Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Richard Dawkins needs to lie down

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No, really. See this:

Dawkins now appears to be channelling persons who cannot handle the new non-gatekeeper world of online media, who think it must all be a big plot involving fake news, the alt right, the Russians, and all things that scare them.

 

 


Memo

From: UD News

To: UD News Robotics Dawkinsbot II Special Project

Re: Retooling needed for Dawkinsbot II – urgent


Our revamped Dawkinsbot has been performing fabulously to date.* But AI experts are warning that our introduction of a ramped-up politics algorithm could endanger the entire mechanism.

We have not worked out a protocol for what happens if the bot just plain goes nuts.

Remember, our goal is to damage the Darwin brand. We will succeed in doing so if the bot merely sounds off-base. Not if it sounds like it is in meltdown! Look, in the worst-case scenario, someone might see connectors sticking out…

Plus there is always the risk that the real Richard Dawkins, hard at work in his cottage on his lifetime masterpiece, How Darwinism Explains Absolutely Everything, might be tipped off by a friend as to what we are doing.

Patchy Ausstechformen

Our legal counsel advises that the real Dawkins could sue us for portraying him as far more foolish than he can possibly be.

A joke’s a joke, but … Okay, you get the picture, guys: Our advisory board wants you to scale back that politics algorithm and get him back to bashing religion in really tasteless ways. You could probably do it in a couple of days.

As we all know, Brexit and US 2016 were normal political events and the main problem was the inability of conventional mainstream media to understand and report on them accurately in the internet age.

Our Corner Historian points out that the same thing happened at the dawn of the printing press, and probably with the dawn of writing (maybe 7 millennia ago?). Media based in earlier technologies and the establishment figures associated with them usually fail to read the moods rightly because they aren’t part of the critical conversations. They don’t even want to be part of them. The situation naturally feels like an apocalypse to them.

Can one of you guys generate a rough schedule and cost estimate for this project? Soon.

* See: Memo November 3,2016: Earnings watch for UD News shareholders: Dawkinsbot disliked by scientists, no longer a hot property Note: Our fix worked but it might have gone too far in a different direction.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments
The style of writing NEWS employs always fascinates me. Not for her tortured efforts at humour, so much as for its undeniable effort to appear 'hip', and 'with it'. As for Dawkins he's always had a penchant for the slightly absurd, you may recall his shortlived 'Brights' naming disaster.rvb8
March 6, 2017
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Bizarre. I and my friends discussed the issues surrounding Brexit at length and our discussion was informed by mainstream media reporting combined with our own political convictions and the evidence of our own eyes. Hardly spent any time on social media drivel so I don't know a social media bot would have read my mind and manipulated me.Splatter
March 5, 2017
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Well, there were a lot of folks who never bought Trump, but did short-sell Hillary.anthropic
March 4, 2017
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I thought they didn't need anything as exotic as mind-reading bots, just a bunch of teenagers in Macedonia who found out how to make good money out of writing fake news stories for gullible Trump supporters.Seversky
March 4, 2017
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When he was young, Dawkins had a novel way to look at evolution. But he has become a charicature of the angry old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Does anyone take his recent antics, or opinions, seriously?Armand Jacks
March 4, 2017
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awstar at 1: You'd be amazed what our coffee room here has done to influence global events. Connect the dots ... ;)News
March 4, 2017
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Methinks it is Like a Fake News reporting Russianawstar
March 4, 2017
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