Check the idea
A story about the possible appearance of the near future, which may lead to an unfavorable development of search networks.
Herman became a developer because he wanted to create a better world by creating programs. He diligently studied computer science to know about a variety of technologies and tools that can automate various activities. Not being a genius engineer, he looked around at the world, looking for something that had not yet been improved by other people, something that could be optimized. The goal was the embodiment of desire, if you do not stand on a par with the greatest scientists, then at least leave a trace about yourself in history larger than carbon.
Discovering a process that can be simplified, or a device that can be upgraded, became an incredibly difficult task in the middle of the twenty-first century — the century of marketing and optimization. Any miserable success in the second, was presented first as a colossal breakthrough of all mankind. Despite the insignificance of individual achievements, their incremental changes really allowed the majority of the world's population to make their lives more comfortable. However, Hermann still kept confidence that the potential for improvement was not exhausted, and good ideas lay under my feet, the main thing is to stumble over them.
The position of a leading programmer in a company that is average by the standards of a megapolis, allowed during working hours to do serious things, and in free time to travel, learn about the world. Herman tried to visit the country, life, culture and climatic conditions which differed markedly. He believed that only in this way, having independently grasped all the diversity of human activities, it is possible to make any significant change in the conduct of the social and economic processes of society.
')
Sometimes Herman encountered problems, and in his head ideas arose to solve them. But after talking with friends and colleagues, having studied the issue on the Internet, he sadly understood that in one form or another the solution had already been invented, and the commercial niche was occupied by a solid company. Negative emotions that arose from an understanding of the secondary nature of their falsely unique insights, however, quickly faded away, because there were ways to remove obstacles, tested and available for use here and now.
In the evening of one of the days off, Herman went to visit friends who celebrated housewarming. The apartment was in a one-story house on one of the upper floors. Despite the fact that there were five elevators in the stairwell, we had to wait for the arrival of at least one for quite a long time. Above each pair of doors hiding a mine, there was a small scoreboard, where white numbers on a purple background displayed a number — the number of the floor where the cabin stopped. The values ​​"54", "79", "67", "98", "91" were on. Probably a few minutes earlier, people had gone to these floors, and the elevators stayed there waiting for the next call.
Listening to the echoing sound of the motor running during the lift, Herman asked the question "Are there elevators that accumulate statistics on movements and do not stand idle at the moment of waiting, but move to the floor from which the most likely call will be made at the current time?". Hardly stepping on the threshold of the apartment and bringing congratulations to the owners, he went to the computer to find the answer to his question on the Internet. Having entered the query “an elevator that predicts a call floor” and did not find examples of ready-made implementations, but only a few such ideas were expressed, Herman was delighted that he had found a worthwhile undertaking that could save a lot of time every day. Then, deciding to start a technical study a month later during the holidays, he returned to his friends to celebrate.
New housing was for friends - a young couple, only the beginning of a series of pleasant phenomena, because after a week her husband, also a developer, was invited for an interview at company G., the owner of the largest search network, and a month later, after passing through several stages of the interview, a rental agreement was signed. In the interval between these episodes, a sad event occurred for Hermann - the same company announced the receipt of a patent for the “smart elevator” system, which will reduce the average waiting time for a person to lift. Having studied the patent, Herman bitterly discovered that he contains all the ideas that had recently appeared to him, and decided that a friend could study the history of visits to his browser, and during the interview he could propose this idea for implementation.
This conclusion was logical in view of the current situation in the world. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the business of advertising-earning companies was unstable. Over the previous decades, it has been possible to impose on consumers a multitude of devices for home, car, and personal consumption, on the basis of which extensive information was collected about users to display the most relevant advertising. As a result, the advertising market has reached the limit, and all subsequent attempts to make it more profitable failed. In this regard, the company sought to squeeze all the juice out of their projects and subordinates, trying to lure the most enterprising employees to their staff, expecting them to be able to offer successful ventures. Those who quit or failed interviews were blacklisted as waste material. As for the intellectual control system of the elevator, during the year it was sold, put on sale and brought the company substantial revenues.
