Around 2010 I was invited to interview for Google's SRE team. In the course of preparation for the interview, the Google's HR person appointed to me gave me a

Around 2010 I was invited to interview for Google's SRE team. In the course of preparation for the interview, the Google's HR person appointed to me gave me a list of various questions I'd have to prep for. One of the questions was "what should be the next large project for Google?". My answer, unironically, was "GoogleGovernment". The idea was to build SAP-like suite of programs that a country could then buy or rent and have a fully digital government to run the country... Luckily, that question never came up in the interview, and remained an anecdote I share with other coffee drinkers around the coffee machine. My younger self believed (inspired by a chapter from the UK citizen act translated into Prolog) that the success could be expanded much further (I didn't bother reading the accompanying paper, at least not at that time). While it was already mentioned that there will be people either unable to overpower the computer system making bureaucratic decision as well as those who'd use it to avoid responsibility... I think it's due to the readers here tending to be older. It's hard to appreciate the enthusiasm with which a younger person might believe that such a computer system can be a boon to society. That it can be made to function better than humans currently in charge. And that mistakes, even if discovered, will be addressed in a much more efficient (than live humans would) and fixed in a centralized and timely fashion.