Let me explain that when I post to this site, I actually go through the website www.blogger.com and not the site you are looking at now. I periodically check www.janetharriett.blogspot.com just to see how everything looks to you, but not all that often, since Blogger lets me see everything you see, only without that nifty banner ad about four inches above this.
I seem to be missing half the fun.
On Monday, I posted an entry that used the word "lobster" and/or "lobsters" 13 times. Now, I see the "Ads by Google" feature Maine Lobster Direct, a service wherein a 5-pound live lobster will be delivered to your door overnight, presumably for your culinary enjoyment. My best guess is that the content of those banner ads is somehow triggered by the content of my posts, in a sort of rudimentary word-frequency kind of way. Kind of explains why, in the early days of Penguin Perspectives, I wrote about how silly it was that ads for the prescription sleeping pill Ambien carry warnings that side effects include drowsiness, then found shortly thereafter that the banner ad was a link to Ambien's website.
This is exactly why automation will not replace human thinking in the near future. Whatever search algorithm they use to see what I'm talking about this week, and thus, what ads you must be interested in, does not comprehend sarcasm. It sees that I said "lobster" a lot and thinks you must want to have lobster delivered to your door. It does not see that I said "lobster" a lot in the context of an impending crustacean assault from the sea as we inadvertently help our main course breed intelligence and strategic planning by turning the stupid ones into the exact kind of Complete Dinner that Maine Lobster Direct is hawking.
Perhaps the lobsters will still get us, but I don't think we have much to fear from technology.
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