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WebSonic.nl [PersonRank 10]

Sunday, January 10, 2010
14 years ago14,878 views

Nice article Philipp!. Is this the future we can expect? Some parts I would get used to, like the The Google phone Nexus Nine, the 3D overlays, 4D ping pong and working one hour a day :-)

Neo [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

So a future controlled by a computer president that cannot make mistakes? Sounds dystopian to me.

There's a story about a computer brain that runs the world and entertains the humans so it can keep them powering the machinery of the computer's existence. It's called the Matrix.

Luka [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I really enjoyed this one!

Pete [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Nothing new.

Just google ;) around and you will find google-is-everything stories.

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

The TrulySafeSearch was an interesting new concept (or rather a more explicitly designed concept), good article altogether, thanks.

Jill Whalen [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

I recently read Jules Verne's "In The Year 2889" which was eerily similar to what we already have in 2010. I think this post should be the new 2889 (only it will probably happen long before then).

Foot In Mouth [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

An excellent conceptual progression of the influence of Google on the world around us. I would say the two small weaknesses of the story were the persistence of the mouse as an object like we know today, and that his interactions were through a desktop instead of a google that moves with us, is embeded into our glasses, on everyday objects around us instead of a 3d "2nd life" world via google.

Short Story [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Have not read a good sci-fact short story in a while.

Banus [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Really liked it.
The laziness in a massively automated society and the digital shell remind me a little of "Riders of the Purple Wage"... and the ubiquitous, crowdsourced machine learning doesn't seem so far from reality.

Steve Ardire [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

esp like NLP search adjusts to your preferences, augmented reality overlays, AI for real-time data w/ sensors.... When ;)

Shadow14l [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I hope you're not serious about this, because if you are, you really need to get a life...

Gil Reich [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Reminds me of the prologue to The Emperor's New Mind. I accept Penrose's conclusions there. Science fiction keeps presenting these kinds of scenarios of AI, robots, etc. becoming more human-like. But instead machines keep getting better at complementing people, not replacing them.

Morpheus [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Yes Neo, now you understand... Google is ... the Matrix

Sergey [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

What a fucking pile of horseshit. This is the dumbest goddamned thing I've read in ages. It's like 1984, except you're no Orwell and can't recognize how awful this would be for all of us to have Google controlling all of our information and communications. [personal attack removed]

prabst! [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I was really into your spec-fic short until the "game" portion. You've got some logical ideas regarding the near-term future involving a likely present mega company/corporation.

I see some crackdown coming down the pipe on google. they're just getting too big.

Tim [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

That was fun, but I didn't see much about advertising.

sel [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

this was pretty scary especially the last part about the president... hope google paid you enough for that pice of propaganda...

compwhizii [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Whoever took this article seriously (Sergey and Shadow14l) are complete [personal attack removed].

john [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Wow what a depressing future. I'm glad your vision will never happen

Philip [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Terrifying! A world run by google – essentially a dictatorship! But the technology sounds awesome...

Matt Cutts [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I enjoyed the story, but the comments are nearly as good. :)

[Posted from an EEE PC that I hacked to run Chrome OS. :)]

ArpitNext [PersonRank 7]

14 years ago #

lol. ;)

Some people are still living in a world "Built By Microsoft". Unfortunately, as a (dumb) end-user we don't use computer – we just live in a world built by any tech company. And, currently we are in transition period (MS to GOOG)

macbeach [PersonRank 6]

14 years ago #

I certainly like the part about the fast-boot PC. More about that later, first a few quibbles:

I don't think it will be possible for Google to dominate the Internet to the same extent that Microsoft (coupled with Intel) has dominated the desktop. Furthermore I think the people at Google understand this. The relative monoculture of Windows/Intel has been bad for technology, bad for our economy, bad for our government, and even bad for Microsoft in the long run as they have approached a place where almost nobody trusts them any more and that may be difficult for them to change (assuming they try).

Making the Internet the hub around which computing revolves has the advantage of giving us more choice than we can shake a stick at (an old expression meaning "a lot"). As newer Internet standards solidify to some extent the cost of putting a new concept up for trial will be pretty much equal to what you paid to write the software, or if you are a do-it-yourselfer, the cost of your time.

