Google warns the politicians with its new-fangled TRUTH TELLING MACHINE!!!
Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
He predicted that ‘truth predictor’ software would, within five years, ‘hold politicians to account.’ People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
‘One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,’ he told the newspaper.
Now I would love to know how this could be. I’ve been a big fan of Wittgenstein’s description of truth and fact since I read On Certainty, and I just can’t see how a computer algorithm could detect falsehood and truth based on patterns of speech (or text).
I’d be intrigued as to an explanation though. I wonder what proponents of truth as dialectic or “fairness” would say about such a program?