Google Translate as a Broken Telephone

Another delightful pastime is overtransforming an information artifact through digital algorithms—useful, if used sparingly—until it turns into something quite strange. For instance, you can use one of the online machine-translation services to translate a phrase through a ring of languages back to the original and see what you get. The sentence “The edge of knowledge motivates intriguing online discussions” transforms into “Online discussions in order to stimulate an attractive national know...

 Our Algorithms Must Continue Evolving

Actually, if cloud algorithms ever seem to come to rest and need little tending, that should be taken as a danger sign. In that eventuality, stasis would be an indication that people have allowed themselves to be overly defined and guided by old software and have stopped changing, or to put it another way, have stopped living fully. Living languages ought to require continued examples from living people in order for automated translation services to stay up to date. If the cloud has learned a...

 "Big Data" is Just Repackaging Information

The owners of the biggest computers like to think about them as big artificial brains. But actually they are simply repackaging valuable information gathered from everyone else. This is what “big data” means. For instance, a big remote Google or Microsoft computer can translate this op-ed, more or less, from English to another language, but what is really going on is that real human translators are being made anonymous, invisible, and insecure. Real translations, made by humans, are gathered...