Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money.
This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.
Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives.
Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others, depending on their logical position within the corporation.
The corporations aren't sentient in the collective, though it can be argued many of their constituent cells are. The corporations are able to influence their environment using individual constituent cells to communicate with similar cells in other organisms.
Ultimately, the corporation itself has the goal of producing value for its owners, since its owners provide the working capital necessary for the corporation to function.
The methods corporations use to achieve their goal of returning value can be opaque to the owners and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. Their "reasoning" is a manifest property coming from the interaction of the cells with the environment, the cells interacting with each other (both within and outside the corporation), and other organisms.
(There's the neat rub that individual cells can be constituents of multiple organisms simultaneously, too!)
If the owners stop receiving value and withdraw their working capital the corporation becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids, incorporating unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. This change increases the inscrutability and opacity of the reasoning process. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.
It's going to be interesting when the corporations, talking with other corporations, manifestly decide that they don't need human components anymore. All of that can happen without the pesky need for consciousness, too.
I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.
> If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment. There's plenty of failing businesses with their doors open for this reason.
You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.
Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).
I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.
Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money.
This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.
Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives.
Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others, depending on their logical position within the corporation.
The corporations aren't sentient in the collective, though it can be argued many of their constituent cells are. The corporations are able to influence their environment using individual constituent cells to communicate with similar cells in other organisms.
Ultimately, the corporation itself has the goal of producing value for its owners, since its owners provide the working capital necessary for the corporation to function.
The methods corporations use to achieve their goal of returning value can be opaque to the owners and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. Their "reasoning" is a manifest property coming from the interaction of the cells with the environment, the cells interacting with each other (both within and outside the corporation), and other organisms.
(There's the neat rub that individual cells can be constituents of multiple organisms simultaneously, too!)
If the owners stop receiving value and withdraw their working capital the corporation becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids, incorporating unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. This change increases the inscrutability and opacity of the reasoning process. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.
It's going to be interesting when the corporations, talking with other corporations, manifestly decide that they don't need human components anymore. All of that can happen without the pesky need for consciousness, too.
> made up of individual cells
I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.
> If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.
Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment. There's plenty of failing businesses with their doors open for this reason.
You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.
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Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).
Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Google, as a wise man once said.
All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.
I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.
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I don't think that's necessarily true - some large companies are coöps, they don't seem to be sociopathic?
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