The one fatal flaw in Google's 'Lake America' defense

The socials are slamming Google for going along with Donald Trump's lie that Lake Ontario is now called Lake America. (Apple still calls the lake "Lake Ontario," and MapQuest has promised to never change it to "Lake America." 

Google posted a defense. Here is that defense, in full: 

"The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now."

The fatal flaw in this argument, of course, is that Google chose to follow the GNIS because when they made that decision it was a highly credible, independent, honest, and justifiable source for the names of things on maps. 

The reason GNIS was such a great resource is that it was both open (the public could make suggestions, for example), and also curated by members of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and its Domestic Names Committee (DNC), a committee of knowledgable professionals who base their decisions on clear, non-partisan criteria. Committee members are career federal employees appointed by their respective federal agencies (Departments of Interior, Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Homeland Security, the U.S. Postal Service, Government Publishing Office, and Library of Congress) to serve as that agency's representative, with appointments approved by the Secretary of the Interior for two-year terms.

But the fact that an unserious clown happens to be president and chooses to arbitrarily choose names for either political or personal ego reasons has the authority to over-ride GNIS decision-making means that the GNIS data is no longer a credible source for naming. 

Meanwhile, other sources for this content remain credible and authoritative. These include OpenStreetMap, GeoNames, Natural Earth, GADM, and state and local government GIS agencies.

That Google is choosing to stick with a tainted resource that used to be credible is a political decision that sells out its users in favor of currying favor with a corrupt administration.

Google is defending its decision with an appeal to authority based on a now-unauthoritative resource. That's the fatal flaw it in its indefensible defense of lying about the name of a lake on behalf of an authoritative conman. 

Why it's impossible to get relevant news on Google News

If you search for a specific phrase in quotation marks, Google News will spam you with social media garbage instead of news that's relevant to your search. 

If you remove the quotation marks, Google News will spam you with actual news stories, but ones unrelated to your desired content, as it simply looks for the words you're searching for anywhere in the article. 

In other words, you can search social media for your specific phrase, or you can search news sites for the words in your phrase, but you can't search news sites for your actual phrase. 

Google News is just Forrest Gump's shrimp boat now

You know that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest sees Lieutenant Dan on the shore and is so distracted by him that he jumps off and swims to shore, allowing the boat to crash into the dock? 

Yeah, that's Google News now. In this metaphor, Forrest is Google and Lieutenant Dan is AI.

As a journalist, I have used Google News for many years to catch up on topics in which I am interested. I am always looking for news stories from U.S. news organizations published within a specific period of time, usually in the past week, but sometimes in the past day. 

Google News has a Tools menu, where you can specify the range. You can also specify the language and location of the publication. 

Bit by bit, all of this just stopped working. 

Now, when I do my traditional searches, a huge majority of some of my searches are from Instagram or other social media sites, not news publishing sites. 

Many of my results are in foreign languages I cannot even identify. 

Many of my results are published in foreign countries, not the U.S. as I specified. 

Now, the most recent failure is that when I specify news published in, say, the past week, it just ignores that setting and gives me news published weeks, months or years in the past. 

Google has abandoned Google News and let it crash into the dock.

The best way to think is to move

I don't know why, but creative thinking and planning with clarity and ambition are always helped by motion. 

Go for a walk. Hike on a trail. Take a road trip. Fly to another country. 

The act of moving helps you unstick yourself, and breaks you out of the doldrums and hesitancy that can hold you back.

If you want to get things moving in your life, then get moving. 

We live in the age of capture

Maybe 12 years ago or so, I enjoyed newsgroup-like mailing list thing with three other guys who were all former co-workers of mine. Basically, we just swapped funny current events (what we'd now call memes) we would write profane limericks, and generally share offensive, NSFW nuggets that weren't really acceptable to post on social media.

It was a super smart group, and the whole thing was a lot of fun. 