One of the interests of Herman was sport. He dreamed of running a marathon. The study of training methods was accompanied by viewing statistics of world records and fixing an interesting fact. Over the past fifty years, each new record gave a relative improvement over the previous one by less than a thousandth. For comparison, in the middle of the twentieth century, athletes managed to update the record by a few hundredths, and by the beginning of the millennium no more than a hundredth. From these data followed the conclusion that the results reached the line above which one could not jump - honestly, without doping, people could not overcome the marathon in less than two hours. Herman thought “That's it! Here technologies may help. ”
One of the ways to improve the result of the marathon runners is to use the help of pacemakers - runners, who set the pace in a certain part of the course. Herman came up with the use of augmented reality glasses, which will draw a person pacemaker on the road in front of the runner throughout the marathon. Having checked his idea with a search network, namely the query “pacemaker for marathoners in augmented reality,” he decided to start its implementation from next week simultaneously with the start of his own preparatory training sessions. For both classes, he decided to allocate a whole year.
A couple of days later a phone call rang out - an invitation for an interview was received from company G. The result of the call was an agreement on full-time communication on Monday next week. The stock in a few days allowed me to prepare well, because Herman, in his view, showed himself to recruiters from the best side. A day after the interview, the news was announced - the company received a patent for the application of the augmented reality application “Pacemaker Racing”. The announcement excited Hermann and convinced that you need to get settled in Germany to work with this project and to translate the idea that interested him.
However, the received notification letter instead of describing the time and place of the meeting for the next conversation contained information that there are currently no suitable vacancies for the interviewee. Six months later, the working system was presented to the public, points with it were awarded to several dozens of the best marathon athletes. Over the next year and a half, all of them improved their personal results, and one did what seemed impossible - finishing in the World Marathon Majors marathon with a result at 1:58:08. After this event, the functions of the system were expanded to imitate the domestic, and it itself became paid. professional runners and cyclists began to massively purchase commercial designs, which brought a huge income and allowed to monopolize the sphere of professional sports applications.
While the marathon runners, erasing their sneakers, were chasing the image of a pacemaker on glasses, Herman was sorry for the lost opportunity to realize himself. Almost every day he remembered the success of a friend and his failure. These reflections brought torment and forced to reflect in the search for flaws. And suddenly Herman noticed a strange coincidence. The announcement of the issuance of patents for the elevator and pacemaker appeared after the passage of the first interview in G. both Hermann and his friend. Remembering the rumors that for the last couple of years, giant companies have been developing something new that allows them to get a steady stream of money again, Herman suggested that companies have learned to read people's minds. Realizing that the thesis is ridiculous, for the sake of interest, he nevertheless made a request in the search network, trying to find information about the reading of a person’s thoughts. And although among the materials found there were only charlatans, after searching the keywords for a search, it became clear where the key was. Search query. Before inviting a friend for an interview, a search query was made about a smart elevator, which the company then realized. Before the company invited Herman himself, he made a request for a pacemaker in augmented reality. The answer was simple, logical, but required verification.
With the simplification of the delivery of items by shipment on drones, the consumption of goods by mankind has significantly increased. With the increase in consumption, waste increased, a smaller part of which was processed in various ways. But the rest of the garbage was practically not destroyed, since the incineration plants were banned due to environmental damage, as a result of which large land areas began to turn into huge dumps. To test the hypothesis of theft of ideas through the analysis of search queries, Herman decided to invent and enter into the search query an idea that could partially solve the garbage problem, if it were not too incredible. Most recently, while traveling, he flew over the volcano. This led to the thought “if the goods can be delivered by the drones to the buyer, then why not take out the waste with drones and dump them into the mouths of active volcanoes where the garbage will be destroyed by lava?”, Which was reduced to the search query “garbage removal by drones for destruction in the volcanic lava” .
