Final response

1) A second look at The Futurological Congress
Now that I don't have to worry about giving away the ending to all those that didn't finish the book, I can give a full reaction to the book. My thoughts haven't changed since my last response, but now I can give more details as to why this book left me stunned. When Lem first introduced the LTN bombs I thought to myself, "If they can drug the water with that, what is to stop them from just plain drugging everyone to keep them in line?" Well, it seems like Lem fully explored this idea, maybe a little too far. The main problem was overpopulation, that led to the total violation of everyone's rights. They kept them sedated and never let them see the crap-hole they were living in. If the government is able to go that far, then why not start chemically sterilizing people and not letting them know. Then in a few generations the population will be in check. I mean if your going to go so far, you might as well go all the way. The people are fed nothing but lies, so what is the harm in lying even more. Even during the "present," with the sewer raids, if they are willing to bomb a city for no real reason, then why not have mass killing of criminals and other bad guys. I know I would rather be dead than to live in a world that messed up. The only good thing about the future Lem has presented to us is the fact that everyone is made nice. I'm not saying a world without arms, but a world where people have no drive to use the weapons they have. If only we were allowed to do such things, it would be a messed up world, but in some ways it would be better.
2) Problems with Dreyfus
I am still hung up on Dreyfus and his critique of artificial intelligence in search engines. He is blaming the technology for its faults, when really the creators of web pages are to be blamed. They use encrypted words to get their sites to show up during searches, whether that is the info you are looking for or not. They want the hits on their page, so the programmers do all kinds of sneaky stuff to deliberately throw off the search engine as well as the people actually doing the research. They knowingly add things to the page so their illegitimate information will show up instead of the real things you need. Now I can't blame that on AI, it is doing the job it was designed to do, and it does it well that is how you end up with all the bad links. If it is looking for certain topics you type in and it finds it in a strange place, it shows you where all it found your topic. Dreyfus keeps looking to the AI to solve the problem when you really need to be looking to the people. They are the ones trying to deceive the AI, therefore they are the root of the problem. Dreyfus also does not give the researching people enough credit either. If I type in certain words I know I am going to get a lot of off topic hits. It is up to me to chose my words carefully and also to avoid going to sites that seem off. I mean if I type in "sexy" in a search box I can be sure that some sites are going to have more sexy pictures than sexy information. You have to expect that kind of thing with the internet, its people like Dreyfus that don't expect it and are really picky. My dad is one of those people, he can't use the internet because he doesn't know how and he gets upset. Then I get upset with him, and its just a big mess. You can't blame the engine or the internet, you have to blame the creator and the searchers, they are the ones causing problems.