cabling
In cablingAC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all things hardware, including phones, audio products, storage servers, and networking equipment.
Google once again led to I/O to praise AI and talk about how agent AI will free us from mundane tasks to such an extent that we will all have so much free time that we won’t know what to do with it. There’s only one problem with that: the AI in its current version is nowhere near as good.
I like to use Google services; I set up my Gmail account almost two decades ago, I have 11 years of photos and videos stored in Photos and important documents in Drive; A good part of my digital presence is inexorably linked to my Google account.
I was okay with the trade-offs involved; I didn’t mind sharing my data with Google when all it did with that information was show me targeted ads. That is not the case with AI. Since Google uses personal data to train AI models (ostensibly to provide personalized information), I’m wary of how much of my data is being diverted to Gemini. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy (for now) to prevent Gemini from accessing Drive, Photos, Gmail, and other services. I did this by disabling Gemini logs; go to your Google account settingsand disable Gemini App Activity.
While it’s pretty easy to ignore Gemini right now, Google intends to put that damn shiny icon almost everywhere. I’m greeted by an Ask Gemini button in Chrome, it’s always present in Gmail (I don’t want to summarize a 100-word email!), and for reasons I don’t understand, it’s included in Google Photos (which had a metadata based search which was fine), and even Maps is getting Gemini now.
Google also showed how Live documents acts as a “thought partner and co-author” when you’re “wandering in a stream of consciousness or brainstorming.” Hmm, no thanks. I understand that AI is the latest buzzword right now, and Google is ideally positioned to take advantage of it: the search giant already has a huge amount of data from billions of users, so it makes sense to use it to train its models. But I want nothing to do with it, and while I understand that these features are useful if you need help composing a document or writing a formal email, I don’t see any use in any of the countless new Gemini features coming to Docs, Gmail, or even Keep. I don’t want to talk to Keep to organize my thoughts; that’s where I go to jot down endless to-do lists.
All I wanted was for Google to make significant changes to Search, but what we got was a complete overhaul of AI that doesn’t address the persistent problems facing Google’s flagship product. Search quality has degraded to such an extent that it is SEO-ridden spam, particularly in India. Google knows this and that’s why it started displaying Reddit and Quora results prominently on the page, apparently to deal with spam.
As brands increasingly push these AI services and make them harder to ignore, I am reminded of a post that talks about teaching in the era of generative AI. It discusses how LLMs have made courses fluid to the point where the “process of doing the work” is denied. That made me think a lot about how a little friction is needed, even in mundane tasks. Whether it’s cleaning up digital data (a Sunday morning task I’ve been doing for almost a decade), sorting through all the bills, managing subscriptions, organizing photos and videos, I feel a sense of reward from doing these tasks, and I don’t want AI to eliminate that friction.
Look, I admit that Google did a decent job of describing its vision for AI; Gemini Spark, Omni, Daily Brief and Universal Cart tie into what the brand has been doing over the last year and are a natural extension of the chatbot. I understand that these features have tangible utility, but I don’t see the need to use any of them and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
