Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Artificial Stupidity


As a frequent user of Google searches ... both text and images ... I am not a slavish admirer of its “artificial intelligence” technology. In particular, this big corporate proponent of diversity shows little or no diversity in its search results. It’s often like they are not paying attention to the search question. Let’s then call it “artificial stupidity.”

For instance, if I search for images of  “Doolittle,”  I will get pages and pages of images of that Eddie Murphy movie with the same name and hardly anything of what I am really looking for ... the World War 2 air commander. And on the text-search side, Google’s  (and even DuckDuckGo’s) “algorithms” overwhelming return current-event examples with virtually no historic perspective ... like an attempted reference to prior race riots.

And I have yet not delved into Google’s political bias. Today I did a Google search on “racism” and, surprise, surprise, the first three news returns were about VP Pence, President Trump and the Republican party. Hogwash!

Now, I suspect that there might be more sophisticated ways of doing such searches (using Boolean operators?), but, even if there are, 99.9% of users of these searches will not take the time to learn or use these “sophistications.” It seems clear to me that a search engine, for the novice user, could be made much more sophisticated and diverse ... maybe offering alternative paths to follow ... and any technology company that does this will possibly replace Google’s strangle hold on this technology.

I’ll take just a 10% finder’s fee.

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