I'm not sure how Google (and OpenAI is just as bad) could release a tool that is so fundamentally broken, incapable of any kind of accurate image generation. Here's an example:
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Smart Compose will destroy your brain
Luckily, in Google Docs, it is possible to turn off "Smart Compose".
Go to "Tools"->"Preferences".
The fact that Googlers considered this tool to be useful ... well, that indicates a great deal about the current state of creativity within the company.
When you are expressing an idea, while looking at the words you type, you do not need a computer to suggest phrases based on ideas expressed by other people. It completely fights against your train of thought. This is already having a normalizing effect on originality in searches on Google. But to mess with people's minds while they are writing is unbelievably terrible.
This tool will turn you into a normalized, cliché-spouting, path-dependent robot.
If people use this, even for the construction of corporate memos, their language faculty will atrophy. Their ability to express original ideas will be reduced, and original ideas themselves will ultimately be repressed.
Google, get rid of this "feature".
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Google translate in the wrong direction
No product announcement is what it seems.
Google Translate, with some fanfare, announced that it's "improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined". They provide no sense of how they came to that figure, of course.
What's worse: they are, like most AI researchers, obsessed by the application of particular technologies, rather than any progress in the understanding of the human brain. "Neural Machines" are just engineering tools. They are inventions. They have nothing to do with human language, and are not "closer" to human language than whatever text-matching formal grammar tool they were using before. They willfully ignore cognitive science, biology, natural science, and linguistics. So their approach will always be wrong. And it seems more wrong now, because they think they are more right.
It's hard to see the difference in "product quality", because they don't let you compare the old product to the new one.
But let's give it the oldest test in the book. If I take an English paragraph from their press release, translate it into French, and then translate it back into English ... this "new approach" provides grammatically-correct gibberish.
“Whereas Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) breaks an input sentence into words and phrases to be translated largely independently, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) considers the entire input sentence as a unit for translation. The advantage of this approach is that it requires fewer engineering design choices than previous Phrase-Based translation systems.”
"Alors que la traduction machine à base de phrases (PBMT) casse une phrase d'entrée en mots et phrases à traduire en grande partie indépendamment, la traduction machine neuronale (NMT) considère la phrase d'entrée entière comme une unité de traduction. L'avantage de cette approche est qu'elle nécessite moins de choix d'ingénierie que les systèmes de traduction basés sur des expressions antérieures. "
"While machine-based machine translation (PBMT) breaks an input sentence into words and phrases to be translated largely independently, neural machine translation (NMT) considers the entire input sentence as a translation unit. The advantage of this approach is that it requires fewer engineering choices than translation systems based on earlier expressions. "
I think it's obvious that Google is still vulnerable to any competitor who takes natural science seriously. This is true in both translation and in search.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Language
Although I use Google Translate all the time, it's a shame that Google is still pursuing an approach to natural language processing that should have been abandoned in the late 1950's, after the publication of Syntactic Structures.
Google is stuck in the idea that a corpus, minced through a decision procedure, can somehow provide automated natural language capabilities, before we've successfully understood the biology of language! It's like assuming that lots of observations of objects moving will somehow provide you a theory of gravitation.
As a result, Google Translate just doesn't work. The reason it's still useful is that we have this rich biological mechanism available to us, mostly subconscious, that can make corrections and fill in the gaps.
Type anything into Google Translate, then translate back the results. It's very rare that you'll get anything equivalent to your original. It has something like a 99% failure rate, for me.
So I type:
I wonder if this will ever work?
Google Translate renders this into French:
Je me demande si cela va fonctionner?
... which is already wrong, but to complete the exercise, switch the translation and you get:
I wonder if this will work?
Don't get me wrong: Google Translate is a useful tool. But, honestly, Google, you cannot get from here to real automated translation, if you're relying upon the techniques of statistical analysis. You need a real computational theory of language, a device that, for language L, to quote Chomsky in 1956, "generates all the grammatical sentences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones". This is an incredibly tough problem: there are no statistical shortcuts. It cannot be done unless you start to keep up with the biologists of language. These linguists have made much progress over the last 54 years.
Google is stuck in the idea that a corpus, minced through a decision procedure, can somehow provide automated natural language capabilities, before we've successfully understood the biology of language! It's like assuming that lots of observations of objects moving will somehow provide you a theory of gravitation.