Suddenly, it seemed, one day, one of the guys seemed to go nuts. He became extremely trollish, and just argued with everything and expressed completely false "facts" almost exclusively. Eventually, we kicked him out of the group. 

Since then, I've seen many people suddenly "flip" and become a completely different person. Many have become die-hard Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, or born-again Christians, who not only fully embrace these communities with cult-like devotion, they never stop talking about it. It becomes their identity entirely. 

All this is well understood, and not that new. But lately I've seen people become similarly captured by AI chatbots or AI slop or both. 

If feels like we live in the "Age of Capture," where previously reasonable, well balanced people become completely sucked in by something they feel is "the answer" to everything. 

I have the idea that the number of people captured by AI will only keep growing, and I'm not looking forward to that future. 

I just want to tell all my friends: AI isn't the answer to everything. Please hold on to your individuality, perspective and sanity. Don't be captured. 



Why AI can’t write right

I’ll start with the punch line: Good writing is an expression of individuality, and a communication of life experience and human thought. AI can’t do it. AI will never be able to do it.

The AI chatbots that people use to write for them tend to write bland, average prose. Worse, they use phrases, make sentences, somewhat randomly choose canned constructions that are “off.” 

We can tell it’s “off,” because we are human. 

Good writing and good reading is a conversation between two human beings who “get it.“ They “get it” because they have shared life experiences, they’ve felt pain, they’ve felt love, they’ve experienced beauty, they know what chamomile smells like. And they can use language to communicate experiences in a way that’s individualistic and allows the reader to understand and get to know the writer.

People can do this. Machines can’t. Machines can try to simulate it, but there’s one huge problem with simulating great writing.

Consider three of the greatest American novelist: Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and Twain. If AI were to simulate great writing, it could try to imitate one of them, but in imitating one of them it very much is not imitating the other two. 

Great writing is individualistic. The greater it is the more individualistic it is. So what would it mean for a machine to produce great writing, when it has no life experiences and no individuality?

AI has mastered generic prose. But what makes great writing great is it? It’s the opposite of generic. It’s the opposite of average.

This is great news. It means if you cultivate the art of writing well, you will always be able to do something that AI cannot do.

AI is like a machine gun for your mind

The machine gun was invented to make war less lethal.

The inventor, Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, patented the Gatling gun in 1862. By turning a crank, one operator could fire 200 rounds a minute.

Gatling was inspired by the American Civil War, which started in April 1861 and ended in April 1865. Three-quarters of a million Americans died in that war, give or take 100,000, according to estimates (roughly 2% of all Americans died in the war).

Gatling reasoned that, because one gun could fire as many bullets as a hundred soldiers, future wars would need far fewer soldiers.

He was wrong.

Some 3.7 million soldiers fought in the American Civil War. After the machine gun became used broadly in all conflicts, the numbers only went up. Around 65 million soldiers fought in World War I and 127 million in World War II. There were many other factors at play, of course. But it's safe to say that machine guns didn't shrink armies.

Automated weapons of all kinds, as well as other forms of mechanized warfare, only increased the lethality of war, requiring nations to field even more soldiers if they had any chance of winning.

The same flawed thinking is being applied to AI. The conventional wisdom is that AI will greatly magnify the productivity of each employee, and therefore fewer employees will be needed.

This is also wrong.

What will happen is that the baseline expectation for individual productivity will go way up and the output of corporations will go way up. And in order to maintain competitiveness, companies will need even more employees with even greater skill. Why? Because the competition will have more AI-enhanced employees, and if your company has far fewer they'll be crushed.

Sure, all kinds of companies are blaming layoffs on higher productivity from AI. But this is just so much AI-washing. Inflation, tariffs, market uncertainty, and other factors are driving layoffs, and CEOs are pointing at AI as the reason. But I haven’t seen one shred of evidence that this is the case.

I also don’t see evidence that AI is driving higher productivity, in general. But eventually it will. And when it does, the company that chooses the same output with half the employees will be crushed by the company that chooses to double the output with the same employees.

