10 ms·

Welcome to Google Island

182 points by scholia 13y ago

incision 13y ago
I see it now, Google is an embryonic stage of The Culture [0]. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
- arethuza 13y ago
  "in practice social convention among the Minds prohibits them from watching, or interfering in, citizens' lives unless requested, or unless they perceive severe risk" One of the cute things about the Culture is how damned nice the Minds are - even when they are effectively gods to their meat friends/pets/therapists.
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    > One of the cute things about the Culture is how damned nice the Minds are Were the Minds (originally) designed to be "nice"? Or have they evolved to be nice because that is an effective way to influence humans? (I've only read one Culture book.)
- Roboprog 13y ago
  I always get a chuckle out of the very idea of "post scarcity". Like there won't be some guy who wants to shovel an entire solar system (or two) into his replicator to make a really cool Dyson yacht, or yacht fleet. Or just flat out enjoys going "Dark Phoenix" and destroying a few stars like shooting cans for target practice. Humans will never have all they want, even though we have enough for subsistance. Only a few would be happy to spend a few years rummaging around in the library between meals.
  - gutnor 13y ago
    It is heavily alluded in the novel that culture citizen have been genetically engineered somewhat to smooth their personality. Except for extreme shyness, they would seem like charismatic well balanced individual (source wikipedia I think). Even the language they speak has been engineered. So in culture world, nobody would be deviant enough to want to do those things. It is a bit like star trek, there must have been a few dark ages (they must have had eugenism gone wrong at some point) before reaching the fully evolved post scarcity society that is the Culture.
    - Roboprog 13y ago
      Interesting, have to read some of it some time. I liked Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and Charles Stross' Singularity Sky. In those, there is a spectrum of of societal levels from Beyond/Escaton to "Zombies"/Unthinking Depths, allowing comparison between levels.
bdz 13y ago
This. Also my first impression was a city like Rapture in Bioshock.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dpcx 13y ago
This is a very scary potential view of the future.
- tixocloud 13y ago
  The article for some strange reason reminds me of Jonestown.
- JonSkeptic 13y ago
  I also do not wish to see Larry Paige naked.
flipgimble 13y ago
While its very interesting to explore and write about the implications of Larry Page's idea of experimentation unfettered by government laws, this reads like a poorly written sci-fi story by someone interested by technology, but not knowledgeable enough to write something remotely credible. It lost me at Google Being, 'stitched from photographs'. It focuses mostly on unfettered data collection, which is the main fear of journalists writing about Google.
- dwild 13y ago
  We should write a similar story about a world where journalists control the decision of everyone with this kind of article...
EFruit 13y ago
I am scared, intrigued, worried, and overall frightened. Not frightened by the article, but by the fact that I can't decide if I am for or against this. I wonder at what phase 'Don't be evil' would break down, or alternatively, when their definition of 'evil' would be changed to exclude what they were doing.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Not frightened by the article, but by the fact that I can't decide if I am for or against this. That's sort of the same reaction I am having. I'm all for getting rid of governments and most of what we call "law" today, but this particular vision of a possible outcome seems a bit disturbing in some ways. But, then again, it's just speculative fiction, not reality...
- ihsw 13y ago
  Personally I find solace in this quote: > That which you can control cannot hurt you. It gives great clarity as to why we cling to technology (and other societal control structures).
dmbaggett 13y ago
Begun the Google Backlash has.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  Yet disappeared the Yoda fad, has not.
martythemaniak 13y ago
I do believe we need a place like that, except I don't think its feasible to do it on Earth - there is simply too much baggage here. Luckily we could be less than a generation away from colonizing Mars - and what better place for the adventurous experimenters to go? Imagine an entire planet where you can do anything you want, but also an incredibly harsh one where the need of survival will drive experimentation and adaptation.
hahainternet 13y ago
This is the worst opinion piece I have ever read. The fact it made it to Wired just devalues the whole magazine in my eyes. Did nobody seriously review this before it was published? Did nobody ask what sort of trauma the writer may have suffered?
mindcrime 13y ago
Hmm... as a Libertarian / Voluntaryist / Anarcho-capitalist / whatever-you-want-to-call it, I am sympathetic to what Larry Page is saying. But there are definitely aspects of this story that are fairly unappealing (Larry Page naked, for starters). I'm not sure what the answer is though: By now it should be clear that "government" as a tool to social engineer a perfect world, isn't working. Corporations are always the villians in this cyberpunk'ish stories, but you don't have corporations without government. But you can have technology without government or corporations, so what happens when the tech itself becomes so powerful that it changes the basic nature of society? Getting rid of government and/or corporations won't help, and if you try to counter technology with more technology you just have an arms race. OK, I'm depressed now. :-(
- scilro 13y ago
  Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy. I'm not actually sure anything can truly solve social problems. I tend to believe that human nature is such that we will always have some level of strife and conflict in our world. I think the best we can do is to minimize it, and create structures that at least respect the sovereignty of the individual. But even what I just said gets to the point of why "we" will never be uniformly happy. Different people have fundamentally different goals and principles and there's objective way to resolve those disputes. My foundational principle is freedom from use of force or aggression, and the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. Other people have more of a utilitarian "the most happiness for the maximum number of people" as their principle. And unless the former inevitably leads to the latter by coincidence, there's really no way to reconcile those two positions, in terms of "how do we solve social problems" since those two people don't even agree on what the problem is in the first place. As for democracy: "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the vote". Even in a representative republic like in the US, democracy is nothing special if you're the under-represented minority who has to suffer the "tyranny of the majority".
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ender7 13y ago
