Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked.

Welcome to Google Island | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

It’s okay if that freaks you out, just a little. Now go read Nick Harkaway’s The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. 

My hometown, Mountain View, Calif., has become the unofficial capital of the robotic car revolution. Each day, I seem to run into one, two, or three self-driving Google (GOOG) cars. They’re on my freeways; they’re in my neighborhood; they’re taking my shortcuts.

One time, five of the self-driving cars gathered at a gas station equidistant from my house and Google headquarters. It felt a bit like the robots had taken ownership of my watering hole. People, likely well-paid engineers, had to fill up the cars as if they were fleshy lackeys. The rest of us waited for the robots to get full and head off to wherever it is robots go.

Google’s Self-Driving Robot Cars Are Ruining My Commute

Research published today demonstrates how searches about the future have a strong link to economic success.

They found that countries where “Internet users … search for more information about the future tend to have a higher per-capita GDP,” says Preis, who created a stir in 2010 when he used a similar data-crunching approach to quantify and model stock price fluctuations of companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. “The more a country is looking forward, the more successful economically the country is.”

Of everyone, Germans are the most forward-looking, knocking Britons from the top spot. Preis explained that the U.K. scored so highly a year earlier because of the high anticipation around the Olympics. This year, the Germans are looking forward to a pivotal federal election.

Interestingly, the U.S. ranks 11th, up from 15th a year earlier. The 2012 findings showed that entering an election year, more Americans were looking backward to 2010. This year, Americans as a whole are more optimistic about 2013 than they were a year earlier, Preis says.

What Google Searches About the Future Tell Us About the Present