I trust by now we’ve all seen and been at least a little disturbed by The Selfish Ledger, the nearly 9-minute-long concept video from inside Google’s “moonshot factory” X labs. In the wake of it becoming public this week, Google quickly disavowed the video, claiming it was just a thought experiment “not related to any current or future products.” And yet, the company’s patent applications exhibit a mode of thinking that runs at least in parallel, if not on the exact same tracks, as The Selfish Ledger’s total data collection proposal.
A reader pointed me in the direction of a Google patent application from 2015, made public last year, titled “Detecting and correcting potential errors in user behavior.” A core part of the Selfish Ledger…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/19/17246152/google-selfish-ledger-patent-applications