Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a noted polymath and cryptanalyst who is regarded by many as being the grandfather of modern computing. We take a look at the life and times of one of the founding fathers of the modern information society.
The [Google] search process, in other words, has become “personalized,” which is to say that instead of being universal, it is idiosyncratic and oddly peremptory. “Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results—the ones that the company’s famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other page’s links,” [author] Pariser observes. With personalized search, “now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular—and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” It’s as if we looked up the same topic in an encyclopedia and each found different entries—but of course we would not assume they were different since we’d be consulting what we thought to be a standard reference.
Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of fifty-seven variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology, and assumptions. Pariser suggests, for example, that a search for proof about climate change will turn up different results for an environmental activist than it would for an oil company executive and, one assumes, a different result for a person whom the algorithm understands to be a Democrat than for one it supposes to be a Republican. (One need not declare a party affiliation per se—the algorithm will prise this out.) In this way, the Internet, which isn’t the press, but often functions like the press by disseminating news and information, begins to cut us off from dissenting opinion and conflicting points of view, all the while seeming to be neutral and objective and unencumbered by the kind of bias inherent in, and embraced by, say, the The Weekly Standard or The Nation. [emphasis added]
AI [artificial intelligence] is applied philosophy. AI curates opportunities for us to think about what we would say about the hard cases. At its best, AI gives us new hard cases. That's what IBM's, Jeopardy-winning Watson is....
People wonder whether it's legitimate to talk of Watson as a He, but really the more pressing question is whether we can even speak of an It. In an important sense, there is no Watson....The avatar, the voice, the name — these are sleights of hand. The Watson System is staged to manipulate strings of symbols which have no meaning for it. At no point, any where in its processes, does the meaning, or context, or point of what it is doing, ever get into the act. The Watson System no more understands what's going on around it, or what it is itself doing, than the ant understands the public health risks of decomposition. It may be a useful tool for us to deploy (for winning games on Jeopardy, or diagnosing illnesses, or whatever — mazal tov!), but it isn't smart.
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