As a result, Google Translate just doesn't work. The reason it's still useful is that we have this rich biological mechanism available to us, mostly subconscious, that can make corrections and fill in the gaps.
Type anything into Google Translate, then translate back the results. It's very rare that you'll get anything equivalent to your original. It has something like a 99% failure rate, for me.
So I type:
I wonder if this will ever work?
Google Translate renders this into French:
Je me demande si cela va fonctionner?
... which is already wrong, but to complete the exercise, switch the translation and you get:
I wonder if this will work?
Don't get me wrong: Google Translate is a useful tool. But, honestly, Google, you cannot get from here to real automated translation, if you're relying upon the techniques of statistical analysis. You need a real computational theory of language, a device that, for language L, to quote Chomsky in 1956, "generates all the grammatical sentences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones". This is an incredibly tough problem: there are no statistical shortcuts. It cannot be done unless you start to keep up with the biologists of language. These linguists have made much progress over the last 54 years.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Empty projects do nothing
Google is straying further from reality.
I must comment on the jaw-droppingly misguided projects listed at Google's Project 10^100. This kind of list "chosen from suggestions" is inevitable when wealthy, highly-indoctrinated technologists embark on "saving the world" with no experience in community work, and no apparent information on the world's biggest problems.
* Create more efficient landmine removal programs
First of all, wouldn't stopping the deployment of any more landmines be a more interesting and permanent goal? It would require admitting that the country Google has the most influence in is the largest manufacturer and user of weapons that attack civilians.
Secondly, existing removal programs are quite low-tech and effective (for example, replacing hoes with shovels) and simply need more funding. Would google provide those, or help the groups that try to collect money for them? Are shovels too low-tech for their attention? How about funding or helping the anti-war and anti-aggression movement, which could use technological assistance so activists could organize and connect more effectively.
* Drive innovation in public transport
"Develop new transportation technologies to help move more people with less energy, greater efficiency and fewer casualties." You mean, like trams and trains, jitneys and bicycles? We have all the transportation technologies that are needed ... once again, the issue is to get them to happen again, and in the right way: with effective local manufacture, and proper prioritization and funding. The only high-tech that would be useful here is the means for people to organize to retrieve the infrastructure that has been taken from them by, among others, the auto industry, which regularly bought public transport systems in the last century in order to dismantle them.
* Build real-time, user-reported news service
It seems like twitter and facebook already do this ... are we aiming to re-brand them into news organizations? There are hundreds of initiatives like this, including nonprofit ones, and the best will already float to the top. Unless hamstrung by a major "Google 10^100"-funded competitor ...
* Make educational content available online for free
How about helping people to demand more funding for public education and research? They need to demand that taxpayer-funded research, and any published research for that matter, not be locked-up in private journals and books. They need to fight the perception that education and research is an "entitlement" ... and promote the idea that everyone should receive a free education, and benefit from the open disclosure of results, from the government they have themselves funded ...
* Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
First responders will tell you that they could develop what they need if they only had the resources to do so. But in our privatization-crazed society, this is unlikely: for example, the radio frequencies that used to be clear for emergencies have been sold to the entertainment industry.
* Make government more transparent
Wow. With technology? All the technology is already available ... what is needed, again, is funding to politically organize, and crack open egregious government and corporate opacity.
* Help social entrepreneurs drive change
You know, small business creates change already, everyday. Why not help communities to fund their own private, small-scale solutions to their problems? Why does it need to be national and global scale tech venture capital, with its sterilizing effect upon local life?
* Provide quality education to African students
Simply talk with teachers and educators in Africa, and ask them what they need. At the root of their problems, are the neo-colonial first-world powers and corporations stealing their resources and forcing corrupt governments upon them. If you want to help Africa, provide the aid they want ... and work to stop the 'civilized world'.
* Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
More PR? Science-fiction already has so many positive images of scientists that it has long parted ways from the reality of real-world science. The best way for people to learn to think well of science is to give them more opportunity to get involved in doing it, so that the discipline moves towards science for the people.
* Build better banking tools for everyone
Where to start on this one? It is a transparent attempt to dress up the further encroachment of the financial industry into our lives, as opposed to making people independent of these rapacious corporations with their amoral behavior.
