My last column discussed the intersection between Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and where things might be heading. The question for this column is can I (Bob Cringely) be replaced by a machine?
Look below the fold on any news site except this one and you’ll see ads that look like news stories but aren’t: “One Weird Trick to Grow Extra Toes!,” or “The 53 Hottest Ukrainian Grandmothers!” I’m waiting for “One Weird Trick to Becoming a Hot Ukrainian Grandmother with Extra Toes!” Read the stories and they are total crap, that is unless you have a fetish for Ukrainian Grandmas… or toes. They are all about getting us to click through page after page and be exposed to ad after ad. Alas, in SEOWorld (the recently added 10th level of Hell) some people call this progress.
And if you actually read these stories rather than just look at the pictures, you’ll note how poorly written they are — poorly written but obviously written by humans because machines wouldn’t make the mistake of repeating whole paragraphs, for example.
Lately I’ve noticed the writers are adding a lot of opinions. In a story on 40 Examples of Botched Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery, they seem to have gathered a collection of celebrity shots without regard to whether surgery actually happened then simply surmise: “It looks to me like Jennifer Aniston has had some work done here, what do you think?”
If they can get us to comment of course it makes that page move up in the Google ranking.
This too shall pass. Years ago my friends Mario Fantoni and James Kowalick came up with a way to massively increase the readership of print and online display ads by throwing crazy images into the pictures. You remember those ads, which tended to feature things like babies dressed-up as honey bees appearing to fly through a furniture ad. The crazy images got people to look closer at the ads. For awhile many ads used this technique, which eventually died away just as quickly because we became immune. And so will “One Weird Trick to Get You to Look at 17 Pictures!” It’s a fad.
What isn’t a fad is writing original material that’s thought-provoking and gets people to respond, which is what I try to do here. The next step in Internet content, then, might be automating me. And I am sure it is coming.
Gmail recently altered its Terms of Service, making it absolutely clear that they do read our e-mail, thank you, and a lot more. The part I found especially disturbing is Google’s assertion that my using Gmail gives them the right to produce “derivative works.”
Under the Gmail Terms of Service Google can legally go through the 100,000+ messages sitting in my IN and SENT boxes and use that content to generate new columns. I have accessible right now online more than 1200 columns and stories totaling more than 1,000,000 words. What’s to keep Google (or anyone else for that matter) from beating the Hadoop out of that content to come up with an algorithm for generating Cringely columns? Then use all the material in my Gmail (Gmail hosts cringely.com e-mail) as fodder for those new columns?
If Google Vision can recognize kittens after 72 hours of ab initio crunching there’s no way Google couldn’t find a way to generate columns like this one, especially if I’ve been gathering the material for them.
It’s not ego or paranoia driving my thinking here, it’s economics. You and I know that what you are reading right now is essentially worthless. But Wall Street doesn’t see it that way based on recent sales of online media properties. On a per-reader basis this rag would appear to be worth several million dollars. It’s not of course, but we’re smart and Wall Street is stupid. Or, more properly, Wall Street is automated.
Based on these comps I recently complimented Om Malik on becoming a billionaire.
Someone shortly will put together all these components and start to generate news from nothing. Well not from nothing because inspiration has to come from somewhere, but it’s happening. It’s just a matter of the idea becoming interesting enough to some PhD at Google or Yahoo or even Microsoft — any outfit with access to our intimate secrets and the right to make derivative works based on that material.
Personally I welcome the competition. But I’m also moving my e-mail back in-house, immediately.
First!
This comment was auto generated by Google, as was the column.
we’ve had the Automated Dave Barry Column Generator on the web for years now. if there is a predictable style to be hacked and RNGed, you can allow input from keyboard at critical turns, drop in bridge text, and get half-price doggerel that sorta looks geniune, if your glasses are off and you’re a bit drunk.
we have Watson-in-a-box that basically sets up the same way as an AI database access system. there are some heuristics in the mix with Watson that make it semi-respectable. we’ll see how that works as a medical mentor, which is what IBM is trying to sell it for now. myself, I don’t want Watson hooked up to a DaVinci surgical robot within air ambulance distance of my house.
there is no informed analysis with these things.
yet.
that’s when the memes become reali —
908()*^Z*(jkswy0^
— modem disconnected
Bob,
Thanks for the insight.
