôlement que pouvait constituer cet espace numérique sans frontières.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.
“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The United States and other developed countries are in the midst of a digital revolution that may be even more profound than the industrial revolutions of the past. Advances in robotics, cognitive computing and other digital technologies promise untold benefits in a world of leisure hard to imagine. But there is also a dark side to this technological change. It could lead to joblessness for most and extreme inequality, threatening economic health and political stability.
Tension over rising inequality and a lack of good-paying middle class jobs is growing in Silicon Valley and nearby San Francisco, the epicentre of computerisation and the information economy. In San Francisco, buses for Google, Facebook and other companies ferry high-paid tech workers to their jobs in Silicon Valley. This allows tens of thousands to live in the city, fuelling popular anger over gentrification and high housing prices that are pushing longtime residents out.
What big business is eyeing up as the next big commercial opportunity: namely, autonomous robot technology that can operate in a human environment.
Or to put it another way: Terminator. Although we’re repeatedly told that the robots are not Terminator; that they’re not going to kill us; or make us their slaves; that there is nothing to fear.
“At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology,” the privacy advocates wrote in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise.”
As I've written here before, science fiction is terrible at predicting the future, but it's great at predicting the present. SF writers imagine all the futures they can, and these futures are processed by a huge, dynamic system consisting of editors, booksellers, and readers. The futures that attain popular and commercial success tell us what fears and aspirations for technology and society are bubbling in our collective imaginations.
En 2011, Google possède un parc de plus de 900 000 serveurs, soit 2,8 % du marché à lui tout seul, avec des appareils répartis sur 32 sites. En octobre 2010, le leader numérique représente 6,4 % du trafic Internet mondial et affiche une croissance supérieure à celle du web ! En Europe, il occupe une position hégémonique puisque sa part de marché dans la recherche représente plus de 93%.
The news that Google has purchased a company that makes running robots for the military has prompted the more nervous to see parallels with sci-fi movies such as The Terminator, with its dystopian vision of a world run by remorseless robots with self-conscious intelligence.
Many have expressed concerns about apocalyptic Terminator-like scenarios, in which robots develop the human-like ability to interact with the world all by themselves and attempt to conquer it.
These scenarios are certainly worth studying. However, they are far less plausible and far less immediate than the AI-weapons danger on the horizon now.
Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? It’s no longer just a question for tenured philosophy professors or Hollywood directors. This week, it’s a question being put to the United Nations
The Atlas robot, as it is known, is certainly an imposing figure – it stands 1.88cm (6’2 feet) and weighs 150kg (330lb). However, plans for a terminator style invasion maybe on hold for the moment, as the robots certainly don’t have the movement of a T-800 or a T-1000 as seen in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
“We are making pretty good progress to make sure that it has mobility that is in shooting range of yours. I am not saying that it can do everything that you can do, but if we keep pushing it, we will get there,” Raibert added.
Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated, according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson .
There are at least three very real scenarios whereby Google—perhaps even without its leaders’ knowledge—could shape or even decide the election next year. Whether or not Google executives see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day. The adjustments they make increasingly influence our thinking—including, it turns out, our voting preferences.