* Work toward socially conscious tax policies
While taxing the rich and the corporate is very healthy, the problem is how the money is spent -- trillions for weapons and corporations, almost nothing for people. But unless you address how these decisions are made, and get legalized corruption out of politics, nothing will improve.
* Collect and organize the world's urban data
This one doesn't even seem to have any goals. Here's a more specific one: collect data on the effect of technocratic government policies (like Urban Renewal) and corporate greed (like real estate speculation) on the quality of life of people in cities.
* Create genocide monitoring and alert system
We know where these things are happening. The problem is stopping them, and stopping US funding of them. Our own government is the leading cause of instability and civilian death in the world. Will google address that?
* Enhance science and engineering education
To create more employees? Or more empowered citizens? Work to bring democracy to this country, and the full funding of education will be part and parcel of everyday life.
* Promote health monitoring and data analysis
The biggest problems in medicine are the payouts to corporations selling insurance and pharmaceuticals etc. Eliminate profit from the health-care, and there will be plenty of money to improve its culture and performance.
* Create real-world issue reporting system
Good grief. This assumes that the "appropriate authorities" care about doing the job they say they are doing! They don't, not even at the most visible levels of government. They care about the wealthy and the powerful, and the rules that support them, not about the majority of people. What we need to do is organize to force accountability from those in power. That means organizing all these complaints ... which are already easy enough to find ... into political action.
I must comment on the jaw-droppingly misguided projects listed at Google's Project 10^100. This kind of list "chosen from suggestions" is inevitable when wealthy, highly-indoctrinated technologists embark on "saving the world" with no experience in community work, and no apparent information on the world's biggest problems.
* Create more efficient landmine removal programs
First of all, wouldn't stopping the deployment of any more landmines be a more interesting and permanent goal? It would require admitting that the country Google has the most influence in is the largest manufacturer and user of weapons that attack civilians.
Secondly, existing removal programs are quite low-tech and effective (for example, replacing hoes with shovels) and simply need more funding. Would google provide those, or help the groups that try to collect money for them? Are shovels too low-tech for their attention? How about funding or helping the anti-war and anti-aggression movement, which could use technological assistance so activists could organize and connect more effectively.
* Drive innovation in public transport
"Develop new transportation technologies to help move more people with less energy, greater efficiency and fewer casualties." You mean, like trams and trains, jitneys and bicycles? We have all the transportation technologies that are needed ... once again, the issue is to get them to happen again, and in the right way: with effective local manufacture, and proper prioritization and funding. The only high-tech that would be useful here is the means for people to organize to retrieve the infrastructure that has been taken from them by, among others, the auto industry, which regularly bought public transport systems in the last century in order to dismantle them.
* Build real-time, user-reported news service
It seems like twitter and facebook already do this ... are we aiming to re-brand them into news organizations? There are hundreds of initiatives like this, including nonprofit ones, and the best will already float to the top. Unless hamstrung by a major "Google 10^100"-funded competitor ...
* Make educational content available online for free
How about helping people to demand more funding for public education and research? They need to demand that taxpayer-funded research, and any published research for that matter, not be locked-up in private journals and books. They need to fight the perception that education and research is an "entitlement" ... and promote the idea that everyone should receive a free education, and benefit from the open disclosure of results, from the government they have themselves funded ...
* Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
First responders will tell you that they could develop what they need if they only had the resources to do so. But in our privatization-crazed society, this is unlikely: for example, the radio frequencies that used to be clear for emergencies have been sold to the entertainment industry.
* Make government more transparent
Wow. With technology? All the technology is already available ... what is needed, again, is funding to politically organize, and crack open egregious government and corporate opacity.
* Help social entrepreneurs drive change
You know, small business creates change already, everyday. Why not help communities to fund their own private, small-scale solutions to their problems? Why does it need to be national and global scale tech venture capital, with its sterilizing effect upon local life?
* Provide quality education to African students
Simply talk with teachers and educators in Africa, and ask them what they need. At the root of their problems, are the neo-colonial first-world powers and corporations stealing their resources and forcing corrupt governments upon them. If you want to help Africa, provide the aid they want ... and work to stop the 'civilized world'.
* Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
More PR? Science-fiction already has so many positive images of scientists that it has long parted ways from the reality of real-world science. The best way for people to learn to think well of science is to give them more opportunity to get involved in doing it, so that the discipline moves towards science for the people.
