What do Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice mean to me?

These days I’m at the family cottage, studying Kant and writing. My dad comes up on the weekends and this Friday after dinner, my dad, his partner, and I were sitting around the table, playing cards and eating candy. Conversation drifted to figuring out what flavours were in the candy.

“Is it green apple liquorice? Mmm, maybe it’s guava liquorice.”

“Guava doesn’t taste like anything.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s cola in there somewhere, and red ones are strawberry liquorice.”

“Strawberry liquorice, green apple liquorice, guava liquorice, cola liquorice, they don’t mean anything!” my dad said.

I could see what he meant, I felt a tickle in the back of my mind that the words were wrong. “Strawberry liquorice” sounded almost like “Ireland Argentina”, “air water”, or “ear eye”. What’s wrong with “strawberry liquorice”? We thought about it for a minute and came up with the answer:

  1. Liquorice is a plant.
  2. Liquorice is a flavour named after the plant.
  3. Liquorice is a kind of candy named after the flavour (a particular shape and consistency).
  4. Strawberry is a fruit.
  5. Strawberry is a flavour named after the fruit.
  6. “Strawberry liquorice” is a strawberry-flavoured version of the liquorice kind of candy.

The “problem” is that using those two words together can mean different things to different people. When one person says it to mean, “strawberry (flavour) + liquorice (kind of candy)”, and another person hears “strawberry (flavour) + liquorice (flavour)”, it’s confusing.

Now that we had figured out what was wrong, I said,

“I wonder what else is like strawberry liquorice…”

We thought about it for a few minutes, and I can’t say what was going on in my mind because it felt more like meditation than computation, but I came up with an answer,

“I have one! Ok, it’d be like to Microsoft google. You know, to google something on the internet, but with Microsoft’s search engine.”

Microsoft Google analysis (click to expand)
  1. Google is a tech company.
  2. Google is a search engine product named after the company.
  3. google is a verb named after the product that means “to search using a search engine”.
  4. Microsoft is a tech company.
  5. Microsoft has a search engine product called Bing, not Microsoft.
  6. Microsoft google could be a verb that means, “to search using Microsoft’s search engine”.

So Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice are the same. Yes, they’re the same, but they’re also different, and not in the trivial, “made of different letters” kind of way. They’re so different that the title of this article “Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice” looks like it has typos, but it’s not “Microsoft, Google, and strawberry liquorice”, it’s “Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice”! Back to our conversation - we had established how they’re the same, but now - how are they not the same? I had a couple of guesses:

Strength of association (click to expand)

When you hear the word, “Microsoft”, you don’t think, “search engine product”, so no one is going to hear “Microsoft google” and think search engine + verb or search engine + search engine. When you hear the word “strawberry”, you do think “flavour”, so people could legitimately hear “strawberry liquorice” and think either flavour + kind of candy or flavour + flavour.

Etymological lineage (click to expand)

Liquorice went “plant -> flavour -> type of candy”.
Google went “company -> product -> verb”.

To Uber, to Deliveroo, to Xerox, to Skype, to Tinder, to Instagram… There are so many words that have gone “company -> product -> verb” that at this point, it’s an old-school trope in the tech industry.

Whereas for “plant -> flavour -> type of candy”, I could only find two examples with some after-the-conversation help from ChatGPT - mint and cola (cola is a kind of beverage, not candy). ChatGPT also suggested vanilla, which feels similarly rare “plant -> flavour -> type of choice” (vanilla is a plain, default, inoffensive type of choice).

“Ok, so how would AI be able to do that?” my dad said.

It was a vague question that seemed like an intractable problem, but after a few minutes, I landed on this. This is what I thought “an AI” would need:

  1. Problem intuition - something is wrong. First, when we said “strawberry liquorice”, my dad had the feeling that something was wrong. There was a problem to be solved.
  2. Triage - it has to do with a word having multiple meanings. Our snap judgement within a few seconds to a minute.
  3. Diagnosis - it has to do with multiple words having multiple meanings that can combine to make no sense from a certain perspective. We analyzed where the words came from and what led to “the problem”. We imagined other examples to test out our theory of what happened, then analyzed those examples too.

What struck me was how difficult the first step was to replicate - the intuition that something is wrong. I couldn’t imagine figuring that out myself. It made me think, there’s a much more interesting question,

“In this situation, what are we comparing an AI to?”

We were comparing some AI to a person, but even a person wouldn’t have that initial intuition, a person alone would not have noticed that something was wrong. A group of people performing some activity together would notice, and that’s what had happened - in a group of us, someone said something that didn’t make sense to my dad. The comparison we should be making for this task is between some AI and a group of people participating in some cooperative/competitive system together. The key question of this whole article is, what is the task and what abilities are needed to do it? Or from another perspective, “what would it look like for I, the reader, to do this task”?

Analysis^3 Part 1: What is the task?

Wait, where’s the third analysis coming from? What’s this analysis^3? Well the essence of this post isn’t trivial wordplay or even an exploration of the capabilities of AI, although those are both juicy hooks. See, I’ve been studying philosophy while writing a book for the past seven months, now three months left. I’ve read some Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Aristotle again, Hume, Spinoza, and now I’m partway through Kant before I dig into Hegel, the Bible, Nieztsche, J.S. Mill, and Heidegger. I’ve written a first draft of my sci-fi philosophy novel, and I’ve been passively thinking about how to share what all that means to those who know me.

If I did an MBA or started a startup or had kids, most everyone who knows me would understand how those things might change me, but I’m studying philosophy and writing a book. Before doing them, I didn’t know how those things might change someone, so I’m sure most others don’t know either. How have I changed?

Analysis^3 Part 2: What would it look like to do the task?

There are things here that I would have done differently before studying philosophy:

  1. I wouldn’t have been able to break down what’s wrong with “strawberry liquorice” as precisely and quickly as I did, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain it nearly as clearly.
  2. I wouldn’t have wondered too deeply why Microsoft Google was “the same but different” and I would have framed it as a pure computer science problem, which is too reductive.
  3. I wouldn’t have thought to ask the more interesting question, “in this situation, what are we really comparing AI to?”

There are things here that I wouldn’t have been able to do before writing the book I’m writing:

  1. Synthesize all these topics into many stories that point at a broader narrative.
  2. Give you an intuition for the abilities that writing and studying philosophy develops.
  3. Write this in three to four hours (my posts like this before took me weeks to a month).

That said, I have so much room for improvement. My analyses were just “ok” and not grounded in any literature. The way I use sensitive terms is not as crisp and consistent as it could be - analysis, meaning, intuition, AI, person, etc. The essence of this post could probably be expressed in a way that has more density of meaning in fewer words at a lower level of reading comprehension, I’ve only touched on small facets of studying philosophy / writing, and I’m careful that at some point further focus becomes an unworthy cause…

Back to the titular question - what do Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice mean to me?

Like any worthwhile piece of writing, I can’t exactly summarize it nicely in one sentence, otherwise I would have written that sentence instead of all this. They’re a pair of meaningless terms, but hopefully by now you can grasp what “Microsoft google and strawberry liquorice” mean to me.

20 Jul 2024