Tag: Google

Survey Drama Llama

Posted in philosophy, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Firstly, I’d like to thank the people who have already submitted responses to the Modernity Worldview Survey. I’ll post that you submitted entries before this warning was presented.

» Modernity Worldview Survey «

UPDATE: Crisis Averted

Google has taken action and very responsively removed this warning. If you saw this whilst attempting to visit the URL, try again. Sorry for any fright or inconvenience. I’ll continue as if this never happened. smh

I am frustrated to say the least. I created this survey over the past month or so, writing, rewriting, refactoring, and switching technology and hosts until I settled on Google Cloud (GCP). It worked fine yesterday. When I visited today, I saw this warning.

As I mentioned in my announcement post, I collect no personal information. I don’t even ask for an email address, let alone a credit card number. On a technical note, this is the information I use:

id                 autogenerated unique identifier
timestamp          date and time stamp of record creation (UTC)
question-response  which response option made per question
ternary-triplet    the position of the average modernity score (pre, mod, post) 
plot_x             Cartesian x-axis plot point for the ternary chart
plot_y             Cartesian y-axis plot point for the ternary chart
session_id         facilitates continuity for a user's browser experience
browser*            which browser being used (Chrome, Safari, and so on)
region             browser's language setting (US, GB, FR)
source             whether the user is accessing from the web or 'locally'
                   ('local' indicates a test record, so i can filter them out)

* These examples illustrate the colected browser information:
- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

- Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

This is all.

This is a Chrome Warning. Ironically, a Google product. I tested this on Opera, Edge, and Safari without this nonsense.

The front end (UI) is written in HTML, Python, JavaScript, and React with some standard imports. The backend (database) is MySQL. It is version-controlled on GitHub and entirely hosted on GCP. I link to the survey from here (WordPress) or other social media presences. I did make the mistake of not making the site responsive. I paid the price when I visited the site on my Samsung S24. The page felt like the size of a postage stamp. I may fix this once this security issue is resolved.

I sent Google a request to remove this from their blacklist. This could take three weeks, more or less.

Meantime, I’ll pause survey promotions and hope this resolves quickly. The survey will remain live. If you use something other than Chrome, you should be able to take it. Obviously, I’ll also delay analysing and releasing any summary results.

Apologies for rambling. Thank you for your patience.

Humans Ruin the Economy

Posted in intelligence, morality, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Humans are ruining the economy.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content.

This is the caption on the sign for this segment. The sign advertises a solution, which is to “Vote for DEMOCROBOT… The first party run by artificial intelligence”. It also promises to “give everyone a living wage of £1436.78 a week”.

I have been very vocal that I find the idea of humans governing humans is a bad idea at the start. By and large, humans are abysmal system thinkers and easily get lost in complexity. This is why our governments and economies require so much external energy and course correction. Not only were they poorly designed and implemented, but they’re also trying to manage a dynamic system—a complex system. It won’t work.

What about bots and artificial intelligence? The above image was posted elsewhere, and a person commented that our governments are already filled with artificial intelligence. I argued that at best we’ve got pseudo-intelligence; at worse, we’ve got artificial pseudo-intelligence, API.

The challenge with AI is that it’s developed by humans with all of their faults and biases in-built.

The challenge with AI is that it’s developed by humans with all of their faults and biases in-built. On the upside, at least in theory, rules could be created to afford consistency and escape political theatre. The same could be extended to the justice system, but I’ll not range there.

Part of the challenge is that the AI needs to optimise several factors, at least, and not all factors are measurable or can be quantified. Any such attempt would tip the playing field one way or another. We might assume that at least AI would be unreceptive to lobbying and meddling, but would this be the case? AI—or rather ML, Machine Learning or DL, Deep Learning—rely on input. It wouldn’t take long for interested think tanks to flood the source of inputs with misinformation. And if there is an information curator, we’ve got a principle-agent problem—who’s watching the watcher?—, and we may need to invoke Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon solution.

One might even argue that an open-source, independently audited system would work. Who would be auditing and whose interpretation and opinion would we trust? Then I think of Enron and Worldcom. Auditors paid to falsify their audit results. I’d also argue that this would cause a shift from the political class to the tech class, but the political class is already several tiers down and below the tech class, so the oligarchs still win.

This seems to be little more than a free-association rant, so I’ll pile on one more reflection. Google and Facebook (or Meta) have ethical governing bodies that are summarily shunned or simply ignored when they point out that the parent company is inherently unethical or immoral. I wouldn’t expect much difference here.

I need a bot to help write my posts. I’ll end here.