(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs) At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I realized that this article isn't really any different from the other hyperventilating blog posts that have appeared all over HN recently. I'm not saying that these aren't important topics to discuss, but everything I've read recently has come off as a prurient privacy daydream. Whether it's people writing polemic screeds about Glass despite knowing nothing about how the devices actually work (which they make up for by imagining a host of capabilities and features that it doesn't have), or things like this that manufacture a Lovecraftian monstrosity that has as much in common with the Google of today as a pineapple, they're not really saying anything interesting. Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler. Is privacy a central, unsolved challenge for the next decade? Yes. On the one hand Google (and Apple and Amazon and ... ) need to innovate, or we'll soon see posts on HN describing how "Search has stagnated" and "Google is done for". Keyword search isn't good enough anymore, but to do anything more you need to start understanding the user's context. The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. Sadly, no one's really talking about that. (there's an equally interesting discussion to be had regarding public privacy and cameras, but villifying Glass isn't going to make that problem go away.)
- robterrell 13y ago
  The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my data without my permission or a court order? And then earn my trust by defending my right to data privacy?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
atirip 13y ago
But when Google Island is somewhere where are no laws, then anybody with enough muscle can take it away from poor Larry. And nothing Larry can do, because there are no laws. Taker keep.
- abcd_f 13y ago
  Except that he's the only one with the root access.
  - gaius 13y ago
    Quite. In the Star Trek example, the Captain can say "Computer, locate X", and sometimes he says "Computer, deactivate X's devices" and the computer just does it. It's very unlikely, because he's an idealized fictional hero, that anyone with that kind of power in the real work, is as wise and benevolent as Picard - and even Picard makes mistakes.
    - Yen 13y ago
      Two things about Star Trek - 1. Other characters can and do ask for locations. This is apparently considered non-private information. 2. As open and utopian as the Federation may be portrayed to be, Picard is still the commander of a military vessel, so I wouldn't be surprised if in other contexts, computers give out less personal information and grant less power to administrators.
wasd 13y ago
It seems like I may have missed the point or that this struck a sensitive nerve for a few people but I just found it mildly funny. I'm not sure if the piece was supposed to be anything more than a bit of satire and a friendly jab at Google.
ek 13y ago
Ultimately, I think that this article fallaciously anthropomorphizes Google, and that is the reason why the situation it posits seems so scary. Google is a machine, designed by people. It is true that they have lots and lots of data about individuals, but it is being handled by vast amounts of software and hardware alongside so much other data about so many things about people that there is somewhat of an anonymizing factor. If Google were an individual, what they do would certainly be creepy, but they are not. To put paranoia to rest, it might be in their favor to enact transparent safeguards of some sort that assure consumers that their data is in general not being accessed by Google employees or nefarious third parties (the most notable nefarious third party being, of course, the government).
methodin 13y ago
We haven't passed through the digital renaissance yet. Shouldn't be too long (10 years? - right now it's just a party) but until then lines will be gray and rules will be befuddled. You need to have the visionaries to get us through it, though. There aren't many.
bmbyers 13y ago
Point of interest: google has owned an Alpha fighter jet for years http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-fighter-jet-to-air-fleet-15252 http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-fighter-jet-to-air-f...
cmars 13y ago
Lately I have been feeling we as builders had this responsibility to build the Internet that the world needed, and we failed. We were distracted, we got rich, we ignored or misread the needs of our fellow humans. The walled gardens that we now find so insidious and creepy are due to our own failure to empower the users. We made HTTP, SMTP, XMPP protocols. Large companies brought these to the masses, in ways the masses can understand and interact with in their limited capacity... for a price. Can we reclaim humanity's birthright? Can we build a vision of the world we wish to live in, that is accessible to and understandable by many? Or is our entire collective fate to become a monetized click stream of suckers? This article names Google, but to me that is beside the point. Google is a large system set in motion by shareholders and market forces that has equilibrium. It consumes click streams and subscriptions, and excretes money, like others of its kind. Can such an organism ever serve the best interests of humanity all the time? If you find yourself hating Google, better to look within yourself. Do you have the courage to walk away from these kinds of services and build an alternative, however humble it might be, that empowers and liberates your fellow humans? I am still working on this in myself. My email is still gmail, I would miss some personalities in my G+ circles, but I am uncomfortable, and I find current trends unsettling. (edited for grammar)
farinasa 13y ago
The biggest blunder of this article is how they convey Google. Do they know a little more about me than I like? Sure. But so does Facebook, Microsoft, and OkCupid!. The difference here is that if I want out of Google, I simply go to the dashboard and erase my history. I don't know how deep their erasure goes, but it is certainly more comforting than what any other company offers. Facebook holds your info for a week and if you sign back in, the week restarts. During that week they goad you to come back. Not exactly cooperative. And lets vilify Google first and foremost (/s). I run Ghostery. I am much more scared by the number of unique tracking companies. I don't know anything about them. How could I even begin to tell nearly 1500 known tracking companies to leave me alone? Simply telling them to leave me alone gives them data about me, which they certainly must keep if I am to be left alone.
- mortehu 13y ago
  > Facebook holds your info for a week and if you sign back in, the week restarts. I think this might be intended as protection against attacks on your account. If someone gets ahold of your password and deletes your account, it's nice that you'll be able to restore it for some time after, isn't it? I agree that the wording of the e-mails they send when this happens is unfortunate.
doctorstupid 13y ago
“It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream.” This metaphor of the electrolyte solution is nice. Obviously an allusion to a seemingly innocuous service which ends up tracking every aspect of one's life.