The PC, when it first arrived in its several different forms, offered people the freedom to do things their own way rather than being forced to do things as the "Data Center" personnel dictated. This had both good and bad aspects. The good was that we didn't have malware back then and on surviving mainframe systems such things are still non-existent. The bad, and this carried over into LAN administration as well, is that the end user and the administrator (LAN administrator in this case) didn't always see eye to eye on what "privileges" the end user should have in setting up his own desktop.

Internet standards old and new are going to have to take security seriously, and with that will certainly come limitations. But Windows and Office have taught us that the advantages of having something the user thinks of as "data" such as a spreadsheet automatically run programs of an arbitrary nature was a brain dead idea to begin with. Microsoft used this capability as a comparative advantage against other spreadsheets, while security specialists were screaming their heads off that this shouldn't be allowed. Is there any doubt left that trying to convince even the moderately intelligent users not to click on things they don't understand is a losing proposition?

Finally, I think part of the wrong road we went down with the modern PC was the quickly established concept that it was OK for sophisticated software to make up for the shortcomings of hardware. The notion that every 19 milliseconds the CPU had to check for keyboard input was stupid. On top of that early PC systems piled everything that needed to be "timed". A CPU that was originally designed to power dishwashers was hardly up to the task of replacing mainframes that already had virtual memory, virtual disks, multiple virtual machines, and supported thousands of users accessing the same files at the same time. Many people think of these things as modern inventions, but we have been re-inventing the wheel now for many years and I don't think desktop systems have caught up with mainframes yet as they are a moving target still.

The fact that so much of what we wanted our "general purpose" desktop systems to do are in fact done by those appliances for which the Intel CPUs were originally designed. Instant-on for instance is still taken for granted in most appliances, even though they are now mostly run by internal computers. Why? Because those appliance systems ask a limited CPU to do only a limited set of things, well within the hardware's capability set.

I was going to give an example from personal experience, but that would take three more paragraphs. Suffice it to say that all it took for PC boot-up times to be fixed was for the right people to think about the problem. Clearly those people don't work at Microsoft, or Intel, but I'm quite sure that once those entrenched employees see "how it's done" they will improve their own systems as well and we will have not only "instant-on" computers but as a byproduct computers that are not so easily taken over by malware. If none of the other fantasies in your story come true, these two things will be worth our escape from the tyranny of the monoculture desktop PC.

Internet Strategist [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

I applaud you for seeing the big picture and recognizing that the Corporate elite are merging into the Google Borg. Few recognize that almost all publicly-traded corporations can be controlled by the same people and those same people control all countries by controlling the money supply.

I know that most don't see this and hold out little hope of a mainstream awakening. Only the second coming will save us from ourselves.

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I was thinking this story over this evening and realised the president thing wouldn't be entirely impossible, imagine the following scenario (I am a real poor writer, but I hope I get the idea across):

   In 2012 – right before the US elections – Google introduces Google politics, a service that automatically predicts which candidate is going to win. The service took a comparable approach as the previously used Google flu service, but all of google's services were tied in. After a few elections – in 2028 – people started to realise these predictions were always correct and people started regarding them as the final election outcome. Soon after that – in 2031 – the service was enhanced to predict any new laws and political decisions, mainly based on artificially analysed communication between everybody and after some tweaking – around they year 2034 – this service also becomes 'perfect'. Once politicians saw that Google politics had predicted that their view won't make it, they simply gave up on it and thus the Google president had been born.

David Mulder [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Post Scripto: I now realise I twice put a verb in the wrong tense and once made a typing error, my apologies for that xD

Oscar Gomez [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I like how people can imagine a time like this, but cannot imagine a time where we wont need money... where we can allocate resources using up to date technology instead of something that was invented more than 3000 years ago...

"Oh you cannot buy this apple because you don't have enough money... but we have plenty of apples." We are uncivilized when there are people dying every second from starvation and preventable diseases. We need to start using our technology instead of putting limits on it because of money.

Rob [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

"One hour of work and seven hours of play"

We've been hearing how computers and machines will reduce the amount of time we have to work since at least the 50's. Of course it just hasn't happened, and I doubt it ever will. Like all stories of the future, it seem either either picture a utopian/dystopian vision, but coloured with the technology of the present.

Si [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

I can't figure out if that's a utopia or dystopia you're writing about. But I prefer World of Goo's idea that the Internet will just be abandoned.

Tau-Mu [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Philipp you missed the part where Google Health cured the President using its real-time body sensors and modifiers via Nexus 9.

