Where's Google heading? Dystopia, Kids These Days, and a Sri Lankan novel.
All the news that's fit to drive you insane. Or smile.
The Super Bowl sucked up the oxygen of media attention for a few days, when it was not taken up by Elon Musk, that is. But I have a feeling you would have missed this nugget of Super Bowl information. Here’s how The New Yorker reported it.
What do you think? Signs of the times? Organizations have an incestuous relationship with slogans. (Hey, I used to be in advertising back in the day; I know something about this territory.) A bit later down in this newsletter I point to Google’s famous slogan, now retired.
IRONY, COURTESY AI
Ok, something lighter that the above piece. I came across a story that’s so steeped in irony, I don’t know if we should giggle or weep. It’s the Q&A for someone applying to Anthropic, another AI company. It requests the applicant doesn’t use AI. See below. You read that right.
So most people I know are dipping their toes into AI. Are you? My friend Tyron, who’s completed his novel has used AI as a virtual assistant. How about job applications? Or business proposals?
I ran into this example: Say you want to send off a business proposal to someone up the chain of command. You could ask your AI app to create a slick set of 10 slides in a few seconds. Then, you send it off. The recipient happens to be super busy, so he uploads your preso into his favorite AI app and asks it to condense the slides into one paragraph…so he could tell you he went through your proposal. Mission accomplished at both ends.
WHO NEEDS TO WRITE, ANYMORE? Who has time to read when one could outsource both parts—to AI? If this is what the adults in the room start doing, will the kids ever read? A good friend, who’s a director of sales and marketing at a leading hotel network asked a me what I thought of this untenable situation. They are seeing ‘educated’ kids at interviews who cannot spell or speak well. What’s happening to young people today, he asked.
My answer was that a few of us are trying. That day I had begun my classes with a Socratic discussion. Something we often do, being a classical school. Students were compelled to write down their thoughts first, and express them to the class. Then, they had to translate that into a 200-word essay. The topic: “Is the Internet uniting us or dividing us?”
It’s not unusual. Our kids do read, or are at least required to read novels and other literature. High school students read Dante’s Inferno, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Gothic literature etc. They certainly have to turn in a lot of writing. So excuse the brag here. In a previous newsletter (you would have seen here) I have expounded how my 7th grade students work on and publish eBooks. Fiction, and non-fiction, sometimes poetry.
So yes, Mr. Perera, they do read, and write. I wish you run into some of them in your interviews. Of course you’re in Beverly Hills, and we are in Queen Creek, Arizona.
Big Brother’s siblings are at work
Speaking of books, listening to the news, it’s hard not to compare these times to that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (A movie starring Richard Burton.) I bring up Big Brother because I was invited to register for a series of classes in February on dystopian novels, by a well-known university that I won’t name. I was in for a rude shock. I could not wait for the classes to begin. Until I read the this preamble —the second paragraph.
Whoever wrote this blurb must not have realized that a close reading of Orwell --no different from Arthur Koestler’s work--is also a critique fascism. Or perhaps the university hosting this doesn’t think we wouldn’t suspect their bias. This attempt to rewrite history, or airbrush the deeper shades of a piece or literature is precisely what Nineteen Eighty-four dealt with. I will still take this course.
What’s Google Up To?
I used to tell students how Google, a remarkable company founded by two young grads, had a quaint unofficial motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” It was enshrined in its 2004 prospectus, which you can still see here at the SEC. (It’s long and legally dry, but if you do a ‘Control F’ and search the word Evil you’ll see the word referenced 118 times, one time above Sergei Brin’s and Larry Page’s signatures.)
But somewhere in 2018, that phrase was moved from the preface of its code of conduct to the end of the document. In 2015, Google (now called Alphabet) changed it to ‘Do the right thing.’ Does that remind you of my first story, of the slogan of the Super Bowl?
I bring this up because on February 6th, soon after ‘DEI’ was abolished by a stroke of a Sharpie, Google fell in line, doing the right-ish thing (pun unintended), by scrapping its once-cherished practice of hiring from underrepresented groups. You can read Reuters story on this.
In 2020 CEO, Sundar Pichai set an ambitious goal of hiring 30% more of its leaders from these groups by 2025. Google seems to be falling in line with others like Meta. In 2021 there was a near revolt at Google after it fired someone on its AI ethics team.
I address this because I am a big promoter of Google. After all I don’t use an Apple product, my computer lab has 36 computers that run on Chrome OS, and I lean heavily on, and teach students how to create documents, work on spreadsheets, and make presentations and surveys using Google applications. (Yes, I also teach the competition, Microsoft, but most of the semester is Google.)
So this is disappointing , to see Alphabet change it’s position. Mid February, news also broke that it did the following:
“Google Maps has blocked reviews for the Gulf of Mexico, after criticism of its decision to label it "Gulf of America" for users in the US.” This was after it’s policy to change the name of the Gulf depending on where you are. If you were to search it from the US, it is different from what you see if you search it from another country. Encyclopedia Britannica, however, kept the name in this manner.
Google also quietly removed it’s calendar notifications with occasions such as Black History Month, and Women’s History Month, saying “it wasn’t scalable or sustainable.” You could read this NYT article, without the paywall, here.
Novel set in Sri Lanka by Shavindra Fernando
I will end with a plug for my good friend Shavindra Fernando, a teacher and author. His book is set during a time of leftist rebellion in 1988/1989, at the University of Peradeniya where we were batchmates five years prior. Here’s the setup for “The Vague Poetess” now in its second edition, out on Amazon.
“On an idyllically beautiful university campus set among the hills of Sri Lanka, a student theatre company is rehearsing a production of Blood Wedding, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s gripping exploration of love, hate and divided loyalty. Their director, a visiting scholar from England, watches, first with dismay and then with horror, as the growing social and political unrest among Lanka’s people begins to infect and overwhelm the students, his young cast among them…
Riddled with extra judicial killings in the grounds of an idyllic Eden-like setting of a campus, Shavi knits together the love-and-conflict themes of Lorca’s play. Interestingly, Shavi acted in this play produced by the dramsoc. (I didn’t). He now resides in Cambridge, UK. and now teaches English.
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading this far. As always do let me know what you think of any story here, and share this newsletter if you think someone else might find it interesting. No pressure!