Supposedly, we're moving towards a world in which google creates an AI to solve major problems of the planet and amazon knows your desires before you are even aware of it.
The everyday reality looks a tad different though.
As we had the release of part II of our 'Cliodhna' fantasy series on Sunday, I ended up trying to get some picture of access statistics from YouTube (owned by supposedly data-smart google).
The page shows both access statistics for every video clip and their sum - unfortunately the two numbers were 5 apart when I checked first (the difference then started to vary, at one point reached a whopping 20, but...). Also, on the same page I could conjure up the number of subscribers to the channel in two different places - which were also two different numbers.
How hard can it be for a multi-billion dollar company that advertizes how it can crunch 'big data' to retrieve a handful of numbers from a database, add them correctly and display the result on a webpage? That doesn't sound like rocket science to me... I mean, computers could add integer numbers correctly well before I was born...
And given that google is really unable to do such a simple task - how likely is it that the complicated stuff actually has reasonable output (in fact, Amazon never managed to offer me what I like - despite me trying to teach the algorithm, but that's a different story...)