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Jon Williams, circa 1987, wrote a story of a far-flung humanity's future in "Dinosaurs," in which humans had been engineered into a variety of specialized forms

Jon Williams, circa 1987, wrote a story of a far-flung humanity's future in "Dinosaurs," in which humans had been engineered into a variety of specialized forms to better serve humanity. After nine million years of tweaking, most of them are not too bright but they are perfect at what they do. Ambassador Drill is trying to prevent a newly discovered species, the Shar, from treading on the toes of humanity, because if the Shar do have even a slight accidental conflict as the result of human terraforming ships wiping out Shar colonies because they just didn't notice them, the rather terrifyingly adapted military subspecies branches of humanity will utterly wipe out the Shar, as they have efficiently done with so many others, just as a reflex. Ambassador Drill fears that negotations, despite his desire for peace, may not go well, because the terraforming ships will take a long time to receive information that the Shar are in fact sentient and billions of them ought not to be wiped out ... Google, somehow, strikes me as this vision of humanity, but without an Ambassador Drill. It simply lumbers forward, doing its thing. It is to be modeled as a threat not because it is malign, but because it doesn't notice you exist as it takes another step forward. Threat modeling Lovecraft-style: entities that are alien and unlikely to single you out in particular, it's just what they do is a problem. Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms. I can imagine it still muttering "The algorithms said ..." as anti-trust measures reverse-Frankenstein it into hopefully more manageable pieces.

the8472 6y ago
Sounds like a non-aligned AI.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It essentially is a non-aligned AI. AIs don't need to be implemented in silico. Bureaucracy is by itself a computing medium too.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    That makes me wonder if someone has ever written a scientific paper proving that the bureaucratic processes in place at their company are Turing Complete. You can imagine some sort of Rule 110 cellular automaton being implemented in TPS reports.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      A cellular automaton over office documents would be a nice thing to try! That said, a proof of turing-completeness of bureaucracy is relatively trivial: FROBNICATION QUERY ID [#1234] 1. Requester data [bunch of boxes] 1a. (*) Details on stuffs [bunch of boxes] 1b. (*) Details on different stuffs [bunch of boxes] (...) 4. Additional documents - [Frobnication Registration #432] - [Frobnication Query #1111] -- (*) - Fill section a) if $something. Fill section b) if $somethingelse. With sections 1a/1b implementing conditional branching, and section 4 implementing storage.
    - Igelau 6y ago
      > proving that the bureaucratic processes... are Turing Complete It's called COBOL
ethbr0 6y ago
> Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms That's fine when you're a plucky growth startup. Less fine when you run half the internet. If Google doesn't want to admit it's a mature business and pivot into margin-eating, but risk-reducing support staffing, then okay: break it back up into enough startup-sized chunks that the response failure of one isn't an existential threat to everyone.
- nojvek 6y ago
  I agree. Google is such a large behemoth who actively tries to avoid customer support if they can. Splitting it to smaller business with a bit of autonomy and not having to rely on ad money fueling everything else means those smaller businesses have to give a shit about customers and compete on even ground. Same applies to Facebook and other tech companies. The root issue is taking huge profits from area of business into other avenues which compete with the market on unfair ground (or out right buying out competition) However anti-trust in US has eroded significantly.
  - aerosmile 6y ago
    > However anti-trust in US has eroded significantly. Perhaps compared to the 40s-70s, but certainly not compared to the Reagan era. Starting with the Obama administration, there's been a strong rebirth of the anti-trust movement and it's only gaining momentum (see many recent examples of blocked mergers)[1]. [1] https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s-antitrust-movement https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
    - beerandt 6y ago
      The Obama admin used it only to attack enemies. Renata Hesse was part of that effort, and has since worked for Google and Amazon, and is now expected to be in charge of anti-trust at Biden's DOJ.
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    And as long as the internet giants are on the correct side of the culture war there will be scant appetite for breaking them up or reigning them in. As long as you need 5 phone calls to silence someone and erase them from the online, there is no chance in hell that the government will try to break them up.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> It simply lumbers forward, doing its thing. It is to be modeled as a threat not because it is malign, but because it doesn't notice you exist as it takes another step forward. This is a concept that I think deserves more popular currency. Every so often, you step on a snail. People actually hate doing this, because it's gross, and they will actively seek to avoid it. But that doesn't always work, and the fact that the human (1) would have preferred not to step on it; and (2) could, hypothetically, easily have avoided doing so, doesn't make things any better for the snail. This is also what bothers me about people who swim with whales. Whales are very big. They are so big that just being near them can easily kill you, even though the whales generally harbor no ill intent.
- erikpukinskis 6y ago
  I'm curious if whales more dangerous on an hour-by-hour basis than driving? That's generally my rubric for whether a safety concern is possibly worth avoiding an activity over.
  - wott 6y ago
    > I'm curious if whales more dangerous on an hour-by-hour basis than driving? It depends on how many passengers you pack in a whale.
    - Igelau 6y ago
      My understanding is that a Chrysler as big as a whale can seat about 20. (Love Shack, 1989)
prox 6y ago
Your making another perfect case of why Google should be broken up. It’s important that we can choose again.
banjomet 6y ago
Thanks for the story recommendation!
throwaway2048 6y ago
Modern large corporations are just an more inefficient, less effective paperclip maximizer, with humans gumming up the works. Google is striving hard to remove the "human" part of the problem.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  After finished reading the parent comment, > Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms. I can imagine it still muttering "The algorithms said ..." as anti-trust measures reverse-Frankenstein it into hopefully more manageable pieces. I immediately pressed C-f to search the string "paperclip maximizer", and was not disappointed. Thanks for mentioning it.
hitekker 6y ago
> “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is... instinct. Or reflex. Good story. I can imagine what the specialized humans did to the generalist humans eons ago.
smsm42 6y ago
Except in our case, Google's terraforming ships couldn't care less. It's just not part of their programming that there might be some intelligent life out there worth caring about that might be hurt by their actions, so there's no way for them to receive this information. It's not that it's hard to explain, there's nobody to explain it to.
tjalfi 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning this story; I just finished it and it's a great read.

