Morlock Elloi on Fri, 29 Mar 2019 20:20:40 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> search no more


You may have noticed in the last few days that date-based searches on industrial-surveillance properties are malfunctioning. Especially if you search for something recent (like "sort by date"). This is most easily seen on the Youtube subsidiary: try sorting by date uploaded, see what you get.

The reason is simple: failure of scalable censoring mechanisms (because ML (AI for the masses) has to 'learn' - that's what L stands for) to prevent dissemination of just uploaded undesirable content, they simply decided that you can never search by that criteria. This new episode in 'search' adulteration is entertaining because it could not be made invisible.

The end game is obvious - searching will return only approved content, and the gap between the most recent searchable content and 'now' will depend on the speed of content approval processing. Right now they seem to be far behind.

Can they close the gap? It remains to be seen, as this looks like the first real war between humans and AI: if humans win, the search engines will start to look like Wayback machine or Wikipedia - very few curated results, which will undoubtedly affect the bottom line. Maybe this is acceptable, as other sources of data-siphoning income are steadily growing. If the machines win, the Network will start to look far more sterile and barren, but it will be in real time, and thus can successfully project that sterility into hapless users, who interface the world through handsets. Words you cannot hear and things you cannot see you cannot think.

Both of these outcomes will provide lots of initiative for alternative systems. I wouldn't be surprised if Russians or Chinese provide free uncensored search services to US/EU audiences (like they already do for the news). Now you know what Huawei vs. Cisco is all about.

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