“A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.
“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through.”
The reason AI programs like Gemini are programmed to encourage you to let it make basic life choices for you like what restaurant you should eat at is because they intend to monetize your patronage.
It’s just a matter of time before the AI stops offering you the most highly rated option in the area or whatever aligns most closely to what you requested (If it’s even doing that now) and instead only recommends restaurants that have paid the company for that privilege.
Restaurants that won’t pay Google to recommend them to AI users are going to become functionally invisible, whereas those who are willing to purchase what amounts to targeted advertisements laundered through an AI “friend” will get new customers regardless of their quality.
Basic rule: If you aren’t paying for something, that means you’re the product.
Google Maps already does this, preferring more distant sponsored results over closer non-sponsored ones. All the claims that these algorithms make the same choices you would make if you just had the time and energy to research them are totally false. They make the choices that lead to profitable results for the companies that program them, with a user interface that gaslights you into thinking it was your idea all along.
You can see this at work already in Google Play store– you search for an app, and the only time the app you’re looking for is the top result is when the company behind the app has paid for the privilege– in which case you’ll see it twice.
You can also see this at work on Amazon, when searching by exact product name can sometimes put your result on the second or third page, while you scroll through alternatives that Amazon wants to sell you.
This is a real picture taken by photographer Keinichi Ohno. It’s a single photo of a bird standing at the edge of some water with a wall and its reflection creating a fascinating optical illusion.
