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.
Welcome to Google Island
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#32(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 p…
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 absolut…
Because then you can't sell ads.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#33I 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.
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).
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#34Hmm... 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…
> By now it should be clear that "government" as a tool to social engineer a perfect world, isn't working.
Perfect is unattainable, but engineering a better world seems to be working over the long term (though "engineering" might be overstating the process) however chaotic and back-and-forth things are over any short time scale, and government seems to be a pretty darned important tool in that process.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#35Hmm... 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…
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.
> Technology can never solve social problems.
It certainly can facilitate solutions to social problems.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#36I see it now, Google is an embryonic stage of The Culture [0]. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
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…
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.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#37(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 p…
Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler. Not everything is an argument that needs to be "won" or "lost" though. Sometimes an article is just an article, that's meant to spark a discussion around a topic. Even if the article seems to overtly take a position, that's kind of irrelevant if you think that it's the resulting discussion that matters. Given some of the discussion…
What sucks is that there was already a topic to discuss, and the author changed it. The original idea was simply a place with fewer restrictions, and the author instead decided to talk about a fantasy island anarchy with no rule of law and ridiculous scenarios.
So we can talk about that, if we want. But it seems a lot less interesting and much easier to judge that the actual original idea.
What if we really did have a place where we could use driverless cars on the road right now? Where maybe we didn't have to wait for 10 year trials to start using potentially groundbreaking drugs? Where tax money that would otherwise go to the war on drugs, instead goes to health clinics, and drugs are fully legal. Where maybe the education system isn't set up so that kids forcefully progress at the same rate, with kids of the same age, for the first full 18 years of their lives, without a break, instead of being able to learn at their own pace.
I think there are so many kinds of interesting things to be discussed, which are realistic and apply to our world today. But publications like Wired are apparently not interested in discussing them; only discounting the idea wholesale so they don't have to put any real effort in.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#38But 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.
Except that he's the only one with the root access.
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 absolut…
Because then you can't sell ads.
Google could definitly still sell ads (it doesn't need to give private data to third party to do that).
Re: Welcome to Google Island
#40(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 p…
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 absolut…
> why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my
> data without my permission or a court order?
Options to solve this are to either move Google HQ out of the US to some country without such laws, or lobby for changes to US laws. The first is not practical, and the second takes a long time.