At Half-Price Books, I once picked up a book called The Case Against Government Schools. I had heard lots of left rhetoric about how the right wants to totally dismantle public education, but I'd taken it with a grain of salt. But whaddya know. They even wrote a book about how to totally dismantle pubic education. It's not even a secret.
Anyway, I wanted to email info about the book to someone, so I entered the title into the search engine on Amazon.com. As you know (if you've spent any time at all on Amazon), whatever you search for or look at, you'll see links to relevant lists made by other surfers.
So after I put in the title to this book, right at the top of the page was a list with this title: "So You'd Like to...stop hating the life that you have made for yourself."
At first I laughed. Then I actually got a little creeped out. I'm sure it's just some kind of coincidence...or could the computer actually have analyzed my wish list and reviews, noticed a cluster of books about being a teacher, concluded that therefore I must be a teacher, and then inferred from my search that I hated being a teacher?
Perceiving patterns based on larger implied schemata, comparing one indirectly implied idea to another, reaching intuitive conclusions—these are the kinds of things computers aren't supposed to be able to do.
In other words, computers are supposed to say stuff like "I notice you like books about being a teacher. Here's another book about being a teacher."
They're not supposed to be capable of saying, "Hmmm, the underlying message of your search topic seems to imply that you're having second thoughts about what I assume is your career. Perhaps, instead of the book you think you're seeking, what you really need is some help feeling good about your choices in life."
And even if they could do that, I wouldn't want them to.
Uh, Nad? What are you people doing over there, anyway????
Thursday, June 16, 2005
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5 comments:
We haven't worked a mind reading variable into the algorithm yet. Or at least we hadn't when I last worked on Listmania last year. This was probably just a coincidence.
Woah--creepy. And the government wanted to look at the books we buy or check out from libraries! If Amazon makes conclusions like the one it made for you, what might the FBI think?
Well, Sue, Nadine works at Amazon (yes, I'm showing off my smart friends), so if she says it can't do that, then we can believe her.
Unless... no... it can't be. Unless she too has been seduced by the dark side????
;)
By the way Bean, I really like Listmania, so, nice work. I've found some great books that way. The other lists it returned for the same search were more what you'd expect--lists by paranoid anti-government right-wing libertarians. Not that I'm judgmental or anything. I'm just saying, it works.
Birdie, sugar, we are just way too much alike, except we're different.
I was on Amazon (which I will of course now think of Nadine's Place) looking up a particular knitting book and started getting things like,
"So, You'd Like to...Knit More Than Scarves!"
and
"So, You'd Like to...Knit Your Own Sexy Lingerie!"
and I started feeling very huffy because Amazon OBVIOUSLY is unaware that I already knit far more than scarves and don't want to make my own, or anyone else's, sexy lingerie.
This, on top of the fact that minutes earlier it had suggested I might like to buy an album by Coldplay.
So you feel that Amazon knows you too well, and I am hurt because it isn't paying enough attention to The Real Me.
Do you think perhaps between the two of us we constitute a two-volume edition of The Dictionary of Neuroses?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that we two don't have all the neuroses necessary for a complete dictionary (or encyclopaedia). I think to get all of them, we'd have to bring Dr. Faustus into our little scheme.
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