I got one of those promotional emails from Google Workspace recently, pushing "Ask Gemini in Drive." Their pitch: get synthesized answers pulled from multiple files, no need to actually find and read them yourself.
If there's a conspiracy or cartel among tech giants, it works in two parts.
First, they're slowly weaning us off our own capabilities. Our own PCs, our own software, our own data, our own creative work. Everything gets pushed toward a thin client model where it all lives in the cloud. Their cloud. Their software. Your data, despite endless assurances it stays private (except for training purposes, except for testing, and so on, have you actually read the updated terms of service lately). That means they control everything. Sound familiar? Too much like Orwell's Big Brother?
Second, while some features stay free for now, it quickly becomes clear you'll need to subscribe, and not just to one service either. The real hidden cost will be cloud storage, and eventually being locked out of what's actually yours. I'm not exaggerating. OneDrive has already started doing this, and not just to me.
So we'll be handed answers without needing to think, but we could pay dearly for the privilege.
Is this nirvana, or is it dystopia?
Proof read by Claude Sonnet 5
There are a multiplicity of clouds services offered at the moment. It’s a bit scary because it would take ages to properly access them now. So this is a relatively incomplete list, but it is enough to get me started.
