One of the biggest stories of the year broke on Monday morning, when eagle-eyed Twitter user registered a complaint about the look of Google’s new burger emoji. The crux of the matter concerns the placement of the cheese in the ingredient stack, and Thomas Baekdal, kick-started the discussion that soon swept across the internet.
I think we need to have a discussion about how Google’s burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top pic.twitter.com/PgXmCkY3Yc
— Thomas Baekdal (@baekdal) October 28, 2017
As this sort of controversy is wont to do, the burger emoji scandal soon reached the very heights of power. Google CEO Sundar Pichai dropped his weekend plans to confirm his company’s commitment to a swift resolution. But, as you can see in his tweet below, Pichai listed one barrier to achieving national emoji unity: how do you get folks to agree on the “correct way to do this?”
Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday:) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this! https://t.co/dXRuZnX1Ag
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 29, 2017
With Pichai having thrown down the gauntlet, researchers at Unanimous AI turned to our Swarm AI™ platform to try and get a group of thirty internet denizens to converge on an answer to this all-important question. Modeled after Swarm Intelligence, which evolved in groups of organisms to arrive at optimized collective decisions, Swarm AI technology now helps humans solve complex multi-variable problems like this one. This process enlisted the same technology that Unanimous used to offer insight to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the best philanthropic strategy for his $80B fortune ( read more at FAST COMPANY), albeit with even higher consequences.
First, our researchers wanted to know, which emoji represented the platonic ideal of a burger?
As you can see, the Burger Swarm quickly confirmed Thomas Baekdal’s suspicions, registering a decisive response that affirms “cheese on the top” as the ideal construction. Sundar Pichai might be pleased to hear that our Swarm AI platform made this sort of collaboration across the internet possible in a matter of seconds, despite the Verge’s skepticism about “getting the internet to agree on anything.”
But, how did a team of highly-paid Google engineers go so wrong? Although you wouldn’t have known it if you watched some cable news shows on Monday morning, surely there are other topics more worthy of discussion. So, what went wrong at Google that allowed their new emoji to hijack the national conversation? To find out, our researchers posed one more question to the swarm.
So, there you have it. The brilliant vegetarians at Google may have thrown us all for a loop, but the Swarm was able to create order out of the chaos in a matter of seconds.
Want to learn more about our Swarm AI technology? Check out our TED talk below…
Every week Unanimous A. I. brings together swarms of regular people just like you to help us predict sporting events, investment opportunities, and technology as well as provide insight into everything from pop culture to politics. If you’d like information on joining a swarm – or just want to stay up to date on the latest predictions – click the button below.