A week later, Herman was convinced that he was right - the company announced a patent for the idea that they had invented. There were no invitations for an interview - the previous failure resulted in a blacklist. Began active development, the company fanned the hype in the media, attracting more and more interest in the project. However, less than a year later the project was closed due to unprofitability and failure to achieve the goal. Volcanic emission of sulfur vapor, high temperatures, constantly occurring small eruptions damaged the mechanisms of drones, because of which they either came into disrepair, or fell into the vent with the load, or dumped debris past the vent, causing it to slide to the foot of the volcano, forming new landfills.
While the company was conducting experiments, Herman came up with a few more dubious concepts, the search queries about which, for the purity of the experiment, introduced through the computers of their friends. After their owners were invited to G.'s company for an interview, and patents were filed for all plans, there was not a shadow of doubt left - the company steals other people's ideas, selecting them from search queries.
Life principles asserted that people should be told the truth in order to end the gratuitous exploitation of the labor of others. But how to do this if the truth is so fantastic that no one would believe in it? Herman decides to describe everything in the form of a story, replacing the names, the name of the organization and ideas. In the text editor of the company M. history was written in the same breath until late at night. The proofreading of the text was left for the evening of the next day. Sleepy morning with a cup of coffee in hand passed for parsing incoming emails. Immediately, several letters from acquaintances contained enthusiastic reviews with the same reference to the entry in M.’s literary blog. Turning to the proposed address, Herman realizes with horror that in the article, on behalf of the artificial intelligence developed by M., his essay was published, slightly edited, and the time of publication coincides with the moment of the last editing of the file containing the source text.
Paranoia filled the kitchen. It became unbearably disgusting that the modern IT world was built on the universal absorption of ideas from people who are not even aware of this. The way out of this situation for himself, Herman chose the distance from the informational humanity. He would love to go as far as possible from the planet, but humanity has not yet created colonies outside the Earth. However, there is still a poorly explored territory on it - Antarctica, which calls to conquer it as part of a multi-year Antarctic mission as a system administrator. A minimum of communication with the outside world, the dazzling whiteness of ice and snow, daily scientific experiments in the company of like-minded enthusiasts are all that a person needs in order not to feel lonely and realize their potential for the benefit of humanity.
Herman became a developer because he wanted to create a better world by creating programs. He diligently studied computer science to know about a variety of technologies and tools that can automate various activities. Not being a genius engineer, he looked around at the world, looking for something that had not yet been improved by other people, something that could be optimized. The goal was the embodiment of desire, if you do not stand on a par with the greatest scientists, then at least leave a trace about yourself in history larger than carbon.
Discovering a process that can be simplified, or a device that can be upgraded, became an incredibly difficult task in the middle of the twenty-first century — the century of marketing and optimization. Any miserable success in the second, was presented first as a colossal breakthrough of all mankind. Despite the insignificance of individual achievements, their incremental changes really allowed the majority of the world's population to make their lives more comfortable. However, Hermann still kept confidence that the potential for improvement was not exhausted, and good ideas lay under my feet, the main thing is to stumble over them.
The position of a leading programmer in a company that is average by the standards of a megapolis, allowed during working hours to do serious things, and in free time to travel, learn about the world. Herman tried to visit the country, life, culture and climatic conditions which differed markedly. He believed that only in this way, having independently grasped all the diversity of human activities, it is possible to make any significant change in the conduct of the social and economic processes of society.
')
Sometimes Herman encountered problems, and in his head ideas arose to solve them. But after talking with friends and colleagues, having studied the issue on the Internet, he sadly understood that in one form or another the solution had already been invented, and the commercial niche was occupied by a solid company. Negative emotions that arose from an understanding of the secondary nature of their falsely unique insights, however, quickly faded away, because there were ways to remove obstacles, tested and available for use here and now.
In the evening of one of the days off, Herman went to visit friends who celebrated housewarming. The apartment was in a one-story house on one of the upper floors. Despite the fact that there were five elevators in the stairwell, we had to wait for the arrival of at least one for quite a long time. Above each pair of doors hiding a mine, there was a small scoreboard, where white numbers on a purple background displayed a number — the number of the floor where the cabin stopped. The values ​​"54", "79", "67", "98", "91" were on. Probably a few minutes earlier, people had gone to these floors, and the elevators stayed there waiting for the next call.