the8472 6y ago

Sounds like a non-aligned AI.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
It essentially is a non-aligned AI. AIs don't need to be implemented in silico. Bureaucracy is by itself a computing medium too.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  That makes me wonder if someone has ever written a scientific paper proving that the bureaucratic processes in place at their company are Turing Complete. You can imagine some sort of Rule 110 cellular automaton being implemented in TPS reports.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    A cellular automaton over office documents would be a nice thing to try! That said, a proof of turing-completeness of bureaucracy is relatively trivial: FROBNICATION QUERY ID [#1234] 1. Requester data [bunch of boxes] 1a. (*) Details on stuffs [bunch of boxes] 1b. (*) Details on different stuffs [bunch of boxes] (...) 4. Additional documents - [Frobnication Registration #432] - [Frobnication Query #1111] -- (*) - Fill section a) if $something. Fill section b) if $somethingelse. With sections 1a/1b implementing conditional branching, and section 4 implementing storage.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    > proving that the bureaucratic processes... are Turing Complete It's called COBOL

ethbr0 6y ago

> Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms That's fine when you're a plucky growth startup. Less fine when you run half the internet. If Google doesn't want to admit it's a mature business and pivot into margin-eating, but risk-reducing support staffing, then okay: break it back up into enough startup-sized chunks that the response failure of one isn't an existential threat to everyone.

nojvek 6y ago
I agree. Google is such a large behemoth who actively tries to avoid customer support if they can. Splitting it to smaller business with a bit of autonomy and not having to rely on ad money fueling everything else means those smaller businesses have to give a shit about customers and compete on even ground. Same applies to Facebook and other tech companies. The root issue is taking huge profits from area of business into other avenues which compete with the market on unfair ground (or out right buying out competition) However anti-trust in US has eroded significantly.
- aerosmile 6y ago
  > However anti-trust in US has eroded significantly. Perhaps compared to the 40s-70s, but certainly not compared to the Reagan era. Starting with the Obama administration, there's been a strong rebirth of the anti-trust movement and it's only gaining momentum (see many recent examples of blocked mergers)[1]. [1] https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s-antitrust-movement https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
  - beerandt 6y ago
    The Obama admin used it only to attack enemies. Renata Hesse was part of that effort, and has since worked for Google and Amazon, and is now expected to be in charge of anti-trust at Biden's DOJ.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  And as long as the internet giants are on the correct side of the culture war there will be scant appetite for breaking them up or reigning them in. As long as you need 5 phone calls to silence someone and erase them from the online, there is no chance in hell that the government will try to break them up.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> It simply lumbers forward, doing its thing. It is to be modeled as a threat not because it is malign, but because it doesn't notice you exist as it takes another step forward. This is a concept that I think deserves more popular currency. Every so often, you step on a snail. People actually hate doing this, because it's gross, and they will actively seek to avoid it. But that doesn't always work, and the fact that the human (1) would have preferred not to step on it; and (2) could, hypothetically, easily have avoided doing so, doesn't make things any better for the snail. This is also what bothers me about people who swim with whales. Whales are very big. They are so big that just being near them can easily kill you, even though the whales generally harbor no ill intent.

erikpukinskis 6y ago
I'm curious if whales more dangerous on an hour-by-hour basis than driving? That's generally my rubric for whether a safety concern is possibly worth avoiding an activity over.
- wott 6y ago
  > I'm curious if whales more dangerous on an hour-by-hour basis than driving? It depends on how many passengers you pack in a whale.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    My understanding is that a Chrysler as big as a whale can seat about 20. (Love Shack, 1989)

prox 6y ago

Your making another perfect case of why Google should be broken up. It’s important that we can choose again.

banjomet 6y ago

Thanks for the story recommendation!

throwaway2048 6y ago

Modern large corporations are just an more inefficient, less effective paperclip maximizer, with humans gumming up the works. Google is striving hard to remove the "human" part of the problem.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
After finished reading the parent comment, > Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms. I can imagine it still muttering "The algorithms said ..." as anti-trust measures reverse-Frankenstein it into hopefully more manageable pieces. I immediately pressed C-f to search the string "paperclip maximizer", and was not disappointed. Thanks for mentioning it.

hitekker 6y ago

> “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is... instinct. Or reflex. Good story. I can imagine what the specialized humans did to the generalist humans eons ago.

smsm42 6y ago

Except in our case, Google's terraforming ships couldn't care less. It's just not part of their programming that there might be some intelligent life out there worth caring about that might be hurt by their actions, so there's no way for them to receive this information. It's not that it's hard to explain, there's nobody to explain it to.

tjalfi 6y ago

Thanks for mentioning this story; I just finished it and it's a great read.