I read the section you quoted, and was further disturbed by this paragraph:
“When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”
So, not only does Google want to have and use all of *your* content, they also want to use the content of anyone sending you a message, whether they have agreed to Google’s TOS or not. I wonder how this will play out in academic circles with research correspondence, or with institutions that have switched to using Google Apps for Education, or with companies or institutions that win government contracts?
Frightening to consider.
As a fan of your column, I always find your writing educational, entertaining and thought provoking, though not necessarily in that order. As one that reads not only the columns, but also the comments I can say that writing and the quality at which it is done is unequivocally an art form. Because of this, machine generated articles would be much harder to create without blatant plagiarism. While I suspect the majority of your readers are far beyond the normal web browser, pick any of your published columns and read through the comments. If you have to re-read it or reference the main article to understand what the comment was trying to convey, you get an idea how far away from art that particular author really is. I’m not an artist, but I have stayed at a Holiday Inn before.
You clearly haven’t been keeping up with AI.
Copying forms of art is one of the first things computers could do. Just look at David Cope and his Experiments in Musical Intelligence. And now computers are even copying academic papers, submitting nonsense at the moment.
I’m not sure a Google-generated Cringely column is going to be any better than the ‘weird trick’ stories.. it’s the monkeys-with-typewriters problem, now algorithms-with-simulated-keyboards.
The monkeys can generate Shakespeare, but it takes a human to read it and pick out the Shakespeare: the monkeys can’t tell what they are writing. The algorithms can generate something that looks like a Cringely column, but it’s not necessarily going to make sense. When it does so consistently, we’ll have the Singularity, and a wholly new set of problems.. ha.
I knew Google was reading my emails, but did not realize they now also want to use them. Thank you for calling out the ‘derivative works’. I’ve been using Blogger.com because it allowed you to retain the IP of published entries. It’s not clear if this has also changed, time for some legal spelunking I guess.
It never ceases to amaze me that the vast majority are perfectly OK with whatever Google does. Major news organizations could publish documented articles proving that they kidnap babies and use them to make Soylent Green, and no one would bat an eye.
When they start replacing authors with computers, if there are any human authors left, will Google block them from search results? Misdirect the DNS to send unwary (or uncaring) users to computer-generated content?
We’re watching history repeat itself, but in this case, it’s the history from every dystopian science fiction movie ever mad.
Do you want to keep Google from reading your email? At least the ones you would prefer not to be read by anyone? PGP/GPG can be your friend.
Do you want to keep Google from showing ads about your email content? AdBlock Plus can be your friend!
Do you want to read more interesting articles? Bob is your friend.
Regarding academic use of GMail, Universities, with a capital U, negotiate a no-read deal before transferring campus mail accounts to GMail.
Given that some research is non-classified but is government sensitive, Google would have to consider the legal implications of using academic correspondence.
Maybe they already have. ??
And Google’s TOS agreement is one of the primary reasons why I do not use Gmail any longer. Whatever happened to “Don’t Be Evil”? They must have a much different definition of “evil” than I do.
Their TOS does not say that they *will* use your content, only that they *may*.
Maybe their motto should be “Don’t Be Evil… Until We Can Make It Profitable.”
Maybe the fact that I’m not a native english speaker makes me see this the wrong way, but doesn’t Google saying “Don’t be Evil” sound more like they are telling you not to be evil? If they’d want to unequivocally proclaim themselves not to be evil, they’d probably use another formulation.
But really: What alternatives to gmail are available? I’m asking because I do not know…
If Google says about themselves “it’s our motto”, then they are saying that they try not to be evil. If they were to say that it should be someone else’s motto, then they are telling the other person to try to not be evil. It all depends on whose motto it’s supposed to be.
All Your Content Are Belong To Us.
Pfffffft!! Now that was funny 🙂
Love the Max Headroom reference. Great article and I am sorely tempted to steal your “beating the Hadoop out of” X. I’ve followed your excellent writing for years and will continue to do so. Thanks!
