Page's "perfect search" vision, the idea that you can get everything you could need so that you can work on important problems, is the perfect specimen idea from an engineering mind. The problematization of experience is a great tool, but it is not an end, and of the options available it is a pretty humble one.<p>If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have everything they need to work on important problems too, but they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if that were meaningful to them.<p>I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub," and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that separates those cows from people
in a mind indexed like that is probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that perspective are not the same as those cows.<p>We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.