Monday 29 January 2018

#428 Arguments with Google

Something weird has happened lately and it's not a direct result of any of the several types of personal development activity in which I immerse myself but never actually put into practice. It's just a habit I've developed on my own. I've started writing stuff down more.

I always kept a journal, as pretty much anyone who knows me knows. This is different though. Every single time I have a thought that could be useful to me in some way, I make a note of it. At the end of the week, I have all these pieces of paper, entries on my laptop and notes on my phone and I have to type them all up into a spreadsheet and then rank them and there are like a hundred of these lines representing ideas I've had.

Occasionally I'll actually do one of the things I had an idea about and it tends to be really small like Googling something or sending an email to someone. It's insane how quickly they build up though. It's like I've expanded how my brain works. I've always used paper a bit like that when it comes to memory and you know what? It's really inefficient. I've got pages and pages and pages full of memories I wouldn't even know how to index or sort through and for the most past, they're absolutely useless.

It's bound to happen one day. Seamless expansion of memory and retrieval using technology. Computers do a pretty good job and they're getting better all the time at predicting what we're getting at and returning relevant information based on how well they know us.

I think we'll be arguing with Google soon. It'll know what we need better than we do and there'll be stats to back it up and it'll learn how to negotiate too. Then we'll get really frustrated because whatever's best for you is always frustrating. Until then, I'll just keep writing everything down.

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