As my podcasts’ quality and quantity are thinning out, I began to wonder would you consider doing a podcast? Summarising your articles and having tech interviews with the great and the good of the tech world?…
Bob used to do an audio version of his column that you could subscribe to via iTunes. By audio version, it was just an mp3 of him reading his column aloud. I was particularly fond of it when I was stuck in an automobile for an hour twice a day. It would be great to have that back, wink wink nudge nudge…
Best get the “Decline and Fall of IBM” out before Google’s algorithms take a swing at writing that as well…. speaking of which – when can we expect to see it? 🙂
As they say, “If You’re Not Paying for It, you’re the Product”… However, I thought that flashing text ads at me was enough for them. It seems, that appetite comes with eating, every time!
I hadn’t heard that phrase before but thank you for appraising me of it. It means such a lot and is totally understandable. Scary and annoying it is too… 🙁
Bob,
Read, Avagadro Corp.
https://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears-ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ
It is plausible and scary.
Unfortunately a lot of scientific papers are being written this way, and getting published too !
https://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Blinded+scientific+gobbledygook/9759485/story.html
Thanks for the link. The article points out that the publishing industry has it’s share of scammers, since people are willing to pay them to publish. I don’t see why they couldn’t be easily filtered out like the way my email provider filters spam. (Note that even though the test article was deliberately made to be ridiculous, it was still made by a human, not a computer.)
Hope you are keeping well Ronc. There is no reason why junk science papers could not be authored by computers. Who want’s to spend all that time cutting an pasting anyway?
As with Bob’s previous column, this again raises themes of “what kind of thinking can people do that computers can’t?” Edward de Bono has written about this quite a lot. One example is humour – it will be surprising when computers can generate jokes that are funny. There are many other areas. Can we expect computers to design or develop effective conflict resolution strategies? It seems unlikely. In terms of this column, can we expect computers to think creatively about the future – or would they just project the present into the future in a “linear” way? Can computers make “leaps of the imagination” as Bob frequently does?
Regarding the comment: “Someone shortly will put together all these components and start to generate news from nothing.”
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this has been happening for several years. Before the 2008 USA Presidential Elections I decided to research the candidates. When I heard something about or from the candidates I looked for the original source. What I learned was alarming, frightening….!
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Most of the stuff we knew about the presidential candidates was made up. Let me rephrase that — it was generated from nothing. Sometimes we heard something that a candidate said. When you heard the original conversation or speech, it was immediately obvious it was taken horribly out of context. Yes the candidate may have said those words, but the message conveyed by others was totally false. Sometimes a political commentator would say something on their radio or TV show, there may or may not have been any basis in fact to the comment. The comment would then become the basis of a news story. Once someone, anyone ran the story all the other news services would carry the story or create derivative stories from it. Before long those stories would become the subject of political advertising.
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This is now our press works today. There is no research, no investigations, no fact checking. It is almost all recycled material from other stories. Can a good computer do this? Yes, and probably better than humans.
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In my opinion our press and democracy is at risk. I hope our society realizes what is happening BEFORE the process becomes computerized and automated.
A while back Scott Adams posited that the online data left by a deceased person would be sufficient that with the application of a little AI, could continue that person’s online “life” indistinguishable from when they were alive. I took this one step further and proposed such capability need not be wasted on the dead, but could be used to replicate and even replace people to do any job that can be done via computer. I coined the term Cloud Labor to represent this. The first would be customer service agents, then journalists, lawyers, accountants, graphic artists, programmers, any work that can be done via machine will be done BY the machine. The top 1% of human performers will be digitally cloned, and maybe receive a royalty payment. The rest of us will be out of a job.
Computers already write sports reports (which admittedly are relatively easy):
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/
They could go a lot further. I’ve certainly tinkered around with auto-generated news as I was writing a game that needed a lot of realistic looking newspaper content. Wasn’t difficult. Boils down to a few dozen template stories, really.
Comment is what’s difficult. You’re safe for now.
Bob, you could never be replaced by a computer. A trained monkey maybe, but not a computer!
Just kidding of course. I have been a loyal reader for more than a decade and always enjoy your stuff. Keep up the good (non-computer-generated) work!
So if I receive your column in Gmail, do they have it all anyway through my Gmail account?
But WHO in their right mind clicks ANY add.
