Exa is six orders of magnitude above tera.
Most Sun readers know about gigabytes and megabytes. But it’s estimated that in the year 2002 we created five exabytes (that’s a byte followed by 18 noughts) of information. |Link|
I have trouble imagining that amount of data. I’m sure Eric Schmidt does too, but to him its just a mountain of rough diamonds waiting to be polished by Google. And his plans look, well, ambitious.
And then there’s my dream product — I call it serendipity.It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you’re typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point.
This would be good for journalists and politicians too!
Impossible you might say. But I’m an optimist about human nature.
History has proven that we have the ability and ingenuity to solve problems and improve our lives if only we are given the freedom to do so.
And that’s exactly what the Internet does.
Sounds innocent and helpful enough, but Schmidt clearly means this as a kind of political watchdog.
He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper. |link|
Combine this with GooglePAC, and you have the biggest name on the Internet looking to take on Washington.
Now, I don’t want to disturb my fanbase here, but I have to say that I’m not as optimistic about these possibilities as Schmidt. If a politician knows that he is being rabidly fact-checked not just by some watchdog group but by the collective intelligence of Internet in real time, the chances that he’ll respond by increasing the level of political discourse is very small. Its much more plausible to think that this will push the level of debate even further (!) down. It puts pressure on the politicians to play to a wide, not deep, and to keep the topics on abstract intangibles that can’t be checked or even concretely interpreted by man or machine.
As much as I love television, it has seriously hurt political discourse in this country. Political discussion on the internet is still in its infancy (to the point of being almost quaint) and it will be a long time before it matures. It will take even longer for politicians to understand the internet well enough to turn it into the new town hall. Politicians must realize that when you speak on the internet you are not speaking to a single audience but to multiple, well-entrenched audiences, each with their own concerns and hobby horses, and who chatter about it all nonstop. Pandering to any one of these groups, and worst of all to the least common denominator, makes you look foolish, especially when they are being scrutinized by the brightest AI we have today.
The solution is obvious: say thoughtful things about important issues and be good to your word, and you’ll gain respect even from those that disagree. But the high road is never the easy one.
Now we just need to tackle the disagreement part. If we assume that by thoughtful you mean well thought out, as I’m sure you do, then it stands that there is a possibility for there to be two well thought out sides to an issue. So does it come down to ideology then? If so what is the test of the ideology? History? My ideology is more of a Libertarian “if someone says there ought to be a law they are probably wrong” ideology. That sort of unrestricted freedom has proven to be good and bad in different historical contexts. I think part of the issue has to do with the imperfection of a majority system. People can be fickle about what they want. But I feel that in most cases barring any militant restriction on individual liberties an individual can pursue happiness and achieve it through thoughful actions.
I’m inclined to agree with you that tackling disagreement is the next step, but we’re not there yet. Most of the point of a system like this is to inform debates. Ideally, the average internet user is better-informed than the average TV-watcher, and Google merely intends to bolster that gap. If it allows a larger number of people access to the “facts,” whatever that means, the system has done its part of the job. Then it falls on the consumers of the information to make “informed decisions.”
Again, I agree with what you said about the problems with a majority system. I do, however, think that providing people with a fairly simple tool they can use to verify the information they’re fed is a very good thing. If O’Reilly’s show pastes a D next to Foley’s name, interested parties could use this to figure out he’s lying. WHY he’s lying, and what that means for their eventual vote, is still left in their hands, but at least they’re not voting while misinformed.
I fall somewhere in the middle of Eripsa and Schmidt, though. I don’t think politicians are going to start using a service like this in the very near future, but as the tech-savvy generation comes into its own and starts using tools like this, political discourse could well become as diversified and fast-paced as an internet forum. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I can’t say. At the least it might motivate a little honesty, even if it’s only a little.
Well the problem with the internet is the lack of accountability on an individual level. It’s a place where people can whine and bitch and post all sorts of misinformation without being called out. I just hope that people will become more motivated to tackle “real” local problems that they can do something about rather than just chating about larger abstract issues in a forum which like most discussions either devolves into petty personal attacks or a group of people preaching to their choir.