182 points by scholia 13y ago

I see it now, Google is an embryonic stage of The Culture [0]. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

arethuza 13y ago
"in practice social convention among the Minds prohibits them from watching, or interfering in, citizens' lives unless requested, or unless they perceive severe risk" One of the cute things about the Culture is how damned nice the Minds are - even when they are effectively gods to their meat friends/pets/therapists.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  > One of the cute things about the Culture is how damned nice the Minds are Were the Minds (originally) designed to be "nice"? Or have they evolved to be nice because that is an effective way to influence humans? (I've only read one Culture book.)
Roboprog 13y ago
I always get a chuckle out of the very idea of "post scarcity". Like there won't be some guy who wants to shovel an entire solar system (or two) into his replicator to make a really cool Dyson yacht, or yacht fleet. Or just flat out enjoys going "Dark Phoenix" and destroying a few stars like shooting cans for target practice. Humans will never have all they want, even though we have enough for subsistance. Only a few would be happy to spend a few years rummaging around in the library between meals.
- gutnor 13y ago
  It is heavily alluded in the novel that culture citizen have been genetically engineered somewhat to smooth their personality. Except for extreme shyness, they would seem like charismatic well balanced individual (source wikipedia I think). Even the language they speak has been engineered. So in culture world, nobody would be deviant enough to want to do those things. It is a bit like star trek, there must have been a few dark ages (they must have had eugenism gone wrong at some point) before reaching the fully evolved post scarcity society that is the Culture.
  - Roboprog 13y ago
    Interesting, have to read some of it some time. I liked Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and Charles Stross' Singularity Sky. In those, there is a spectrum of of societal levels from Beyond/Escaton to "Zombies"/Unthinking Depths, allowing comparison between levels.

bdz 13y ago

This. Also my first impression was a city like Rapture in Bioshock.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dpcx 13y ago

This is a very scary potential view of the future.

tixocloud 13y ago
The article for some strange reason reminds me of Jonestown.
JonSkeptic 13y ago
I also do not wish to see Larry Paige naked.

flipgimble 13y ago

While its very interesting to explore and write about the implications of Larry Page's idea of experimentation unfettered by government laws, this reads like a poorly written sci-fi story by someone interested by technology, but not knowledgeable enough to write something remotely credible. It lost me at Google Being, 'stitched from photographs'. It focuses mostly on unfettered data collection, which is the main fear of journalists writing about Google.

dwild 13y ago
We should write a similar story about a world where journalists control the decision of everyone with this kind of article...

