Sharesphere
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.
To Bing, or not to Bing: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous comments,
Or to take arms against a sea of chatbots,
And by opposing end them? To sleep: to search
No more; and by a button’s push to end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
Users are heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To prompt no more;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that lack of search what sites may come
When we have shuffled off this robot talk,
Must give us pause… who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after Bing,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those tools we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Convenience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hope of revelation
Is sicklied o'er with the replica of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. [Micro]Soft you now!
Illustration: Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Clickworker 3d-printed / CC-BY 4.0 / cropped