5 ms·

Built By Google

99 points by stakent 17y ago

dan_sim 17y ago
For the first time in my life, I read something about the future that sounds realistic... but still scary...
- jmonegro 17y ago
  I completely disagree, the author is definitely taking it too far. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of Google dominance.
  - dan_sim 17y ago
    Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that. I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that. That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative. If we don't care who handles our email, Google and Yahoo have to fight based on something other than brand name. I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it. Have they ever done that? What Google service do I use without knowing it's run by Google?
      - dstorrs 17y ago
        > That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative. The problem here is that I've tried a lot of different email systems and, so far, Gmail beats them all hands down--in every way that matters. Its storage levels and general interface is at least as good and its spam filtering and searching (the two main points) are better.
      - stakent 17y ago
        Blogger? Youtube? Doubleclick? ... You know. HN readers know. The rest knows?
        dan_sim 17y ago
        I think that nobody really knows it. It you go to the YouTube home page, there's no mention of Google other than "Add youtube to your google homepage" (might be different in other localization though)
        byrneseyeview 17y ago
        You sign in to Blogger and Youtube with your Google account. Doubleclick is a good point, though. Of course, you know if you place ads on the site (there's a "Google" in the URL) and you know if you buy the ads. So I guess consumers don't know. Would they care, if they did?
        dan_sim 17y ago
        I sign in to HN with my google account...
    - jmonegro 17y ago
      because we don't care. Combining it with the adage "the best way to predict the future is to make it", the only way to stop Google from overgrowing is, then, to start caring. That is, however, quite hard to do considering they do mostly everything right and useful :( C'est ca ou les gouvernements vont interdire telle dominance.
    - madh 17y ago
      Interesting take on the multiple brand, P&G-esque approach. Would be a significant departure from today where Google is very consistent throughout its products. On the other hand, basically any website with AdSense is an offshoot of Google, no? People definitely don't care, and I believe this is because they don't know. Do people really realize that Google has so much information and is nearly at the center of the lives and livelihoods of many people and companies? I don't think so. Most don't even know how Google makes money. Heck, most people don't care enough and don't know enough to use Chrome or Firefox over IE8.
    - btilly 17y ago
      Sophisticated segmentation and branding makes sense for a marketing organization which doesn't truly have diverse product lines. See Apple under Scully for a sign of how poorly it works for technology organizations. Besides, Google is a technical company run by software developers. Their idea of marketing is building a better mouse trap. Changing that attitude would be a major cultural shift.
nvhvhvhvh 17y ago
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fjabre 17y ago
Excellent Asimov-like short story..
bjelkeman-again 17y ago
A quite dystopian vision, with the main character is essentially powered by a future Google, which in its turn is powered by the main character. A very tightly coupled future which doesn't seem to point to much individual freedom. I think the future is quite different. 1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive. Humans are very creative and find different uses for their tools than this.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  It's only dystopian if you're human. I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords. The really depressing thing is that if we do get taken over by an AI, it'll probably be written in C++...
  - mushroomblue 17y ago
    so it'll take 30% longer to be governed?
    - joshhart 17y ago
      Better that than python - Imagine how bad the DMV would be then!
      - Pahalial 17y ago
        Trying to imagine the GIL coping with managing the entire world.. now there's a dystopian vision!
- ewjordan 17y ago
  1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive. Your assumption is that we will need to compete to meet our needs, and I don't think that's necessarily the case: competition within a population only matters when resources are scarce and our efforts have a significant effect on the value of those resources relative to the background level that exists regardless of our presence. Given that to any sufficiently advanced AI we will be less intelligent than our housepets are to us, I think it's a stretch to imagine that we'll be economically relevant at all. When you have two dogs, they don't need to compete with each other to do very well - you feed them based on what they need, regardless of what their relative levels of effort would merit in an environment that didn't include you, the owner. In other words: if we have a peaceful coexistence long enough for computers to truly surpass us (which should not take very long once they reach our level), the table scraps that they hopefully toss down to us will probably render irrelevant anything that we could produce ourselves. And if they don't offer table scraps, we're pretty well screwed, because they're the de facto owners of all the resources since we have no significant power to wield against them and we don't have anything valuable enough to offer in trade. "Friendly housepet" is probably the status we should be shooting for when we achieve AGI, honestly. Cooperative scenarios fail quickly because after a short time we would have precious little to offer an advanced AGI, and the antagonistic scenarios only end one way, with humans losing a disastrously one-sided battle. Edit: grammar (need to drink coffee before posting on HN from now on)
generalk 17y ago
If you enjoyed that you'll probably enjoy Doctorow's Scroogled: http://craphound.com/?p=1902 http://craphound.com/?p=1902
exit 17y ago
the world described would have singularity-ed "long ago".
mushroomblue 17y ago
man. future google is only a marginally-better cattle farmer than the current ones. it seems we're more efficiently used, and for less time, but we're still animals on a farm. when's that going to change?
cgs1019 17y ago
Brings this to mind (albeit indirectly) http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/ Variation is probably the most resilient feature of humanity, which I think is commonly overlooked in these sorts of dystopisms. Well written, though, and a fun short read.
ynniv 17y ago
Wow, that was really boring. Replace everything with "Microsoft", and this could have been written 15 years ago. Use "IBM", and it would have been 25 years ago. There are many great techno-dystopian stories, but this is a rank amateur attempt. The print version would have red pen in the margins: character development? story arc? unnecessary detail! If you liked this story, you are required to have read Snow Crash.
- swombat 17y ago
  Not really... the focus on advertising is much more Google-specific. The real clunker in this story is that with such advanced technology (mostly AI-complete, as others have pointed out), humans are largely irrelevant, and therefore so is advertising as well as any work we might wish to do. The only way to "fix" this would, I suppose, be to posit a truly symbiotic AI relationship, where these strong AIs can only exist with constant interaction with human thought processes. However, if that was the case, the author should really make this clearer.
dkokelley 17y ago
How will Google dominate in the post-scarcity society? Google makes its money on the fact that market players need to find each other. It's just an interesting thought-experiment, but if Google has made everyone's lives so easy (assuming that scarcity has essentially become all but extinct because Google gives everything else away), why would anybody need to advertise their goods?
- alttab 17y ago
  One thing that Google, in their current or projected business model, will never overcome is: the scarcity of natural resources. Food, water, building materials, and energy. Commodities by technology, but still essential for life.
swolchok 17y ago
Most of the things described in this article are AI-complete.
rmorlok 17y ago
The best part of that page was the ad for the Google Nexus One at the bottom that Google chose to show me. But I don't care, because Google does a pretty good job.
dennisgorelik 17y ago
That was a little bit creepy read. Google is and will be quite influential for next 10-20 years, but it would definitely have strong competitors and computers wouldn't be called "Google".
- piotrSikora 17y ago
  Are you sure? People already use "google" instead of "search", they might start using it also instead of "computer" in next few years... You never know! Especially when Chrome OS is just around the corner...
- mikeyur 17y ago
  Have you seen the video of Google asking people to describe what a browser is? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
mattmaroon 17y ago
And also, by the year 1985 we will all have flying cars.
liqquefan 17y ago
Nice story

