Okay, here it comes! On June 12, 2015 Science Friday ran a piece titled "Will Our Smartphones Know Us Better than Ourselves?" Using your phone as much as you do, with its ability to track your every move, it will soon offer proactive suggestions based on what's around you (gas stations, restaurants), as well as tips and prods to make the "best" decisions for you since it is hooked into a Smart world teeming with algorithms and assays about human behavior and society. And YOU, of course, since it's your personal phone.
Listen to this AUDIO, a Science Friday interview with Hilary Mason, founder of Fast Forward Labs in NYC. It's called a "contextual information feature" so as not to sound too intrusive. "When Google Now first debuted, I loved it because it's the first time I've seen Google release an application where they take all of the data they've collected from us and all of the things they've inferred from that data and actually created a product that makes it useful for us as individuals versus making it useful to advertisers. If we look deep into the future, these devices already know where we are and where we're likely to go. I know we like to think of ourselves as unpredictable, random creatures, but we actually are quite predictable. [Your phone] might understand your mood. It might be able to say you've been working too hard, you should take a walk ... It might help you recognize healthy relationships, unhealthy relationships ... It knows who you talk to, who you text, [who you] email ... and the email everybody who uses Google's email service sends ... If it was my father's birthday and I didn't know what to get him, wouldn't it be great if I could see what books he'd been looking at but hadn't yet bought ... wouldn't that be very useful?"
Uh-huh! Very, very useful and very, very helpful! Wait till we make no decisions until we have input from our phone. "Hold on, I have to ask my phone!" Oh, vey ... here's my suggestion:
(Translation: Leaf your phone behind)