Google Does Some Very Good Groogle -- Years of Recognizing Cat Faces to Create One Barely Operational Eyeball -- While 800,000 Very Powerful Human Brains Live in African Refugee Camps

John Markoff of the New York Times reports that "Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researches began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain."

They connected together 16,000 computer processors to review 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos.  The neural network, reports Markoff on the Times's front page, "taught itself to recognize cats."

He goes on to say that "the research is representative of a new generation of computer science....leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation."

What's the point?  Do we not have enough human visual cortexes already?  Speakers and translators of languages? Where does this thrill of human mimesis in machines spring from?  Is it an art form?  Certainly not.  Some Pygmalion perversion?

A search on the New York Times website for the words "African Refugee Camp," meanwhile, produced a report by Lisa Friedman, from August 11, 2011, on how more than 184,000 refugees are streaming into Kenya, Ethiopia and other countries from Somalia, swelling the total number of refugees to more than 800,000.  What stops us from engaging these brains with the same amount of capital?

Why is so much energy being invested in this "new generation of computer science" when it just replicates what we already have?  Why artificial intelligence at all?  Is Markoff overly enamored with Google (he's a technology reporter), or perhaps infected with Groogle, to raise ethical questions about this sort of research?  How much money has been invested in this research?  How much money over the last 30 years?

Or is it just more entertaining -- more eyeball attracting -- to talk about cats?

Groogle = Facebook IPO?

Enough said.

Jeremiah Owyang Groogle-izes at Webcom in Montreal

Jeremiah Owyang's blog -- Three Future Trends in Social Business -- could have been written (in fact, has been written) a decade ago.  Indeed, outside the Silicon Valley sphere, these trends have advanced far beyond what he identifies as "still to come." 

Mr. Owyang is an analyst at the Silicon Valley-based Altimeter Group.  His profile page describes him as "frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today, and...a frequent keynote speaker at business and technology conferences around the world."

In our opinion, Mr. Owyang, on behalf of the Altimeter Group, is speaking pure Groogle.

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs Serve Pure Groogle Grub at Food52

According to an article by Kevin Fitchard at Gigaom, ("Forget recipes, Food52 wants to crowdsource cooking itself"), "When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook."

Really?  They're a bit late, considering HarperCollins published a crowdsourced cookbook over a decade ago. 

The article goes on to say:

The founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.

In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that anytime a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes.

Again, we know of at least one example of this that was even more powerful, more active, and operated out of India, over a decade ago.

In fact, the entire article hypes up outdated features as if they were innovations.  This is Groogle at its most crippling.

Looking for Groogle? One word: Instagram

This article in the New York Times highlights the importance of who-you-know innovation as it pertains to Facebook's one billion dollar buy-out of Instagram.

Next up: The Facebook IPO and how Groogle is leading many Americans to value the wrong things (that is, things that reduce America's global competitiveness).

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.