In 1990, Steve Jobs said that "A computer is to me... the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

And AI to me is the equivalent of a machine gun for our minds. And like the machine gun, it won’t lead to fewer operators, but greater impact per person.

The art of not knowing

We're just talking apes, after all. 

Our ancient ancestors, living in nature with handmade tools, survived in part by learning everything they could about threats, food sources, the location of shelter, and how to maintain a fire. "Content creators" were just people talking -- sharing knowledge, telling stories.

Millennia into the Neolithic Age, information was still scarce, with only a tiny minority of the world's population having physical access to "content" -- books, newspapers, etc., knowledge was rare and hard to get. 

Knowing used to be the most valuable thing in the world. 

Nowadays, some 6 billion people or so have access to the internet. What that means is that all these people have access to too much information.

For example, it would be impossible for any person to learn all the new information uploaded to the internet during the span of a single minute, even if they spent their entire lives learning that minute of data. 

We can only hope to learn a tiny fraction of 1% of the information posted online. Which is to say, we cannot learn 99.9999% of the information that is instantly available to us.

A great way to look at this problem is to stop asking ourselves only how to learn what we want to learn, but instead also ask how to stop learning the information we don't want or need to know. 

The garbage comes at us. The celebrity gossip, random videos, pointless memes, every careless thing the president says, and many other useless things. 

By all means, work on cultivating sources of information that help us live and work better. But also work on blocking information. 

Blocking is the harder problem. 

There is no "the media"

You hear it all the time. The media lies. The media favors the powerful. The media are communists, fascists, or part of a global conspiracy. The media this. The media that. 

Trouble is, there is no "the media." 

Take a few seconds to consider this label, and it reveals itself to be a ridiculous concept. 

Every conceivable perspective on Earth is represented by some organization, group or person categorized as part of "the media." 

If someone believes that "the media" has lied, misled, or favored some powerful interest, the reason they believe that is that they have facts and perspectives provided to them by some other media organizations. That is, of course, unless that someone personally travels around the world to investigate all matters by themselves and to see all current events with their own eyes and does all their own investigation.

It's true that we live in a world of weaponized lies, attention-algorithm garbage, state-sponsored disinformation, conspiracy theories, and bullshit. 

But the reason that characterizes our world is that people choose bad media and bad sources of information. 

X's algorithm, TikTok's algorithm, Facebook's algorithm are bad sources of information. 

NN News, RT, Sputnik, CGTN, Global Times, Iran's Press TV, and Venezuela's TeleSUR are bad sources of information. 

National Report, RealTrueNews, Huzlers, 70news, Disinfomedia, and Global Associated News are bad sources of information. 

Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Epoch Times, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, The Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars are bad sources of information. 

They are all "the media." 

Meanwhile, BBC, PBS, Reuters, NPR, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Consumer Reports, Mother Jones, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, The Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor, The Bulwark, and National Review are good sources of information. 

These are also "the media." 

The blogosphere, the podcast world, and the newsletter platforms have uncountable numbers of content creators providing truly excellent reporting and perspectives. 

These are also "the media." 

Even if you disagree with my lists, you cannot disagree with the fact that there is far, far more high-quality journalism available than you could ever read. The internet and the larger media ecosystem have handed all of us brilliant sources of factual information on a silver platter. 

It's all "the media." 

So choose your media diet well. And reject lame venting that rails against "the media." In fact, the best media is literally the only thing that can save us from the world of falsehoods pushed by the worst media. 

Because there is no "the media."

Ahem!

It’s OK for blog posts to be short.

Why you should love blogs now more than ever

AI is eating the world. Most content online is AI-generated. And most human-generated content is helped by AI. 

While AI has its uses, it's nice to hear from actual people once in a while. 

