Google's Misinformation Tool is Milton Friedman's Fault
No, Google is not being advised by necromancers, zombies, or the souls of the damned. But their decision to turn Google Earth into a misinformation machine driven by imitative AI is driven by the fact that they, and we, are operating in the fallen world that Milton Friedman birthed.
Google, for those who did not see it, allowed people to create satellite images from their Google Earth product using imitative AI. People set out to immediately use it to create misinformation. Bomb craters in Los Angeles. Nuclear reactors in Iran. Etc., etc., etc. 404 Media has an excellent look at what was and could be done with the tool. Google initially claimed that everything was fine since the created images were always watermarked — except that watermarks can be removed, and in most images, in my experience, the logo did not stand out enough to attract my notice. They fairly quickly pulled the feature. Google should have been able to predict this would happen — any time you automate something, especially if you automate it for free, you get more of that thing. In this case they automated lies and got exponentially more lies. But they were constitutionally incapable of acting on that prediction. Why? Milton Friedman.
Okay, why am I blaming a long-dead neutral-evil economist for the failings of a modern mega-corporation? Because Google, like all corporations, is acting under the philosophical and, sometimes, legal constraint, stating that their only responsibility is to enrich shareholders. And that bit of nonsense is perhaps Friedman’s greatest contribution to evil in the world, with the possible exception of the Chicago Boys who aided the murderous dictator Pinochet. In the before times, when we were a nation of citizens and not just a market of perfectly rational economic actors, corporations at least pretended to understand their obligations to the wider world. They also understood that shareholders were not their only stakeholders. After all, corporations did not spring forth from Zeus’ head after Ayn Rand hit him with a railroad spike. Corporations, and all the benefits they receive, are the creations of governments. Their workers make them successful. The towns they operate in provide those workers and the infrastructure necessary for them to survive at all. No one seriously believes that a corporation owes its existence merely to its shareholders. But Friedman made it very profitable to pretend otherwise.
Since the acceptance of Friedman’s “become a sociopath for free” card by the business, and at least partially by the legal, community, firms have been driven by the demand that they increase shareholder value each quarter. Everything else falls by the wayside — including the long term health and reputation of the firm. Tech firms, since they had such explosive growth in the early part of this century, are under even more pressure to match those past results. Unfortunately, tech is now a mature market. Each recent attempt to find a super-charged growth engine — crypto, NFTs, the Metaverse — has failed to deliver the demanded results. Imitative AI is all they have left. Unfortunately for them, imitative AI cannot deliver that level of growth either.
Imitative AI is clearly in a bubble driven by circular financing and losing money hand over fist. Google itself just had its first quarter being cash-flow negative as a result of the amount of money it is spending on AI. They are desperate for imitative AI to pay off, and so they shove it everywhere because they don’t really see a choice. If they can make it ubiquitous, maybe they can convince people who, as a rule, dislike it, to use it and then to pay for using it. It won’t work. People really don’t like imitative AI and few want to pay for the kind of toy applications they do enjoy. Even enterprises are backing off as they see that it doesn’t provide the productivity gains or cost-savings that they had hoped for. In a sane world, businesses would never have gone all-in on such a half-baked technology (half-baked at least in a business sense). But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in Milton Friedman’s.
By introducing a misinformation generator, Google has further damaged its already declining reputation. Google built its business on trust — ask Google, get pointed to the right answer. Now, ask Google, and get shown some misinformation. And if it is in one of their premier tools, then why would misinformation not be in their normal AI summary results? Google may have a big enough monopoly to withstand some amount, maybe even a large amount, of reputational damage. But every bit of damage drives users away. In a mature market, that makes it harder and harder for the number to go up. Friedman’s doctrine started out gutting civil society but it inevitably leads to a death spiral for any firm that adheres to it. They must drive up shareholder value constantly, consequences be damned. Sooner or later, those consequences come home to remind them that sociopathy has its costs.
All hail Milton Friedman — destroyer of the common good and the corporations that gorged on its corpse.