His explanation of the way Google translator works, for instance, is a graphic example of how a giant just takes (or “appropriates without compensation”) and monetizes the work of the crowd. “One of the magic services that’s available in our age is that you can upload a passage in English to your computer from Google and you get back the Spanish translation. And there’s two ways to think about that. The most common way is that there’s some magic artificial intelligence in the sky or in the cloud or something that knows how to translate, and what a wonderful thing that this is available for free.Emphasis mine.
“But there’s another way to look at it, which is the technically true way: You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases, just an enormous body, and then when your example comes in, you search through that to find similar passages and you create a collage of previous translations.”
“So it’s a huge, brute-force operation?” “It’s huge but very much like Facebook, it’s selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves. [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.”
“I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”
As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.He goes on to speak of a fear of "social lasers of cruelty," where economic fear is combined with "these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action," which he sees as leading to wide-spread lynch-mob mentality.
“It’s huge but very much like Facebook, it’s selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves. [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.”This has been true of capitalism throughout, though, hasn't it? What's new is the machinery that enables it.
You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases, just an enormous body, and then when your example comes in, you search through that to find similar passages and you create a collage of previous translations … you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.I'm very sympathetic to the sentiment that technology often gets applied in ways that cause a lot of pain and hardship, eliminating positions that were thought of as skilled and safe. I'm also sympathetic to the objection that the benefits are disproportionately harvested by the already-rich and already-powerful, like Google.
... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo.Huh? Chaos was what we had in the 1990s, when we had human-curated "web indexes" and terrible, useless, SEO-gamed machine indexes like Alta Vista. Google succeeded by bringing a very large dose of order to the web, and it did it merely by finding that point of view from which the web appeared to order itself. That is, Google did not impose order on anyone or anything, Google simply found the natural order that so many others had been fruitlessly seeking. That's really an extremely clever and positive development. Google is highly thought of for good reason.
P K Dick was saying, himself a crackpotthose are some fucking fighting words
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posted by migurski at 10:52 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]