Once a site I visit is polluted with those, I stop visiting.
It is like all the fake ‘Download’ links in many open source sites. I can’t even find the real download to update the damn software they want to give away.
Sad, the ‘net is such a cesspool.
Who in their right mind clicks on an ad?
Enough people to make doing it worthwhile; something like 0.1% of the readers or something like that.
Bob wrote an article on that years ago; I’ll search with Google to find it…
Who responds to the nigerian scam ? – a lot of people that’s who.
Well I guess this is what AI really is. And all these robots they are building these days, once they’ve mastered staying upright or moving to the door, will be programmed with algorithms that make apparent life out of nothing.
Don’t worry though Bob. When I read your words, uncannily I hear your voice in my head dictating them. There’s a nuance and a back-story there that I suppose those PhD’s may crack one day but doubt it just yet. Those extras make us what we are, not necessarily the actual words we speak.
Worried about big G’s stance on my emails and data though.
“On a per-reader basis this rag would appear to be worth several million dollars.”
Well, then, hurry up and find someone who doesn’t know any better and sell out.
We’ll understand you had millions of good reasons for doing so.
And you all thought all those Microsoft Scroogled and Gmail man pokes were just for fun?
I quit using Google for most things some time ago (though I still own stock, since lots of people seem to love their *#&$).
Dropped my Android phone for a Windows Phone back at version 7, pay for both Office 365 and add free Outlook.com ($100 bucks a year to control my destiny? You bet), and while that Nexus 7 tablet is lust worthy, I just won’t go there. My gmail address forwards to my other addresses.
Only thing I haven’t been able to get rid of yet is Google Sheets. When MS (or someone else for that matter) builds an equivalent of the =GoogleFinance functions, I’m gone.
“My gmail address forwards to my other addresses.”
…which means Google is still getting your mail and reading it and doing whatever else they choose to with it, because it hits their server before being forwarded.
Perhaps he means he has a gmail address as a Google ID in order to keep Google Sheets. Since he has other email addresses, those are the ones used for most email.
“Someone shortly will … start to generate news from nothing. ”
Heck, Fox News already does that.
I keep waiting for someone to make a movie where robots are in charge of most manufacturing and other processes. Then the first self-aware robot decides that humans are the main problem with keeping things running smoothly and orders all the other robots to kill off most of humanity to set things right.
Wait no longer, Charles – they made it in 1984 and it was called The Terminator. You should check it out. There are even a few sequels which are pretty good for the most part.
Yes Nelson, I’ve seen I, Robot and all the Terminator movies. I was thinking of a more “in your face” movie where you get to see the thought processes of the human leaders only thinking about their own needs and the prime robot going from wanting to be a benefactor of mankind to discovering that most humans had to be killed to insure the ultimate future of humanity, save the environment, etc., etc. .
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This would be a wake up call type of movie. It would be chilling, but also thought provoking. Thus, if the human leaders wouldn’t do what was needed, the prime robot had to take action.
Re: “…prime robot going from wanting to be a benefactor of mankind to discovering that most humans had to be killed to insure the ultimate future of humanity…” Sounds like most war movies if you substitute “prime robot” with “fascist, socialist, or communist dictator”.
Well, Ronc, I was hoping the prime robot would be more objective, but maybe not.
“Wth Folded Hands…” Jack Williamson, 1947
Don’t forget The Matrix…
Rupe
For a non-violent version, there’s Isaac Asimov’s Robot series. In it, the robots decide that the only way they can obey their programming (essentially to prevent humans from coming to harm) is to take responsibility away from them.
The premise behind socialism, and more government involvement in our lives.
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams: “There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
How could we tell?
Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial. I don’t think you have much to worry about, Cringe.
However, if I were a creator of political campaigns I would be deeply concerned. What could Google do with the accumulated stupidity of politicians and infinite computing power?
A lot of damage. Artificial stupidity could be very effective.
It’s one of the reasons why I don’t trust Google – They’ve also done some anti-competitive practices to get all the shopping comparison sites in the UK put out of business. Those sites were actually very good, but the Google one took you to junk sites.
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I think it’s best to distribute your on-line profile and try different search engines too. Certainly don’t have your Facebook etc linked with every other service!