Dave Winer, one of the original bloggers, and the guy who co-invented podcasting along with Adam Curry in 2003, defined a blog like this: 

"A blog is the unedited voice of a person."

He explained: "The lack of editing is central, because it's one person who's responsible for every word."

So while the machines are churning out words on an unprecedented scale, representing the hive-mind groupthink of the posted content hoovered up as training data, it's more valuable than ever to hear the "unedited voice of a person" once in a while. 

That's why you should love blogs more than ever. 

How to quit algorithms

Social algorithms are expertly updated and optimized every day to draw you in, literally take your time, and consume more of your attention. 

So the "news," current events and viral videos it shows to you are brilliantly designed to affect you emotionally.

For news and current events, anger and fear are the easiest emotions to engender.

If a billion things happen a day, showing you the 10 worst things makes social networks the most money.

So we're all left angry and afraid, with no headspace left to enjoy the beauty of the world, so that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can make even more hundreds of billions of dollars than they already have.

Take control. Stop reading posts on social. Instead, write posts and read the comments. Comment on the comments. 

Find the very finest, most fact-checked, fact-based, science-based sources of information you can find and curate these sources with a quality RSS reader. 

Make RSS your input. Make social your output. 

That's how you quit algorithms. That's how you gain a better perspective on the world and what's happening in it. And that's how you foster community. 

Blowing up my blog and starting over

I've been blogging since the 90s. My posts have always evolved. In the beginning, I blogged to share the crazy shit I encountered as a tech journalist. Most of those posts were funny or ironic. There was no other place for people to find out that stuff. 

Then the information landscape changed. The internet got better. Social emerged. Eventually, just about anybody could find out about just about anything. 

Now, the information landscape is changing even more. Social is dying. Blogs are dying. Even the Wikipedia has a head cold. AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. 

In recent years, I've used this blog for self-promotion. It hasn't gone well. If social is bad for self-promotion, blogs are even worse. So I'm going to stop promoting my work here. 

Lately, I've been embracing an everything-in-the-right-place approach to posting. For example, I've been de-emphasizing posting my photography on Instagram, where I'm shadow-banned for criticizing Meta, in favor of Flickr. 

(Nobody cares about Flickr, and I have almost no followers there. But the pictures look perfect. I care more about perfect pictures that are available to the public than building a following of people who want to find my pictures.)

In the spirit of posting everything in the right place, I've decided to stop posting my best observations and advice on social, and instead post them here. 

As with my Flickr account, I'm going to stop trying to get followers and instead post good stuff from my own brain in public for anyone who's interested.

Always disclose how you use AI

As we slouch toward a world of AI-made fake everything (and the distrust that follows) it’s time to spell out exactly how you’re using AI. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.

(Disclosure: The words and image in this post were made without AI.)

Superintelligent: I Can't Believe It's Butter!

Superintelligent hosts Mike Elgan and Emily Forlini explore the link between churning homemade butter and the craving for authenticity in the new world of fake AI everything. They talk about Google’s new Gmail AI features as the most recent example of companies pushing everyone to use AI for communication. The hosts allow themselves to be influenced by influencer and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, who says that in 2026 influencers will need to prove their humanity by posting authentic content and disclosing how they use AI.

Subscribe by searching your podcast app for "Superintelligent"

The virtues of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

I asked Gemini to read Book One of Meditations and concisely list the virtues Marcus Aurelius advocated. Here they are:  

  • Maintain a noble character and control your temper.

  • Embody modesty and manliness.

  • Practice piety, generosity, and simplicity in diet while avoiding the habits of the rich.

  • Invest liberally in good education and teachers.

  • Endure pain, work hard, desire little, and ignore slander and partisan games.

  • Avoid superstition and empty enthusiasms, tolerate plain speaking, and embrace the discipline of philosophy.

  • Reform one's character, avoid ostentatious rhetoric, and read texts with deep precision rather than superficiality.

  • Exercise moral freedom, rely solely on reason, and remain consistent in behavior regardless of fortune.