Listening to the echoing sound of the motor running during the lift, Herman asked the question "Are there elevators that accumulate statistics on movements and do not stand idle at the moment of waiting, but move to the floor from which the most likely call will be made at the current time?". Hardly stepping on the threshold of the apartment and bringing congratulations to the owners, he went to the computer to find the answer to his question on the Internet. Having entered the query “an elevator that predicts a call floor” and did not find examples of ready-made implementations, but only a few such ideas were expressed, Herman was delighted that he had found a worthwhile undertaking that could save a lot of time every day. Then, deciding to start a technical study a month later during the holidays, he returned to his friends to celebrate.
New housing was for friends - a young couple, only the beginning of a series of pleasant phenomena, because after a week her husband, also a developer, was invited for an interview at company G., the owner of the largest search network, and a month later, after passing through several stages of the interview, a rental agreement was signed. In the interval between these episodes, a sad event occurred for Hermann - the same company announced the receipt of a patent for the “smart elevator” system, which will reduce the average waiting time for a person to lift. Having studied the patent, Herman bitterly discovered that he contains all the ideas that had recently appeared to him, and decided that a friend could study the history of visits to his browser, and during the interview he could propose this idea for implementation.
This conclusion was logical in view of the current situation in the world. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the business of advertising-earning companies was unstable. Over the previous decades, it has been possible to impose on consumers a multitude of devices for home, car, and personal consumption, on the basis of which extensive information was collected about users to display the most relevant advertising. As a result, the advertising market has reached the limit, and all subsequent attempts to make it more profitable failed. In this regard, the company sought to squeeze all the juice out of their projects and subordinates, trying to lure the most enterprising employees to their staff, expecting them to be able to offer successful ventures. Those who quit or failed interviews were blacklisted as waste material. As for the intellectual control system of the elevator, during the year it was sold, put on sale and brought the company substantial revenues.
One of the interests of Herman was sport. He dreamed of running a marathon. The study of training methods was accompanied by viewing statistics of world records and fixing an interesting fact. Over the past fifty years, each new record gave a relative improvement over the previous one by less than a thousandth. For comparison, in the middle of the twentieth century, athletes managed to update the record by a few hundredths, and by the beginning of the millennium no more than a hundredth. From these data followed the conclusion that the results reached the line above which one could not jump - honestly, without doping, people could not overcome the marathon in less than two hours. Herman thought “That's it! Here technologies may help. ”
One of the ways to improve the result of the marathon runners is to use the help of pacemakers - runners, who set the pace in a certain part of the course. Herman came up with the use of augmented reality glasses, which will draw a person pacemaker on the road in front of the runner throughout the marathon. Having checked his idea with a search network, namely the query “pacemaker for marathoners in augmented reality,” he decided to start its implementation from next week simultaneously with the start of his own preparatory training sessions. For both classes, he decided to allocate a whole year.
A couple of days later a phone call rang out - an invitation for an interview was received from company G. The result of the call was an agreement on full-time communication on Monday next week. The stock in a few days allowed me to prepare well, because Herman, in his view, showed himself to recruiters from the best side. A day after the interview, the news was announced - the company received a patent for the application of the augmented reality application “Pacemaker Racing”. The announcement excited Hermann and convinced that you need to get settled in Germany to work with this project and to translate the idea that interested him.
However, the received notification letter instead of describing the time and place of the meeting for the next conversation contained information that there are currently no suitable vacancies for the interviewee. Six months later, the working system was presented to the public, points with it were awarded to several dozens of the best marathon athletes. Over the next year and a half, all of them improved their personal results, and one did what seemed impossible - finishing in the World Marathon Majors marathon with a result at 1:58:08. After this event, the functions of the system were expanded to imitate the domestic, and it itself became paid. professional runners and cyclists began to massively purchase commercial designs, which brought a huge income and allowed to monopolize the sphere of professional sports applications.