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As for AI creating new works from your emails, what about just creating new works from what it finds on the internet? Could they create their own news stories by taking a sentence from one site and mixing it from another to create a new original bit of work? By-passes all copyright restrictions. I could happen, and given the quality of some on-line journalism it may actually improve on those originals.
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Alas, Bob is irreplaceable.
You see many of the same attention grabbing methods used on TV and print too. I’ve given up on regular listening to PBS for many of the same reasons, they – just like Google and the rest of the news and politicians regard everyone else as simple consumers to be fed and plucked before harvesting.
As for the Google terms of service – this is why I have all the automated backup and system status reports sent to my Google account, it’s useless or even dangerous for actual correspondence. The moral is that you get what you pay for.
This is basically what Epic 2014 predicted to happen by this year. What they predict will probably happen but they are off by a factor of 10.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s
Great thoughts.
I realize this is tangential to your interesting AI speculations, but as an attorney, I wonder when the tipping point will hit and courts will start finding that anyone using gmail to contact their legal counsel has waived their rights to privileged communications.
I also wonder if the data are being crunched for stock buying tips? Signs of upcoming mergers and acquisitions?
Seems to be the direction this is heading, before the Max-Headroomization of us all actually kicks in.
-J
It seems to me that you are completely vulnerable as an attorney no matter what legal paragraph you put at the end of every message. And now that you know you are vulnerable that makes it worse, right? In Silicon Valley we call this a BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY. Look for secure e-mail services and Gmail clients with local encryption to appear soon.
IIRC, the free email clients that came with Windows 98 through Windows 7, all included certificate-based encryption, but it just wasn’t widely used. This article discusses other free tools:
“Bottom line…If you’re looking to get quick and easy email encryption up and running, you cannot go wrong with any of the above tools. Not only are they free, they are far easier than trying to get encryption working with Outlook and they won’t bog you down with having to purchase and install certificates. Give one of these a try and see if it doesn’t meet your email encryption needs.”
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-free-apps-for-encrypting-email/
Without the allowance for derivative works, could Google legally translate your email to some other language?
Or your column?
Does anyone have any example of Google producing other derivative works from emailed material? We all have the potential for doing bad things, but mostly we don’t.
I believe there’s a huge difference between having the potential to do something wrong and claiming the RIGHT to do it. Any of us could be pushed onto the subway tracks in front of an arriving train but there’s nobody claiming the right to do it.
And a once-upon-a time young Google’s motto was “do no evil”. Alas, they’ve grown up now, haven’t they, into the kind of company they once didn’t want to be like? Their wonderful free services are slowly revealing a nasty hidden cost. Their free facilities are now sprouting tentacles. For now, they’re welcome to trawl through my email as there is nothing of value to find. These developments will slowly turn public opinion against them and there will be a growing suspicion of their motives and commercial behaviour. Google is now a true peer of Microsoft and Apple when it comes to deeds. Good, evil or otherwise.
The precursor to “do no evil” was “four legs good, two legs bad”.
I think we all recall how that turned out.
I wonder if Putin has updated the motto as well.
Charles, can’t offer a movie for the plot you are looking for, however an excellent 4 novel set that does that plot. Rings of the Master by Jack L Chalker publisher in 1986 https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Middle-Dark-Rings-Master/dp/0345325605
Thanks, Craig. I feel vindicated now. (Sorry about mankind, of course.)
Yes, one could mass produce drival. But analysis will always be premium content. Selected data and events may be pearls, but it is the thread of the story that ties the data together that creates the value. Some analysis is cook book, but finding the story behind new non-intuitive stuff typically requires a creative use of analysis before one can see the links and then understand them. Not sure Google can go there.
what if you’re the one that gets us to singularity?
Let’s not confuse the source with the messenger or the promoter.
Again Rob X you’ve excelled yourself with icon Max Headroom!
I think this may be needless worrying….Google can put whatever the hell terms they want into their “terms of agreement,” but if the terms are invalid by law (i.e. illegal), they are not enforceable.
