Dan McKinley Math, Programming, and Minority Reports
I recently read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. It was good! You should read it. I want to say this up front, since after some preamble I’m going to describe a Rube-Goldbergian attempt to poke petty holes in it. I don’t want the reader to lose sight of the big picture, which is that I was trying to do this in the spirit of the book. Which again, is pretty good.
How are we going to know what’s true? How are we going to find information, now? It’s been on my mind lately, as it’s been on everyone else’s mind. The web has been thrown into chaos. As of right now if you ask Google if there’s a country in Africa that starts with “k,” you get a confident “no” that cites one post or another lampooning the entire debacle.
Google isn’t shooting itself in the face right before our eyes because they all think these results are good. (I bet the internal conversations are hilarious.) They’re shooting themselves in the face because they’re in a desperate steel cage match with the Innovator’s Dilemma. Our relationship with information retrieval seems like it’s changing, and this will affect Google. But as a participant in this shitshow they are constrained to seek the set of different equilibria that still more or less resemble web search. When they fuck up, they are fairly scrutinized in ways that their competitors are not. They have to transmogrify the golden goose into some sort of hovercraft, which is a significantly harder task than simply killing it.
LLM’s are now training on their own hallucinated content in a doom loop, and media companies are too busy dying [1] to be plausible as a solution to this. I don’t know what to say about Twitter except “good luck.” You’d be forgiven for hoping for the Nothing but Flowers scenario, in which we all collectively and abruptly decide to go back to the land.
