Can Siri Understand the Word "Guilty"? Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark Guilty in the Glorification of Groogle

In their article, "The Future of Virtual Personal Assistants," Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark work very hard to set the world back by another 5-10 years, if not longer.  Much longer.

According to them -- both vice presidents at SRA International -- "Siri was a great achievement for Apple and Steve Jobs, helping to introduce virtual personal assistants to millions of consumers, and changing forever the way we view our smartphones."

Apparently, "using speech instead of keyboards to communicate with computers is an old dream, but it took more than thirty years to achieve the robustness and performance needed to make speech systems practical for consumers."

Those 30 years have been terribly misspent.  In fact, Siri may be the biggest example of Groogle ever concocted.  The idea that we need smart-phones to understand our speech, when we have people who understand speech, sets us down a course completely opposite to everything we've learned about collective intelligence and the power of knowledge trade and exchange.

If you listen closely to Groogle-speakers, examples of applications are invariably culture specific.  Question and Answer systems are always finding good restaurants in San Francisco (does everyone in this world eat out at restaurants?).  Or, another example heard yesterday, iPhone apps should provide the 5-10 minutes worth of entertainment one requires when sitting at Starbucks.  Huh?

Now listen to this example from Winarsky and Mark:

Lisa: “Nina, I need a new purse.”
Nina: “Great! Do you want to buy something from Michael Kors like you did last time?”
Lisa: “Well, I’d like Michael Kors, but I don’t want to spend more than $400.”
Nina: “Last time you bought your Michael Kors purse from Nordstrom. Nordstrom has a Michael Kors sale right now…here are some purses you might like.”
Lisa: “I like the chocolate brown one, at $329. Is that the best price you found?”
Nina: “I saw a couple of offers at $310 from other retailers, but their return policy isn’t as generous as Nordstrom’s.”
Lisa” “Okay, let’s go with Nordstrom”.

Winarsky and Mark claim that VPA (Virtual Personal Assistant) technology is "the most elegant and effective way we have figured out yet for humans and machines to interact." 

The key words here are "we have figured out."  Groogle appears to have affected their ability to think.  In fact, if we had an award for "Groogle Article of the Year," this article would be a top contender.

The Groogle of a Discussion Between Evan Williams, Matt Haughey, Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Paul Bausch and Others

In a discussion with Anil Dash, Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan and others about the comment feature on blogs ("How do blogs need to evolve?"), Evan Williams says, "I'm surprised there haven't been more experiments with other modes of participation and collaboration."

Later in the discussion, Matt Haughey writes "I wish there were better tools for feedback [on blogs]."

It can be argued that both things -- experiments and actual tools -- do exist, have existed for some time, but that the noisy symptoms of Groogle (remember, several of the above people were involved in the development of Blogger.com) have kept them from emerging on the Internet.

The long evolution of blogs, then, may present a clear example of how Groogle could well be slowing innovation; that Internet technologies would be much further along, with better blogs, better decision making abilities, clearer rules of ownership and so forth if Groogle-prevention systems were in place.

Infected with Groogle, Hypothes.is Appears to Dumb-Down Collective Intelligence

In a Hypothes.is workshop on identity management, the group claims to have "tackled the problem" of what user identity model should be used.  The group recorded the following principles:

• there should be incentives for newcomers to obtain a positive reputation
• allocating an initial trust by default to every new user is an easy opportunity for abuse
• new users have to "pay their due" in order to prove their value to the community
• there must be mechanisms in place to make it unattractive for a user to start over with a new identity

Unfortunately, these principles are based on Grooglesque assumptions that have arisen around web systems such as StackOverflow, Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia and others.  They are not the guiding principles required to create the kind of peer review that leads to collective intelligence.

The second principle, "allocating an initial trust," presupposes the idea that such a decision -- trust or non-trust -- needs to be made by default from the moment a user joins the community.  Technologies developed outside the Groogle hot zone have shown that this needn't be the case.  Similarly, the third principle, that users must "pay their due" in order to prove their value to the community is absurd.  And again, technologies have been designed which don't require such due-paying, and yet which are able to quickly establish reliable reputation scores.

We believe that by its very organizing, "who-you-know" structure, Hypothes.is is missing the point -- but we'll discuss this further in future posts.