EFruit 13y ago

I am scared, intrigued, worried, and overall frightened. Not frightened by the article, but by the fact that I can't decide if I am for or against this. I wonder at what phase 'Don't be evil' would break down, or alternatively, when their definition of 'evil' would be changed to exclude what they were doing.

mindcrime 13y ago
Not frightened by the article, but by the fact that I can't decide if I am for or against this. That's sort of the same reaction I am having. I'm all for getting rid of governments and most of what we call "law" today, but this particular vision of a possible outcome seems a bit disturbing in some ways. But, then again, it's just speculative fiction, not reality...
ihsw 13y ago
Personally I find solace in this quote: > That which you can control cannot hurt you. It gives great clarity as to why we cling to technology (and other societal control structures).

dmbaggett 13y ago

Begun the Google Backlash has.

andyhmltn 13y ago
Yet disappeared the Yoda fad, has not.

martythemaniak 13y ago

I do believe we need a place like that, except I don't think its feasible to do it on Earth - there is simply too much baggage here. Luckily we could be less than a generation away from colonizing Mars - and what better place for the adventurous experimenters to go? Imagine an entire planet where you can do anything you want, but also an incredibly harsh one where the need of survival will drive experimentation and adaptation.

hahainternet 13y ago

This is the worst opinion piece I have ever read. The fact it made it to Wired just devalues the whole magazine in my eyes. Did nobody seriously review this before it was published? Did nobody ask what sort of trauma the writer may have suffered?

mindcrime 13y ago

Hmm... as a Libertarian / Voluntaryist / Anarcho-capitalist / whatever-you-want-to-call it, I am sympathetic to what Larry Page is saying. But there are definitely aspects of this story that are fairly unappealing (Larry Page naked, for starters). I'm not sure what the answer is though: By now it should be clear that "government" as a tool to social engineer a perfect world, isn't working. Corporations are always the villians in this cyberpunk'ish stories, but you don't have corporations without government. But you can have technology without government or corporations, so what happens when the tech itself becomes so powerful that it changes the basic nature of society? Getting rid of government and/or corporations won't help, and if you try to counter technology with more technology you just have an arms race. OK, I'm depressed now. :-(

scilro 13y ago
Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Technology can never solve social problems. The answer is to simply work on fixing the problems we have in society the only way we actually can: through discourse, activism, democracy. I'm not actually sure anything can truly solve social problems. I tend to believe that human nature is such that we will always have some level of strife and conflict in our world. I think the best we can do is to minimize it, and create structures that at least respect the sovereignty of the individual. But even what I just said gets to the point of why "we" will never be uniformly happy. Different people have fundamentally different goals and principles and there's objective way to resolve those disputes. My foundational principle is freedom from use of force or aggression, and the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. Other people have more of a utilitarian "the most happiness for the maximum number of people" as their principle. And unless the former inevitably leads to the latter by coincidence, there's really no way to reconcile those two positions, in terms of "how do we solve social problems" since those two people don't even agree on what the problem is in the first place. As for democracy: "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the vote". Even in a representative republic like in the US, democracy is nothing special if you're the under-represented minority who has to suffer the "tyranny of the majority".

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ender7 13y ago

(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs) At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I realized that this article isn't really any different from the other hyperventilating blog posts that have appeared all over HN recently. I'm not saying that these aren't important topics to discuss, but everything I've read recently has come off as a prurient privacy daydream. Whether it's people writing polemic screeds about Glass despite knowing nothing about how the devices actually work (which they make up for by imagining a host of capabilities and features that it doesn't have), or things like this that manufacture a Lovecraftian monstrosity that has as much in common with the Google of today as a pineapple, they're not really saying anything interesting. Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler. Is privacy a central, unsolved challenge for the next decade? Yes. On the one hand Google (and Apple and Amazon and ... ) need to innovate, or we'll soon see posts on HN describing how "Search has stagnated" and "Google is done for". Keyword search isn't good enough anymore, but to do anything more you need to start understanding the user's context. The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. Sadly, no one's really talking about that. (there's an equally interesting discussion to be had regarding public privacy and cameras, but villifying Glass isn't going to make that problem go away.)

