“Masheens tuk r jerbs”

Oh no! It’s the machines! And they’ve taken our jobs! Such pleasant and incredibly lucrative jobs as auto-parts-painter and conveyor-button-pusher. Whole city districts have been ruined economically due to these manual jobs becoming automated and moving out to different countries. Wait, families depended on these jobs? That’s actually tragic. You see, life’s filled with opportunities for you to make virtually infinite amounts of money (meaning you’ll be able to spend on whatever you desire and still be able to save). Why would you ever want to be stuck in a hall flipping car parts for the rest of your life and still barely scrape?

Stealthily injecting fear

If you’ve visited a website in the last 10 years, you’ve seen an article titled something along the lines of “The Machines Are Rising: Our Job Prospects Are Gone”. Hold on, that’s not editorialized enough. Let’s try again: “THE FUTURE HAS NO JOBS FOR HUMANS“. Feeling afraid yet? There’s actually no reason to be.

Despite what these paranoia peddlers are trying to tell you, machines aren’t taking our jobs, they aren’t going to leave us jobless and they most certainly aren’t going to make our lives worse. In fact, they’re probably going to make our lives much better, but only up to a certain point of intelligence. In other words, as long as robots are “dumb”, they’ll be controllable. Attempting to infuse them with intelligence that’s meant to rival human’s will produce highly unstable commercially available products that’ll eventually implode and probably take us down with them.

Our humble servants

If you still don’t believe me, just take a look at a ubiquitous robot found in nearly every home: the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner automates the tedious drudgery of sweeping the floor and allows a person to remove at least 90% of particles found on the floor and furniture at least 20 times faster than if it was done manually. Does the vacuum cleaner “take away” the job of a housemaid? If you were a housemaid who worked for $3 an hour, you were most certainly displaced by a vacuum cleaner; if you are an expert cleaner who charges $25,000 an hour, no amount of automation is going to take away your job.

A vacuum cleaner does its job perfectly as it is, but the problems begin when companies competing for market share start including completely unnecessary and potentially dangerous features in their products simply in order to “be the first that’s done it”. By this I mean putting an internet connection into a dishwasher, fridge, car etc. Not only does that make the cost of the product go up, but also opens your personal life to unmitigated collection of data and intrusion of privacy. Besides, such products probably won’t even do its job right, which is to reliably serve the owner.

Dumbphone

This entire philosophy of “smart” devices is being pushed by major technology companies, such as Google, Samsung and Apple. Of course, they won’t outright jump into making smart pillows and such, but they will try to appeal to the trendsetter audience by creating stylish and minimalistic devices. Note that every device that’s described as “smart” actually gives you less control over its functions than the “dumb” equivalent. That’s absolutely by design.

After the general public is sufficiently acclimated to the notion of having “smart” devices, the producer can start clamping down on their functions. This is always followed by the reduction of usability. For example, having all your smartphone data stored on a cloud server sounds awesome, until you realize that the result is reduced hard storage on the phone. Having an Android phone come preloaded with default apps means you can use it out of the box, but these apps can’t be removed without voiding the warranty. In fact, Google has already gotten into trouble in the EU due to these practices. So, how do we fight back?

Logic guerilla

The first step is to look at the way technology is advancing and future-proof your employment. For example, the number of websites shows constant growth and isn’t likely to stop anytime soon, so becoming a web designer or a programmer seems like a good idea. Also, the smart products have a propensity for breaking down, and becoming proficient with ways to repair them will become extremely lucrative in the future. But these examples aren’t the point – the idea is to find your own niche that’s immune to technological advances and become the world’s best in it. At that point, you’re no longer a wage slave, but a free person and can vote with your wallet.

Another way to push back against needless automation as consumers is to mercilessly criticize faulty products. If it’s not working properly, don’t buy it. If you do happen to buy it and it’s not serving you, speak up and be fearless. Combined, these two steps will keep your choices open and you’ll be able to afford the products that work, rather than be shoehorned into buying the lowest grade of consumer electronic products.

Paying to be a beta tester

As I mentioned above, the problem with these devices is they’re going to have needless experimental functions built into them. The idea is that our human capabilities are somehow obsolete and we should instead let computers think for us. The problem with computers is that they’re prone to glitching. This happens to us too (you ever walked into a room and forgot what you were looking for?) but our brains can recover and repair any damage, while computers can’t.

Our brains are wonderfully optimized and control the instinctive functions of the body, as well as our higher conscious functions, such as dreaming, creativity and imagination. Better yet, a brain weighs 1.5 kilograms, runs on measly 20 watts and has internal self-cleaning and self-repair systems. Meanwhile, computers aren’t even able to choose a truly random number, and have to cheat their way to that functionality in some way.

