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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

The thing the article is missing is that algorithms will hopefully improve along with storage capacity. That is, Google may be able to infer what is "Precious" nearly as well as you can. The question is whether Google will offer us that capability, or keep it for itself.

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At the very least Google is now currently separating out stuff that is definitely not "precious". I used to never look at my inbox until they started taking out all the updates, newsletters, etc into separate tabs. Leaving my inbox relatively movement-free and with only very important things.

I think the technology and capabilities likely exist for Google or any other entity to do this classification for us.

But it's a slippery slope. Do we want machine learning algorithms to show us what to care about? Won't that somehow cheapen the uniquely human experience of sifting through your own data and correlating it with your memories and emotions at the time?

That's where we start slipping into the philosophical aspect of the conversation. I don't know that a computer will ever be as good at discerning meaning from our communication as we are - partly because a lot of the meaning is because we say so, not necessarily because of something inherent.

But could they get to 50%? 90%? I hope so, because the load is so huge.

I hope you're right, and that's what I'm getting at with "something on the table." Right now, the pace of storage is increasing so much faster than the algorithms to infer meaning.

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