Bill Dembski has been researching on December 23, 2023 3 Information Theory Bill Dembski has been researching on December 23, 2023 3 Information Theory
Bill Dembski is best known to many of us as an information theorist, but recently he has been examining the question of what big tech companies are doing with our information. This includes a look at the search engines we use to find information. he notes,
Google advertises itself as being in the search business. But it isn’t, except as a byproduct of its core business. For search to work, Google has to ingest the entire web, or at least as much as it can access. Any information it can access, it can consume. Google is an information feeder. Its incentive is not to help users find content creators but to be a one-stop shop for all information.
As Google describes its mission, it is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” And how best to make it universally accessible and useful, except to repackage and present it as stand-alone pieces of information that can ignore the creator of the information. It’s a zero-sum game: As much as Google sends consumers to a creator’s website, it’s missing out on what consumers can spend with them. Also, with the recent rise of LLMs and AI, it can be rationalized that you are adding value by using other people’s content and allowing a chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT to rewrite and update the content. “We’re going to take what you’ve done and make it better.” What they don’t like, except those who created the content in the first place.
In the absence of government antitrust action to prevent this usurpation of Internet content, Google, like an insatiable beast, will gobble up as much content as it can from websites and then repackage it in ways that incentivize people to look no further than what immediately comes out. Of course they will rip off the content (as per Jaron Lanier’s long-standing criticism). But even if an antitrust action eventually brings Google to heel, it’s likely to be long after the content sites that rely on search have been decimated. I hope I’m wrong because I have a dog in this fight.
Bill Dembski, Google Overreach, December 22, 2023
We tend to assume that simply providing information is neutral, like the phone line. But maybe not.
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