Tommy [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Have to say I was waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Other than that, a useful interlude.

Psyphi [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I enjoyed this article. But the computer has a mouse? Why?

Anuj [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

Nice one.. Reminded of reading Asimov long time back

Fred [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

As much as the "story" is an exaggeration, it does highlight our dangerous dependancy on one large and highly secretive "black box" company, without much introspection or analysis of pros & cons on our part.

Lured by the never-ending "free" features offered by Google, we eagerly give up our email communications (Gmail users), browsing & search habits (nearly everyone), physical location (Nexus owners), voice (Google Voice), documents and data (Google Doc users), viewing habits (YouTube), purchasing choices, etc etc to be scrutinized and analyzed by the über-geeks of Mountain View.

"Don't worry", we keep hearing, "and trust us. We are not evil! Besides, competition is always only a click away". Soothed by this argument, we go on as before. As time passes, it becomes increasingly unclear which "competition" Google is talking about as are fewer and fewer independent web companies who are not feeding data back to Google.

They keep asking for more. They want to our health records, our off-line preferences, our thoughts (and you had better not be thinking any "private" thoughts you want nobody to find out about, or Eric Schmidt will have no qualms about turning you over to the appropriate authorities).

My question: when will this end and why is no one questioning this madness?

BlueToad [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I thought that article was well thought out and could come true... word for word.

Thanks for the read, its brain food

Abe [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Obama scares the hell out of me ever since I read and watched the videos of an online game’s history section that asks a simple question of ‘Is it real or is it just a game’? You will be surprised. [usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php]

A S [PersonRank 3]

14 years ago #

Good post. Been awhile since you had posted something like this.

Only thing: when the technology is so far advanced that there is an AI president, we won't have computers that are separate from us. Computers and Internet connectivity will be embedded. All of us will a kind of cyborgs.

A S [PersonRank 3]

14 years ago #

In the previous comment, I meant that computers and Internet connectivity will be embedded inside our bodies.

john conrou [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Totally kewl. Nice work... I thoroughly enjoyed it.

killerbunny [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Cute story. Dystopia a la Phillip Dick. Loved the faux angry response by fake poster Sergey.

AssortedTrails [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

It does seem like a rather boring lifestyle, a very creative article nonetheless...

scjm [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Splendid story, Philipp.

Scott Rouse [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Sounds good. I say let's go ahead and start living that way.

Mysterius [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Intriguing vision. Human introspective value rivaled only by the range of comments provoked. ;)

lailai [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

You forgot the part where everyone work in google because that is the only company that exists

billythekid [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I don't know whether to embrace or cry at the thought, so for the moment, I'm content to chuckle.

António Meireles (aka doniphon) [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Interesting, really. But by focusing too much in the (concrete) stuff we _expect_ google to pop some day, it ends missing the bigguer picture.

A much more rich, and nightmarish vision, imho is this one, from Cory Doctorow's, published in 2008 – http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

Anyway, there's a point on this _short_ story very worth noting – the dangers of Google, as the only and ultimate _normalizer_ – the entity that defines what is and isn't _real_ and/or true. tricky and scary. Not just because we get Google as some sort of tech deity bust mostly because it will end 'generating' an army of zombies – people that grew without the need to think, research, contradict, and so on,

We are already on the road for that ... how many of 'us' engineers can pass without a PC or calculator, and Math/science pro's ...

Ultimately Google's biguest threat is not absolute control – is to learn to a society that simply gets all (knowledge) as granted and simply forgot what _really_ is to grow and think .

Gaurav Agarwal [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Although I a great Google Fan..and really admire their innovation, this kind of future looks scary.. yet I love the gadgets ;)

clint boulton [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Don't forget the Google-paid police!

Artur Artamonov [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

In my mind it is hell. When you can do your own mistakes.

John Doe [PersonRank 1]

14 years ago #

This sounds to me ... apocalyptic. Where are Pete's real friends ? This is really scarry! I hope we will never reach this point. This fantasy is sick.

seventh son [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

600613...the number of the beast!

Skills [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

I welcome our Google overlords! 1 hour a day of work will bring on a new golden age of art and music.

Adam [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

This is a scary vision of the future...

Gerusz [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Wow, part awesome (holophone, AR workplace), part scary. I hope bots will be three-laws compliant, and the President will also have the 0th implemented correctly :-)

rstlne [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

Of course, even in the Google future, they'll still be censored by China.

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