- Don't be ev... Aw fuck it.
Turns out being neutral is impossible. The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to “leverage” search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.” and “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.” The email chain, while sprinkled with cautionary notes about engaging in political activity, suggests employees considered ways to harness the company’s vast influence on the internet in response to the travel ban. Google said none of the ideas discussed were implemented. "These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology—not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s executive order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”WASHINGTON—Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.
When all you have's a hammer, the world is made of nails. Gilder made the point in Life After Google that whenever we say "machine learning" or "AI" we're really talking about Markov chains, which are useful for some tasks and suck balls for others. Nonetheless, everyone in tech right now is basically throwing Markov chains at every fucking thing they see, whether it's applicable or not, because that's where the tools are. The irony isn't lost on me: an entire industry obsesses over how great AI is, then comes home and chortles over how stupid AI is.
On a related tangent, his talk and curve extrapolation got my gears turning. I'm trying to better understand the root of the inherit skepticism I have for AI. It induced me to tweet a rare somewhat related position: https://twitter.com/MarkKatakowski/status/1043527784134574080 I expect that Kurzweil would argue that nature hit a roadblock with the birth canal, and that if we could just deliver however these folk do then we'd be playing 3D Go. But I am reticent to count nature out when it comes to creative solutions. What can a mirror reflect besides the world? We have uncovered plenty that we did not know, but have we ever uncovered anything that we could not?
OHHHHHHH SHIT DID YOU JUST POST AN ANIMATED GIF Hey everybody! mk just posted an animated gif! The three books of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin trilogy basically argue that the evolutionarily dominant strategy of gray goo is to capture and tend to intelligence because of its anti-entropic tendencies.
Not his point, really - the argument is if intelligence arises in one place but not in another, the gray goo will show up eventually and as the gray goo is immortal and intelligence is not, that resource will be conserved. As a thought experiment it's novel and reasonably well-argued. The middle book is kind of shit, though.