Achilles’ heel

Any piece of hardware that works with electronic impulses has inherent systemic vulnerabilities that simply cannot be patched or resolved – you’re only safe not using the device. The more power a piece of electronics has, the greater the vulnerabilities. For example, Rowhammer is a cutting edge attack on RAM sticks that allows the hacker to literally make his code jump from one stick to another through synchronized pulses, bypassing all software security features.

Artificial intelligence projects have similar problems, most of which come down to the incessant search for infinite computing power in order to match the capabilities of the human brain. These aren’t publicly discussed, as that would damage the PR efforts of tech companies, but you can logically conclude that they exist, the engineers know about them and will still push the products further. While we as individuals can’t stop progress, we can ensure the robots are our assistants, not our deeply flawed masters.

The SEO pitfall

In my line of work, I see the words “SEO” and “keyword optimization” thrown around all the time. Many (if not all) website-owning clients think SEO (search engine optimization, a practice whereby ‘magical words’ are put onto a webpage so it ranks higher in the search results) is a mystical pill that solves all problems and brings infinite traffic, along with a bank account brimming with cash. But, that’s not how any of that works.

What is SEO anyway?

Let’s go back. Way, way back. Even further back. Are you in the early 90s yet? Well, you should understand how simplistic the search engines were back then. They would simply scan the text on the page, including the header, footer and the title to determine what the page was about, match it with certain keywords people used to enter into the engine search box and then rank it according to how much content was related.

While this worked for a while, shrewd hackers soon realized pages could simply have nonsensical words, but as long as the search engine algorithm considered them high-value and relevant, the page would rank high for a search term despite having no content at all. Except a few viruses, that is.

I vividly remember malware-laden fake PDF files that would be the top of Google search results for a term such as “Jessica Alba” a few years back, and they got there exactly through this method. But, in any case, dudes in charge of search engines sat down and discussed the problem: how do we fix this for good? How do we make a search engine algorithm that’s bulletproof and can’t be exploited in this way?

Unhackable

And since they’re very smart dudes, they came to the conclusion that all visitors of all websites are in a constant search for value. Whether it’s entertainment, information or something else, what the visitor wants is something they consider valuable and the search engine should provide it to them. Now, how do we define value?

Well, this was a bit more tricky, but these guys were engineers and so they kept discussing this problem until they realized the answer. You see, the online value of anything is exactly equal to its trustworthiness. Thus, they came up with a set of parameters that together measure the website’s trustworthiness.

Measuring the trust

Now, what kind of parameters might those be? Well, a website that’s well-established in its field is much more trustworthy than a website that appeared yesterday. If a website has news coverage, that also makes it more trustworthy compared to anonymous websites etc. In short, no matter what category it belongs to, a website that’s on top of search rankings needs to be public (well-known, with a known owner, registered for a long time etc.)

Such a website would also have a community built around it, and wherever people gather, they create content. In the case of virtual presence, that means user reviews, forum threads, or maybe even multimedia content, such as video and images. A public website that has no user-generated content would be extremely suspicious and would point towards some nefarious workings.

A large group of people that create content would necessarily mean there’s always fresh content on the website. Again, a website that ticks all the other boxes but has no fresh content is pretty much dead and will quickly fall down the search rankings. But, some malware distributors could satisfy all of those conditions and still make a website with malware #1 in search results, right? Not if you take into account the amount of times people mention the website in private, on social networks.

Where does it end?

As you can see, true “SEO” is incredibly complex and covers so many aspects of a website that I’m not sure even the engineers in charge of it know exactly what goes on behind the scenes. In fact, I imagine large search engine providers have already established a quasi-AI that independently gathers data and measures trustworthiness, to the point of humans being completely out of the loop, so malware producers can’t buy them off or something.

In any case, SEO covers all facets of a website, including its ease of use, the loading speed, navigation, simplicity – simply put, how valuable it is to all users. Which makes it all the more disheartening when clients ask me to “add some SEO to an article” by putting a certain word 10 times per page.

It doesn’t even matter

The problem is that the SEO industry is such a large business by now, that there’s no way to stop the behemoth except wait for it to collapse under its own weight. People pay exorbitant amounts of money to have their page titles and image alternate descriptions filled with useless keywords that do absolutely nothing to improve the trustworthiness compared to the amount of effort that goes into the task.

Such SEO does not exist, just like dancing in the dirt can’t summon the rain. But, if you understand how clouds form and are able to create and launch a cloud-generating rocket, there might just be rain for you too. In the case of websites, this translates to making a usable and trustworthy place where the community can gather and generate content.