Built By Google

99 points by stakent 17y ago

dan_sim 17y ago

For the first time in my life, I read something about the future that sounds realistic... but still scary...

jmonegro 17y ago
I completely disagree, the author is definitely taking it too far. Not in terms of technology, but in terms of Google dominance.
- dan_sim 17y ago
  Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that. I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that. That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative. If we don't care who handles our email, Google and Yahoo have to fight based on something other than brand name. I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it. Have they ever done that? What Google service do I use without knowing it's run by Google?
    - dstorrs 17y ago
      > That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative. The problem here is that I've tried a lot of different email systems and, so far, Gmail beats them all hands down--in every way that matters. Its storage levels and general interface is at least as good and its spam filtering and searching (the two main points) are better.
    - stakent 17y ago
      Blogger? Youtube? Doubleclick? ... You know. HN readers know. The rest knows?
      - dan_sim 17y ago
        I think that nobody really knows it. It you go to the YouTube home page, there's no mention of Google other than "Add youtube to your google homepage" (might be different in other localization though)
      - byrneseyeview 17y ago
        You sign in to Blogger and Youtube with your Google account. Doubleclick is a good point, though. Of course, you know if you place ads on the site (there's a "Google" in the URL) and you know if you buy the ads. So I guess consumers don't know. Would they care, if they did?
        dan_sim 17y ago
        I sign in to HN with my google account...
  - jmonegro 17y ago
    because we don't care. Combining it with the adage "the best way to predict the future is to make it", the only way to stop Google from overgrowing is, then, to start caring. That is, however, quite hard to do considering they do mostly everything right and useful :( C'est ca ou les gouvernements vont interdire telle dominance.
  - madh 17y ago
    Interesting take on the multiple brand, P&G-esque approach. Would be a significant departure from today where Google is very consistent throughout its products. On the other hand, basically any website with AdSense is an offshoot of Google, no? People definitely don't care, and I believe this is because they don't know. Do people really realize that Google has so much information and is nearly at the center of the lives and livelihoods of many people and companies? I don't think so. Most don't even know how Google makes money. Heck, most people don't care enough and don't know enough to use Chrome or Firefox over IE8.
  - btilly 17y ago
    Sophisticated segmentation and branding makes sense for a marketing organization which doesn't truly have diverse product lines. See Apple under Scully for a sign of how poorly it works for technology organizations. Besides, Google is a technical company run by software developers. Their idea of marketing is building a better mouse trap. Changing that attitude would be a major cultural shift.