robterrell 13y ago
The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my data without my permission or a court order? And then earn my trust by defending my right to data privacy?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

atirip 13y ago

But when Google Island is somewhere where are no laws, then anybody with enough muscle can take it away from poor Larry. And nothing Larry can do, because there are no laws. Taker keep.

abcd_f 13y ago
Except that he's the only one with the root access.
- gaius 13y ago
  Quite. In the Star Trek example, the Captain can say "Computer, locate X", and sometimes he says "Computer, deactivate X's devices" and the computer just does it. It's very unlikely, because he's an idealized fictional hero, that anyone with that kind of power in the real work, is as wise and benevolent as Picard - and even Picard makes mistakes.
  - Yen 13y ago
    Two things about Star Trek - 1. Other characters can and do ask for locations. This is apparently considered non-private information. 2. As open and utopian as the Federation may be portrayed to be, Picard is still the commander of a military vessel, so I wouldn't be surprised if in other contexts, computers give out less personal information and grant less power to administrators.

wasd 13y ago

It seems like I may have missed the point or that this struck a sensitive nerve for a few people but I just found it mildly funny. I'm not sure if the piece was supposed to be anything more than a bit of satire and a friendly jab at Google.

ek 13y ago

Ultimately, I think that this article fallaciously anthropomorphizes Google, and that is the reason why the situation it posits seems so scary. Google is a machine, designed by people. It is true that they have lots and lots of data about individuals, but it is being handled by vast amounts of software and hardware alongside so much other data about so many things about people that there is somewhat of an anonymizing factor. If Google were an individual, what they do would certainly be creepy, but they are not. To put paranoia to rest, it might be in their favor to enact transparent safeguards of some sort that assure consumers that their data is in general not being accessed by Google employees or nefarious third parties (the most notable nefarious third party being, of course, the government).

methodin 13y ago

We haven't passed through the digital renaissance yet. Shouldn't be too long (10 years? - right now it's just a party) but until then lines will be gray and rules will be befuddled. You need to have the visionaries to get us through it, though. There aren't many.

bmbyers 13y ago

Point of interest: google has owned an Alpha fighter jet for years http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-fighter-jet-to-air-fleet-15252 http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-fighter-jet-to-air-f...

cmars 13y ago

Lately I have been feeling we as builders had this responsibility to build the Internet that the world needed, and we failed. We were distracted, we got rich, we ignored or misread the needs of our fellow humans. The walled gardens that we now find so insidious and creepy are due to our own failure to empower the users. We made HTTP, SMTP, XMPP protocols. Large companies brought these to the masses, in ways the masses can understand and interact with in their limited capacity... for a price. Can we reclaim humanity's birthright? Can we build a vision of the world we wish to live in, that is accessible to and understandable by many? Or is our entire collective fate to become a monetized click stream of suckers? This article names Google, but to me that is beside the point. Google is a large system set in motion by shareholders and market forces that has equilibrium. It consumes click streams and subscriptions, and excretes money, like others of its kind. Can such an organism ever serve the best interests of humanity all the time? If you find yourself hating Google, better to look within yourself. Do you have the courage to walk away from these kinds of services and build an alternative, however humble it might be, that empowers and liberates your fellow humans? I am still working on this in myself. My email is still gmail, I would miss some personalities in my G+ circles, but I am uncomfortable, and I find current trends unsettling. (edited for grammar)

farinasa 13y ago

The biggest blunder of this article is how they convey Google. Do they know a little more about me than I like? Sure. But so does Facebook, Microsoft, and OkCupid!. The difference here is that if I want out of Google, I simply go to the dashboard and erase my history. I don't know how deep their erasure goes, but it is certainly more comforting than what any other company offers. Facebook holds your info for a week and if you sign back in, the week restarts. During that week they goad you to come back. Not exactly cooperative. And lets vilify Google first and foremost (/s). I run Ghostery. I am much more scared by the number of unique tracking companies. I don't know anything about them. How could I even begin to tell nearly 1500 known tracking companies to leave me alone? Simply telling them to leave me alone gives them data about me, which they certainly must keep if I am to be left alone.

mortehu 13y ago
> Facebook holds your info for a week and if you sign back in, the week restarts. I think this might be intended as protection against attacks on your account. If someone gets ahold of your password and deletes your account, it's nice that you'll be able to restore it for some time after, isn't it? I agree that the wording of the e-mails they send when this happens is unfortunate.

doctorstupid 13y ago

“It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream.” This metaphor of the electrolyte solution is nice. Obviously an allusion to a seemingly innocuous service which ends up tracking every aspect of one's life.