For those too young to remember; the search engine that also hosts this blog and which I will therefore call Gogol, was launched in the late 1990s; and developed over the next years into one of the great engineering achievements of the millennial period.
It was so good by 2004, serving up vast numbers of well-ranked and relevant results (up to millions, maybe billions, of them, if you could be bothered to look); including in real time (showing results, additively, tens of seconds after pages were posted onto the web) that other search engines were irrelevant.
The Gogol incrementally ceased to be optimized for searching, and (which, presumably, had always been the intention); became orientated first to making money, then to surveillance and ideological control.
Features were stripped-out - such as real-time searching, relevance ranking; then results became filtered. And now it serves up very few pages at all (a few dozen - at most a couple of hundred).
Nowadays the results are full of stuff like Facebook and Instagram pages - such that the search results do not even lead to the actual results: do not lead to the sampled passages.
So good had been Gogol that it took a long time before any of the (supposed) rivals to equal or surpass it in the primary function of web searching and ranking.
But for the past year-plus; the point has been reached when I am convinced that Gogol has so degraded itself that other algorithms (which used to be qualitatively inferior) are now actually much superior in terms of generating relevant results - for instance DDG.
This is a microcosm of the trajectory of Western civilization through the twentieth century. As real science became all-but extinct, technological progress slowed; then (overall) ceased; then went into reverse - as functionality was first sacrificed, then ignored, in pursuit of totalitarian socio-political mass manipulation.
So-called AI has accelerated the process - is indeed a key element in the process; since its core net-intent was, from the beginning, civilizationally destructive.
And the widespread welcoming of "AI" is evidence of the success of The Long-term Plan - which was always and ultimately spiritual, not material.
For the spiritual agenda to succeed, people must want their own spiritual-enslavement, their own value-degradation - people must be induced willingly to blind-themselves to the motivation and consequences of post-millennial technology.
Job Done.
What we ought to do is simple, and within the capacity of literally everybody in all circumstances...
And that is to realize and acknowledge the evil intent behind all of the totalitarian-backed technologies (including not just "AI", but professional science and research, institutional "reforms", EVs, sustainable energies, the Birdemic Peck, establishment-backed medical campaigns... the whole caboodle).
And inwardly, with heart-felt motivation: decisively-reject that intent.
But, apparently, this little and simple action is just too much to ask.