  • Live according to nature with dignity, graciousness, and affection, while remaining free from passion.

  • Correct others gently by setting a good example rather than by criticism or fault-finding.

  • Recognize and avoid the malice, caprice, and hypocrisy often associated with absolute power.

  • Fulfill social obligations and avoid using "busyness" as an excuse to neglect duties to others.

  • Accept criticism from friends even when unreasonable, praise teachers heartily, and genuinely love children.

  • Love family, truth, and justice, and cherish the ideal of a commonwealth based on equity and freedom of speech.

  • Exhibit self-mastery, cheerfulness in illness, and genuine integrity without the need for display.

  • Act with unshakeable resolution, suppress vanity, work diligently, and treat all with impartial justice and temperance.

  • Be grateful for good relationships, the preservation of health, and the guidance to live in obedience to nature.


Digital twin tech is a double-edged sword

Using digital twin technology to simulate real people can be powerful. But when it’s used to represent the views of people (leaders, celebrities, customers, or the public), people tend to oppose the idea. When they interact with prominent people, they want to interact with the real people. When their views are considered, they want to be asked rather than represented by a digital twin. 

This might change later, but for now the lesson is clear: it’s important to use digital twin tech carefully — and watch out for reputation harm from using it wrongly. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.

Don't miss This Week in Tech: “A Shortage of Shame"

Host Leo Laporte is joined by Daniel Rubino, Sam Abuelsamid, and me! We do a post-mortem on Black Friday. We dig into record online sales, shaky in store traffic, and the tricks retailers use to turn inflated prices and AI shopping tools into “record breaking” headlines. From defense tech stumbles at Anduril to China leapfrogging the US on “open” AI models, the we point out how a shortage of shame runs through everything from autonomous weapons to space data center fantasies and EV pullbacks.​

You will also hear our honest takes on Trump’s Silicon Valley powered AI agenda, the Warner Music and Suno AI music deal, leaks about ads coming to ChatGPT, and rumors of a Jony Ive and Sam Altman hardware device, plus why Roblox, spying cars, and out of control RAM prices all point to the same broken incentives. 

This Week in Tech records live every Sunday at 5:15 p.m. Eastern, 2:15 p.m. Pacific, 22:15 UTC, and you can watch or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RSS, YouTube, or through Club TWiT.

Intelligent Machines: 'None Pizza Left Beef'

Check out the latest episode of Intelligent Machines with Leo Laporte, Paris Martineau, and me, Mike Elgan. 

In this episode, we push the conversation to the edge: Could the future of AI be sitting right on your desk instead of hiding in giant data centers? We dig into Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip and HP’s ZGX Nano—tiny but powerful machines that could let people fine-tune advanced AI models at home. 

Other stories include ChatGPT Atlas, Claude Skills, new research on AI news mistakes, OpenAI’s crackdown on Sora 2 deepfakes, and a look at why some experts say AI hype is getting out of hand.

Go here to listen, watch, subscribe and join the club!

Superintelligent: "Zuckerberg’s new birth control glasses"

In this episode of Superintelligent, we dove headlong into the spectacle of the Meta Connect event, where Mark Zuckerberg and team set out to convince us that the future is wearable, voice-activated, wrist-twitching and dorky.

Yes, we’re talking about the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses and their neural band companion—the gadget duo supposedly destined to replace keyboards and smartphones.

The demo was a train wreck. The AI hallucinated. Mark couldn’t answer a phone call. But it’s also true that a bad demo doesn’t mean it’s a bad product.

Meta’s glasses raise big questions about social acceptability, privacy, and whether the market will truly take off like the Silicon Valley giants hope it will. Also: Can Apple’s design sophistication rescue wearable tech from utter dweebdom? We pitted optimism against skepticism, debating everything from the speed of miniaturization to necessity of face computers.

Watch, listen and subscribe!