* Build better banking tools for everyone
Where to start on this one? It is a transparent attempt to dress up the further encroachment of the financial industry into our lives, as opposed to making people independent of these rapacious corporations with their amoral behavior.
* Work toward socially conscious tax policies
While taxing the rich and the corporate is very healthy, the problem is how the money is spent -- trillions for weapons and corporations, almost nothing for people. But unless you address how these decisions are made, and get legalized corruption out of politics, nothing will improve.
* Collect and organize the world's urban data
This one doesn't even seem to have any goals. Here's a more specific one: collect data on the effect of technocratic government policies (like Urban Renewal) and corporate greed (like real estate speculation) on the quality of life of people in cities.
* Create genocide monitoring and alert system
We know where these things are happening. The problem is stopping them, and stopping US funding of them. Our own government is the leading cause of instability and civilian death in the world. Will google address that?
* Enhance science and engineering education
To create more employees? Or more empowered citizens? Work to bring democracy to this country, and the full funding of education will be part and parcel of everyday life.
* Promote health monitoring and data analysis
The biggest problems in medicine are the payouts to corporations selling insurance and pharmaceuticals etc. Eliminate profit from the health-care, and there will be plenty of money to improve its culture and performance.
* Create real-world issue reporting system
Good grief. This assumes that the "appropriate authorities" care about doing the job they say they are doing! They don't, not even at the most visible levels of government. They care about the wealthy and the powerful, and the rules that support them, not about the majority of people. What we need to do is organize to force accountability from those in power. That means organizing all these complaints ... which are already easy enough to find ... into political action.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Google transport: A to B
In Google Earth, it's possible to ask for directions from Paris to St. Louis, but it gives you no results.
If all modes of transport were integrated into the system, Google would be able to capture the ticketing market from, say, Expedia & Ticketmaster ...
If all modes of transport were integrated into the system, Google would be able to capture the ticketing market from, say, Expedia & Ticketmaster ...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Geographical connection engine ...
I believe there are huge geographical databases already available to Google, or any search engine.
Let's call it a Map Rank, attached to a search rank, which would return a reasonable geographic approximation of text data.
Take, as an example, the search string "Nobel Prize Winners". Search through wikipedia, find all Nobel prize winners, rank them, find all places mentioned in the article, rank them by prominence in the article, and then draw balloons on the map. You'll get nice clustering, and snippets of text will appear when you click on the balloons, or when you zoom in close enough so that there are just a few.
Now, imagine multiplying this over dates. Dates are found in the articles, and become milestones along a timeline. Type in a time window, and a map is shown, with a slider on a time line -- only those nobel prize winners with dates within the slider window are shown.
Make some assumptions about time & space in an article: like "if a year and a place are mentioned in the same phrase, there's an association". Then you could show the movement of those nobel prize winners, according to the available information.
Open up other databases, for population, poverty, commerce ... add old phone books from around the world, and the currently digitizing research libraries, and you can find this "geographical connection engine" will tell you a lot about the real world you would not have easily guessed.
If you animate some of these searches, you can watch the ebb and flow of history. It will look very ... geological. And, OK, it might spawn a new kind of cliometric physics, somewhat reminiscent of Hegel ...
Let's call it a Map Rank, attached to a search rank, which would return a reasonable geographic approximation of text data.
Take, as an example, the search string "Nobel Prize Winners". Search through wikipedia, find all Nobel prize winners, rank them, find all places mentioned in the article, rank them by prominence in the article, and then draw balloons on the map. You'll get nice clustering, and snippets of text will appear when you click on the balloons, or when you zoom in close enough so that there are just a few.
Now, imagine multiplying this over dates. Dates are found in the articles, and become milestones along a timeline. Type in a time window, and a map is shown, with a slider on a time line -- only those nobel prize winners with dates within the slider window are shown.
Make some assumptions about time & space in an article: like "if a year and a place are mentioned in the same phrase, there's an association". Then you could show the movement of those nobel prize winners, according to the available information.
Open up other databases, for population, poverty, commerce ... add old phone books from around the world, and the currently digitizing research libraries, and you can find this "geographical connection engine" will tell you a lot about the real world you would not have easily guessed.
If you animate some of these searches, you can watch the ebb and flow of history. It will look very ... geological. And, OK, it might spawn a new kind of cliometric physics, somewhat reminiscent of Hegel ...
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