This Here Gerenuk

Google is making a marketing push for the various incarnations of the Google Assistant. That includes an ad showing people narrating videos with obvious errors, like misidentifying the Eiffel Tower. Every time I watch that one, it seems quite unbelievable. Not that people would misidentify the Eiffel Tower - I totally buy that. I just can't believe the ad is going to win anyone over.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, the internet allows you to cure your ignorance almost instantly, yet so many people just don't use the opportunity. And one of the defining characteristics of our age is that despite being a time of abundant information, so many people don't care whether or not they are correct. In a world where anonymous social media sources are more esteemed than experts, it's hard to imagine anyone caring whether they've correctly identified some animal at the zoo.

To be clear, I'm not putting down people who lack knowledge, but come on, if you can't recognize giraffes or the Eiffel Tower, you've probably been hiding from learning most of your life. Or to look at it another way: If you have a great lack of knowledge, surely you would get used to the idea that you’re often wrong about things, and thus you’d learn not to make over-confident statements about things you know little about. But if you persist in making authoritative statements anyway, you presumably care more about sounding smart than being smart, so you're not going to change just because you can ask your phone. After all, you've always been able to ask the person next to you, you just don't want to.

Indeed, the second half of the ad is the fakest-sounding, with the same people reacting to being informed by Google. They all take it quite well, humbly accepting the correction in a way that’s completely alien to anyone on twenty-first-century planet Earth. Come on Google, your business is built around knowing the Internet, yet you haven’t noticed that people don’t react politely to being challenged in public? I hate to play the Silicon-Valley-is-out-of-touch card, since that seems to be the explanation for all shortcomings of technology today; but that seems to be the case here. Google is assuming that the public is crying out for more information, and valuing facts above all else.