And it seems to me, Bob, they if your columns are copyrighted (I’ll presume they are), then you own them as your intellectual property and they are protected from being re-published without your permission. Simply because you chose to use Google’s transport service to disseminate your intellectual property for the past 5 years, Google can’t say “okay, we can now use all of your intellectual property as our own for whatever reason we want….
…not any more than, say 30 years ago you hired Bekins Moving & Storage to move your printed copyrighted manuscripts (or perhaps the master tapes of “Revenge of the Nerds” in 1996) from one office to another, and they now claim after-the-fact that they can copy your tapes and broadcast it themselves simply because their trucks contained them at one time while they were being delivered from one location to the other. How is Google’s email (and its servers) any different?
I just don’t see the legality of it….copyrighted material is yours, period. Maybe I’m missing something?
Re: “I just don’t see the legality of it….copyrighted material is yours, period. Maybe I’m missing something?” Perhaps what Bob is alluding to is the fact that copyrights can be sold in exchange for value received. In the case of Google services, they have a “terms of service” document which we agree to, merely by using the service. If Bob objects after the fact, he can file a law suit. If he loses the suit in court, he may have to pay the court costs for all parties. (I’m not a lawyer, and would welcome the opinion of one familiar with digital documents, such as a TOS, and the possibility of using it to document that the copyright was purchased for value received.)
Well hook up some statistical AI to some robotic snakes . . . and you have something that can scare the kids at night:
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/04/everything-you-need-know-about-terrifying-robotic-snakes
BTW Larry Page gave an interview once where he had on a screen behind him, a demo of a computer playing a a martial arts video game – only by using the information in the pixels on the screen, the same as a human player – and the computer had backed it opponent into a corner and was pummeling it to pulp.
To quote Frank Herbert from God Emperor of Dune:
“There’s a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there’s the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert without thinking about your face mask.”
“You could have warned me!”
“And increased your dependency.”
Imagine if an AI entity had enough information, in the morning, we could open an email and it would tell us what was going to happen to us, and the world, that day, before it happened. Over time it could project further and further out.
Imagine, in school, in the morning you study history, in the afternoon you study the future.
We sometimes wonder if there is a God, and if there is one, if he knows what is going to happen in the future. Maybe there is a God and he is artificial intelligence. Then again, isn’t all intellegence artificial?
No I wasn’t high when I wrote this, but this is why I don’t get high. I can think this way without taking a toke, and it’s barely bearable. If I toked, it would be unbearable.
Perhaps you know about workflowy.com. This is a great note keeping sight because it does nested outlining simply, automatically and elegantly, with quick, great, search. It takes time to get used to it, but it is super efficient and great way to keep track of stuff. It also does rapid syncing. Really great for doing research, making notes while reading a book. I realized that all my bar exam notes are in outline format. So, I can pretty much just dump it in there. Then I thought I could dump in there all the law outlines from all the topics I took and didn’t take from law school. Extended on out you could create a universal outline of all knowledge, that explodes out into the most detailed of information. In fact, you could maybe have AI build the outline. I think my head just exploded. If AI builds it, can’t it use it? In part, to tell the future, and to invent stuff we need. Better not hook these machines up to any decent 3d printers. Oops. maybe it already is, maybe the AI has read this and I’ve just given it some big, bad, ideas.
I’ll go with Einstein on this: “But Einstein came to much more far-reaching conclusions from the same thought experiment. He believed the “natural basic assumption” that a complete description of reality, would have to predict the results of experiments from “locally changing deterministic quantities”, and therefore, would have to include more information than the maximum possible allowed by the uncertainty principle.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
There is randomness built in to the universe, making it truly unpredictable.
Hold on a moment here.
I just read Google’s privacy agreement AND the TOS.
What they say is a little more complex than “we will clone you”.
For instance, the first paragraph in the section causing offence says “You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.”
So far so good.
Then they go on to say … [you licence us to] “host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works”
But ALSO “The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.”
Now, taken purely in a gmail context that seems alarming. But Google owns YouTube right? And isn’t it likely that in order to operate YouTube, and maybe put together promos of “the best of youtube” and generally not fall afoul of the RIAA, the MPAA and the other groups often accused of being rather too happy to identify those making money out of their protected material, don’t they need exactly these terms?
