<story><title>Randall Munroe is learning new things from Google</title><url>https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>finnthehuman</author><text>&amp;gt;I agree but simple things it&amp;#x27;s really nice ¯\_(ツ)_&amp;#x2F;¯&lt;p&gt;Not to pick on this person is particular, but this is why I am so against surfacing untrustworthy information as trustworthy.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s AI &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; that Austin is the capital of Texas with the same system that thinks the Wright Brothers flew through the core of the earth.  So why the fuck would anyone trust google that the capital of Texas is Austin? Because you think you can intuit the boundaries of what their AI will and won&amp;#x27;t fuck up? [0] And that&amp;#x27;s a reasonable burden to put on dummies who already think search engine results are somehow more authoritative than the simple text matching they&amp;#x27;re based on at their core?&lt;p&gt;How is anyone at google with a brain comfortable with this feature being live?&lt;p&gt;But these low hanging, blatantly obvious, wrong things are actually a good thing.  Because once the obvious things are fixed the un-obvious ones will linger as even more unwarranted trust is be placed in the feature. And it will become even harder to get it though people&amp;#x27;s thick skulls how goddamn stupid it is to outsource reasoning to machines that can&amp;#x27;t fucking reason.&lt;p&gt;[0]  Sure, xkcd asked fundamentally unanswerable questions, but google notoriously spent years getting &amp;quot;how long does it take to caramelize onions&amp;quot; wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>I think this is a UI problem. Google ought to re-state the question they&amp;#x27;re answering, which may be slightly or entirely different from what was asked.&lt;p&gt;In other words, if I Google &amp;quot;What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon&amp;quot;, the answer box should say &amp;quot;US astronauts landed on the moon in 1970&amp;quot; (not just &amp;quot;1970&amp;quot;). Give users the ability to assess whether the AI was correct.</text></comment>
<story><title>Randall Munroe is learning new things from Google</title><url>https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>finnthehuman</author><text>&amp;gt;I agree but simple things it&amp;#x27;s really nice ¯\_(ツ)_&amp;#x2F;¯&lt;p&gt;Not to pick on this person is particular, but this is why I am so against surfacing untrustworthy information as trustworthy.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s AI &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; that Austin is the capital of Texas with the same system that thinks the Wright Brothers flew through the core of the earth.  So why the fuck would anyone trust google that the capital of Texas is Austin? Because you think you can intuit the boundaries of what their AI will and won&amp;#x27;t fuck up? [0] And that&amp;#x27;s a reasonable burden to put on dummies who already think search engine results are somehow more authoritative than the simple text matching they&amp;#x27;re based on at their core?&lt;p&gt;How is anyone at google with a brain comfortable with this feature being live?&lt;p&gt;But these low hanging, blatantly obvious, wrong things are actually a good thing.  Because once the obvious things are fixed the un-obvious ones will linger as even more unwarranted trust is be placed in the feature. And it will become even harder to get it though people&amp;#x27;s thick skulls how goddamn stupid it is to outsource reasoning to machines that can&amp;#x27;t fucking reason.&lt;p&gt;[0]  Sure, xkcd asked fundamentally unanswerable questions, but google notoriously spent years getting &amp;quot;how long does it take to caramelize onions&amp;quot; wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Seirdy</author><text>This reminds me of something I once wrote in a conversation about the phrase &amp;quot;when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail&amp;quot; wrt web technologies:&lt;p&gt;When a tool&amp;#x27;s convenience grows faster than its reliability and quality, this is what often happens (assuming the tool needs to be more than just convenient). This is just one example.</text></comment>