Although the importance of Google’s search engine has declined in recent years, it remains the world’s most important epistemological tool — the first place many people go to get answers to their questions and fill gaps in their knowledge. Google is now giving precedence in its search results to a chatbot that it knows is unreliable — that it knows spreads lies. That strikes me as being deeply unethical — and a sad testament to how far Google has fallen from its founding ideals.
That statement hardly seems worth bothering with. Google’s original mission statement was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But as Shoshana Zuboff has well documented, Google fell from whatever goals — stated goals, a friend reminded me — over 20 years ago when they discovered that a search engine providing genuine knowledge to the world didn’t actual command any money or power. (Spoiler alert: they opted for the money and the power.)
But the combination Carr highlights should still shock us:
- The first, prioritized place the entire world goes to search is Google
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- The first, prioritized answer Google provides for every search is knowingly likely to be, and very often is, bullshit.
But you’re not supposed to be paying attention enough to notice or care. At a conference once, Zuboff was asked by the then vice president of Google, “Shoshana, do you really want to get in the way of organizing and making accessible the world’s information?”
Of course, there is no need to get in the way of that stated goal because Google is not even interested in making the world’s information accessible to you — to say nothing about the spread of knowledge or wisdom. They do not care if even one person’s knowledge increases or decreases, if one’s knowledge becomes more accurate or less accurate. And to the degree that it could be said that they do “care,” knowledge, truthfulness, wisdom are their kryptonite.
“If we’re gonna fix this,” says Zuboff, “no matter how much we feel like we need this stuff, we’ve got to get to a place where we are willing to say no.”