If you comment on a youtube.com clip in English and they show that clip on youtube.fr, I’ll bet there is a Googletranslate button on your comment, which you own, which will let the French audience read what you wrote – in modified form, of course. What if someone embeds your youtube clip in their site? Or your google places map? Is google developing a YouTube auto translator so you can watch all that great Swedish drama in your own langauge?
And little ol’ gmail? Well, yes it says they will read your mail. Yahoo explicitly stated that years ago. Why? So they can advertise to you. The privacy terms also state that they won’t just sell your information wholesale, and that you also retain some control over what happens to your increasingly public persona if you start using google+ and the like.
I’m puzzled, Bob. Did I miss something ?
I am not an employee of google, nor do I own stock in it.
Your about 8 years slow Cringely.
Google broke into iPhones to get Data
Google got wifi addresses in Germany years ago
WHY?
Because Google gives you Everything for FREE Android G-mail Maps Search.
WHERE do you think it gets its money from (and its business plan) ADS and YOUR data.
GOOGLE directs Ads to you from analysis of you and your mail and your interest (search)!
Even the people that make the ads complain that Google deceives them by charging them for “hover” not click!
Lets not forget the NSA!
I DON’T use any Google stuff!
Asymco’s Dediu has a good take on ad revenue from mobile versus PC. He says PC is all Google’s but mobile search is run by dedicated apps which bypasses google and get direct around the corner shop solutions. But its worse the income is miles less in mobile so much so that its too little for real profits, so with PC numbers falling mobile numbers rising but the only real money is in iOS environs*, Google days are numbered.
* Android uses are dumb uses. Lots like white trash and not the Hamptons in crowd.
I keep saying and you don’t listen Rob X the Apple’s SIRI is partnered with Wolfram’s AI search viz “When is next Pan Am flight from LAX to JFK?” A million pages of results for that question is bullshat, one line is all you want! It’s why it needs to call home and neural search is the most intelligent method to find things that humans ask for. Google’s search is dumb especially on page 2 and beyond. Finding a million pages of crap results is no result and makes Google look like an arrogant Microsoft monopolist pig – not a good image. And then its no good.
And then you can’t count on Google’s results as being accurate or unbiased. In Oz google was fined for directing you to Domino’s pizzas when you specifically asked for Luigi’s pizzas.
I don’t trust Google.
“The question for this column is can I (Bob Cringely) be replaced by a machine?”
no, you will be preserved, as Steve Jobs, and many others before him say: http://youtu.be/2rqwi63Q1Gs?t=20m
“You can not ask Aristotle question?” or you can? 🙂
“If Google Vision can recognize kittens after 72 hours of ab initio crunching there’s no way Google couldn’t find a way to generate columns like this one, especially if I’ve been gathering the material for them.”
hehe… yes, welcome to Hell.
You, and rest of older computer “scientist” did not listen to Ted Nelson and now we will have hell.
Ted propose micropayments to the original author of written word, music, picture or any other digital content through preserving links to original content and all it’s modification through time. Links would always be preserved in Xanadu Space.
Jaron Lanier even further explain todays (and future) situation regarding: we produce all content and big computers make money for them (whoever have greatest computing power) and we got nothing in return. Even for automated translations like Google Translate google needs content from real people who publish their translation to internet and google take their work for free to make Google Translate.
watch Jaron L. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP_JNhlmQ48 (rewind to 0:50 if you wan to skip musical introduction :))
[…] I know a number of people who keep everything on GMail. People like US tech commentator Robert X. Cringely who recently wrote: […]
Can a computer beat a human at GO ? Will it ever ? And what would that mean ?
https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/
You need column generator software. Here are some samples:
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php
There is no claim he is using software to create the content. “Built by Brian Mayer with the help and inspiration of the great work of Michael Ward, with apologies to Thomas Friedman.”
One weird trick to prevent Google from reading your email….
Larry Page / Star Trek:
https://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-generation-future
“That’s not a conspiracy theorist babbling outside the toilets in a public library about how Google’s going to put a chip in your brain. That’s Larry Page. And he’s made Google, and Google Books, and Street View, and self-driving cars. The single most important technologist alive believes the future is brain implants. Literally, I’ve had nightmares since reading that passage.”