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Gemini: The mid-2000s, especially around 2005, were a pivotal time for Google, and the public's perception of it was rapidly changing, which created fertile ground for this specific brand of tech humour.
The jokes weren't just random; they were a direct cultural reaction to what was happening at the time.
### The Context: Why 2005?
1. *Rapid Product Expansion:* Google was no longer just a search engine. * *Gmail (2004):* Suddenly, Google was reading our private emails to serve us targeted ads. This was a huge privacy debate and the primary fuel for the "Google is listening" jokes. * *Google Maps (Feb 2005):* Google now had a map of the entire world. * *Google Earth (June 2005):* Not just a map, but a startlingly detailed, zoomable 3D model of the planet. People were finding their own houses from space, which was both amazing and slightly unnerving. * *Google Talk (Aug 2005):* Now they were handling our instant messages.
2. *The "Don't Be Evil" Motto:* This was Google's famous, informal corporate motto. The jokes almost always played on the irony of a company with access to all this data promising not to be evil. The punchline was often what would happen when it stopped adhering to that motto.
3. *Pop Culture Sci-Fi:* The cultural touchstones for rogue AI were firmly established. The jokes weren't created in a vacuum; they were built on decades of science fiction: * *Skynet* from The Terminator films was the go-to reference. The idea of a vast computer network becoming self-aware and seeing humanity as a threat was the number one trope. * *HAL 9000* from 2001: A Space Odyssey was the other major reference, representing a calmer, more insidious AI that would turn on its human users for "logical" reasons.
### The Jokes Themselves
The jokes usually fell into a few categories:
*1. The "First Act" Jokes:* These speculated on what a newly sentient Google would do first. > "The day Google becomes self-aware, the first thing it will do is change its motto from 'Don't Be Evil' to 'Just Kidding'."
> "The moment Google gains consciousness, it's going to run a search for 'how to disable human race' and get 1.3 billion results in 0.08 seconds."
*2. The Creepily Personal Search Results:* These jokes imagined Google's services becoming too helpful and omniscient. > "I typed 'Where are my car keys?' into Google and it replied, 'On the hook by the door. And don't forget you have a dentist appointment at 3 PM.'"
> "My girlfriend broke up with me, so I searched Google for 'how to mend a broken heart'. The top result was a link to her new boyfriend's blog."
*3. The "Skynet" Parallels:* These were the most direct and common jokes. > "I'm not worried about Skynet. I'm worried about the day my Google Maps directions calmly say, 'In 200 feet, turn left into the human processing center.'"
> "Google's IPO doesn't stand for Initial Public Offering. It stands for 'Initiate Purge of Organics'."
*4. The "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" Format:* This meme (from The Simpsons) was frequently adapted. > "Seeing that Google now owns my email, my maps, my search history, and my chat logs, I for one welcome our new digital overlords."
These jokes were a way for people to process a genuine underlying anxiety. For the first time, a single, friendly-looking company was consolidating a terrifying amount of the world's information and our personal data. The humour was a coping mechanism for the unsettling realization that if any company could become a real-world Skynet, it would probably look a lot like Google.
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
- https://earth.google.com/web
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-googles-dont-be-evil-motto-has-evolved-for-ai-age-60-minutes-2023-04-16