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Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Image by Sean MacEntee.

October 11, 2016

Uninformation Campaigns

So, this is fun! A black-hat “reputation management” firm seems to be filing illegitimate lawsuits in order to get judgments that will force Google to take down unflattering search results. The case-by-case details are worth reading, but here’s a taste of what Washington Post reporters Eugene Volokh and Paul Alan concluded:

Google and various other Internet platforms have a policy: They won’t take down material (or, in Google’s case, remove it from Google indexes) just because someone says it’s defamatory. […] But if they see a court order that declares that some material is defamatory, they tend to take down or deindex the material, relying on the court’s decision. […]

Who is behind these cases? For many of these, we don’t know. As we mentioned, many of the plaintiffs might well not have known what was happening. They might have hired a reputation management company, expecting it to get the negative posts removed legitimately (e.g., through a legitimate libel lawsuit, or through negotiation with the actual authors).

(Bold in original. Story via @counternotions on Twitter.)

Mostly I find this amusing, but I also feel a touch uneasy. For one thing, the courts appear to have verified nothing. So this is a case of slimy lawyers tricking the state into suppressing free speech, solely because their clients paid them to. The state went along with it happily (except for one skeptical judge). Systems that only work when everyone acts in good faith… well, those systems are easy to break.

You can argue that Google is not the government and it’s not a legal free speech issue for them to exclude whatever they see fit from their search results. And to be honest, I don’t know where the official line falls. But I do think it’s notable that Google is only deindexing this material because a government entity has instructed them to, however indirectly.

I guess that wouldn’t be a problem if the court were acting competently?

In other news, some modern humans find themselves in this situation: “Still haven’t had a first cup of tea this morning, debugging the kettle and now iWifi base-station has reset. Boiling water in saucepan now.”

Header image by Sean MacEntee.

March 17, 2016

Frankenstein Robotics

Still from a YouTube video by Diamond Dogs.

The gadget (creature?) pictured above is a Dwarf Gekko from the Metal Gear Solid video game series. According to an MGS fan site:

“Beyond using its three manipulator arms to move about, these unmanned weapons possess the dexterity to enter homes and office buildings, operate computer keyboards and open drawers to collect intelligence, and operate a handgun. Small enough to function unhindered in any space designed for human use.”

Something is profoundly creepy about the human-shaped limbs mounted on a robotic ball. It’s like an evil BB-8 designed by HR Giger with input from Hans Bellmer.

Drawing by Hans Bellmer. See more here (NSFW).

In real life, we make humanoid robots because they can navigate “any space designed for human use” — AKA the built environment as it currently exists. We can integrate them into manufacturing, warehouse stocking, and other types of repetitive manual labor. This will potentially have a huge economic impact within a couple of decades, and it’s much easier to get there if we don’t need to rebuild every facility that will be affected. We can slide into the automated future factory by factory instead of jumping in everywhere all at once.

Despite its potential to shape this trend, Boston Dynamics, originator of the infamous BigDog robot, has been put up for sale by Alphabet (Google’s parent company). Apparently the executives at BD haven’t tried hard enough to generate revenue in the near-term. Bloomberg Business also reported that Google’s internal PR apparatus was not keen on BD’s efforts to make androids:

“After [Boston Dynamics’] latest robot video was posted to YouTube, in February, Google’s public-relations team expressed discomfort that Alphabet would be associated with a push into humanoid robotics. […] ‘There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,’ wrote Courtney Hohne, a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for Google X. […] ‘We’re not going to comment on this video because there’s really not a lot we can add, and we don’t want to answer most of the Qs it triggers,’ she wrote.”

The term “uncanny valley” usually refers to the point when an animated human is not quite perfect, but really close — it turns out that being slightly off is much more unsettling than an obvious caricature. We need a similar term for the visceral reaction to repurposed humanness, like the Dwarf Gekko’s three limbs.

March 1, 2016

Amagooglezon

Amazon has a whim machine bolted onto their ecommerce system. The recommendation engine is a combination of practical — “Other people who bought X also bought Y” — and bemusingly enthusiastic: “You clicked on X before so I bet you’d really like ALSDJFLKSAJF too! Wow, look at all those letters! Notice how they’re in the same alphabet as X? Pretty impressive, huh?” It’s bad at nuance but it’s good at throwing out options. There are so many options for it to scan and suggest.

This stock photo amuses me. Image via Robbert Noordzij.

Businesses need to solve hard problems in order to be successful. Shopping on Amazon is cheap and convenient and they have a vast array of goods. Selling things cheaply without collapsing is a hard problem, and so is convenience, and so is being stocked with lots of products. Amazon conquered all three challenges. Now the benefits feed into each other. Customers love the cheapness and convenience, so sellers must stock their storefronts. Sellers are much easier to aggregate than customers, so once you figure out the customer bit, you’re golden.

Superstar internet businesses — and I guess most high-value companies in general — are all about positive feedback loops. Circular incentives that channel energy from initial success to intermediate success to dominance.

When you search for something on Google, you make Google better by feeding data into their algorithm, and your presence incentivizes both websites and advertisers to cater to this particular search engine. You come back because the algorithm is so good at presenting the information you want. Websites worry about SEO and advertisers drop $$$$$ because that excellent algorithm keeps pulling you back. The incentive structure is great for Google. That ingenious feedback loop made them dominant and it keeps them dominant.

Fast forward to 2037 when we’re surfing Amagooglezon (or whatever supplants them) with our heads swimming in VR buckets. We’ll bounce from product to product, purchasing and appraising and reviewing and returning and diving into on-demand experiences. I wonder how recommendation systems will work then — maybe they’ll have personalities. Maybe we’ll fall in love with them. Maybe we’ll hate them. Maybe our wallets will be managed by AI assistants and none of this will matter.

Tag: Google

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