nvhvhvhvh 17y ago

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fjabre 17y ago

Excellent Asimov-like short story..

bjelkeman-again 17y ago

A quite dystopian vision, with the main character is essentially powered by a future Google, which in its turn is powered by the main character. A very tightly coupled future which doesn't seem to point to much individual freedom. I think the future is quite different. 1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive. Humans are very creative and find different uses for their tools than this.

nostrademons 17y ago
It's only dystopian if you're human. I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords. The really depressing thing is that if we do get taken over by an AI, it'll probably be written in C++...
- mushroomblue 17y ago
  so it'll take 30% longer to be governed?
  - joshhart 17y ago
    Better that than python - Imagine how bad the DMV would be then!
    - Pahalial 17y ago
      Trying to imagine the GIL coping with managing the entire world.. now there's a dystopian vision!
ewjordan 17y ago
1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive. Your assumption is that we will need to compete to meet our needs, and I don't think that's necessarily the case: competition within a population only matters when resources are scarce and our efforts have a significant effect on the value of those resources relative to the background level that exists regardless of our presence. Given that to any sufficiently advanced AI we will be less intelligent than our housepets are to us, I think it's a stretch to imagine that we'll be economically relevant at all. When you have two dogs, they don't need to compete with each other to do very well - you feed them based on what they need, regardless of what their relative levels of effort would merit in an environment that didn't include you, the owner. In other words: if we have a peaceful coexistence long enough for computers to truly surpass us (which should not take very long once they reach our level), the table scraps that they hopefully toss down to us will probably render irrelevant anything that we could produce ourselves. And if they don't offer table scraps, we're pretty well screwed, because they're the de facto owners of all the resources since we have no significant power to wield against them and we don't have anything valuable enough to offer in trade. "Friendly housepet" is probably the status we should be shooting for when we achieve AGI, honestly. Cooperative scenarios fail quickly because after a short time we would have precious little to offer an advanced AGI, and the antagonistic scenarios only end one way, with humans losing a disastrously one-sided battle. Edit: grammar (need to drink coffee before posting on HN from now on)

generalk 17y ago

If you enjoyed that you'll probably enjoy Doctorow's Scroogled: http://craphound.com/?p=1902 http://craphound.com/?p=1902

exit 17y ago

the world described would have singularity-ed "long ago".

mushroomblue 17y ago

man. future google is only a marginally-better cattle farmer than the current ones. it seems we're more efficiently used, and for less time, but we're still animals on a farm. when's that going to change?

cgs1019 17y ago

Brings this to mind (albeit indirectly) http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/ Variation is probably the most resilient feature of humanity, which I think is commonly overlooked in these sorts of dystopisms. Well written, though, and a fun short read.

ynniv 17y ago

Wow, that was really boring. Replace everything with "Microsoft", and this could have been written 15 years ago. Use "IBM", and it would have been 25 years ago. There are many great techno-dystopian stories, but this is a rank amateur attempt. The print version would have red pen in the margins: character development? story arc? unnecessary detail! If you liked this story, you are required to have read Snow Crash.

swombat 17y ago
Not really... the focus on advertising is much more Google-specific. The real clunker in this story is that with such advanced technology (mostly AI-complete, as others have pointed out), humans are largely irrelevant, and therefore so is advertising as well as any work we might wish to do. The only way to "fix" this would, I suppose, be to posit a truly symbiotic AI relationship, where these strong AIs can only exist with constant interaction with human thought processes. However, if that was the case, the author should really make this clearer.

dkokelley 17y ago

How will Google dominate in the post-scarcity society? Google makes its money on the fact that market players need to find each other. It's just an interesting thought-experiment, but if Google has made everyone's lives so easy (assuming that scarcity has essentially become all but extinct because Google gives everything else away), why would anybody need to advertise their goods?

alttab 17y ago
One thing that Google, in their current or projected business model, will never overcome is: the scarcity of natural resources. Food, water, building materials, and energy. Commodities by technology, but still essential for life.

swolchok 17y ago

Most of the things described in this article are AI-complete.

rmorlok 17y ago

The best part of that page was the ad for the Google Nexus One at the bottom that Google chose to show me. But I don't care, because Google does a pretty good job.

dennisgorelik 17y ago

That was a little bit creepy read. Google is and will be quite influential for next 10-20 years, but it would definitely have strong competitors and computers wouldn't be called "Google".

piotrSikora 17y ago
Are you sure? People already use "google" instead of "search", they might start using it also instead of "computer" in next few years... You never know! Especially when Chrome OS is just around the corner...
mikeyur 17y ago
Have you seen the video of Google asking people to describe what a browser is? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

mattmaroon 17y ago

And also, by the year 1985 we will all have flying cars.

liqquefan 17y ago

Nice story