While the marathon runners, erasing their sneakers, were chasing the image of a pacemaker on glasses, Herman was sorry for the lost opportunity to realize himself. Almost every day he remembered the success of a friend and his failure. These reflections brought torment and forced to reflect in the search for flaws. And suddenly Herman noticed a strange coincidence. The announcement of the issuance of patents for the elevator and pacemaker appeared after the passage of the first interview in G. both Hermann and his friend. Remembering the rumors that for the last couple of years, giant companies have been developing something new that allows them to get a steady stream of money again, Herman suggested that companies have learned to read people's minds. Realizing that the thesis is ridiculous, for the sake of interest, he nevertheless made a request in the search network, trying to find information about the reading of a person’s thoughts. And although among the materials found there were only charlatans, after searching the keywords for a search, it became clear where the key was. Search query. Before inviting a friend for an interview, a search query was made about a smart elevator, which the company then realized. Before the company invited Herman himself, he made a request for a pacemaker in augmented reality. The answer was simple, logical, but required verification.
With the simplification of the delivery of items by shipment on drones, the consumption of goods by mankind has significantly increased. With the increase in consumption, waste increased, a smaller part of which was processed in various ways. But the rest of the garbage was practically not destroyed, since the incineration plants were banned due to environmental damage, as a result of which large land areas began to turn into huge dumps. To test the hypothesis of theft of ideas through the analysis of search queries, Herman decided to invent and enter into the search query an idea that could partially solve the garbage problem, if it were not too incredible. Most recently, while traveling, he flew over the volcano. This led to the thought “if the goods can be delivered by the drones to the buyer, then why not take out the waste with drones and dump them into the mouths of active volcanoes where the garbage will be destroyed by lava?”, Which was reduced to the search query “garbage removal by drones for destruction in the volcanic lava” .
A week later, Herman was convinced that he was right - the company announced a patent for the idea that they had invented. There were no invitations for an interview - the previous failure resulted in a blacklist. Began active development, the company fanned the hype in the media, attracting more and more interest in the project. However, less than a year later the project was closed due to unprofitability and failure to achieve the goal. Volcanic emission of sulfur vapor, high temperatures, constantly occurring small eruptions damaged the mechanisms of drones, because of which they either came into disrepair, or fell into the vent with the load, or dumped debris past the vent, causing it to slide to the foot of the volcano, forming new landfills.
While the company was conducting experiments, Herman came up with a few more dubious concepts, the search queries about which, for the purity of the experiment, introduced through the computers of their friends. After their owners were invited to G.'s company for an interview, and patents were filed for all plans, there was not a shadow of doubt left - the company steals other people's ideas, selecting them from search queries.
Life principles asserted that people should be told the truth in order to end the gratuitous exploitation of the labor of others. But how to do this if the truth is so fantastic that no one would believe in it? Herman decides to describe everything in the form of a story, replacing the names, the name of the organization and ideas. In the text editor of the company M. history was written in the same breath until late at night. The proofreading of the text was left for the evening of the next day. Sleepy morning with a cup of coffee in hand passed for parsing incoming emails. Immediately, several letters from acquaintances contained enthusiastic reviews with the same reference to the entry in M.’s literary blog. Turning to the proposed address, Herman realizes with horror that in the article, on behalf of the artificial intelligence developed by M., his essay was published, slightly edited, and the time of publication coincides with the moment of the last editing of the file containing the source text.
Paranoia filled the kitchen. It became unbearably disgusting that the modern IT world was built on the universal absorption of ideas from people who are not even aware of this. The way out of this situation for himself, Herman chose the distance from the informational humanity. He would love to go as far as possible from the planet, but humanity has not yet created colonies outside the Earth. However, there is still a poorly explored territory on it - Antarctica, which calls to conquer it as part of a multi-year Antarctic mission as a system administrator. A minimum of communication with the outside world, the dazzling whiteness of ice and snow, daily scientific experiments in the company of like-minded enthusiasts are all that a person needs in order not to feel lonely and realize their potential for the benefit of humanity.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/398653/
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