{"id":286,"date":"2005-04-01T21:17:04","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T15:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/04\/01\/gmail-sets-a-moving-target\/"},"modified":"2005-04-01T21:17:04","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T15:47:04","slug":"gmail-sets-a-moving-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200504\/gmail-sets-a-moving-target\/","title":{"rendered":"Gmail sets a moving target"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite my best efforts, I been able to fill up only 10% of my 1 GB quota in Gmail. Now they’ve gone and decided to increase the limit<\/a> as and when they can. Ah well, I must redouble my efforts. <\/p>\n

Secondly, I am greatly interested in knowing how Google’s plans for world domination are proceeding. The reason for my interest is that the maintenance and further development of the world’s huge population of 6 billion are proving to be too much of a strain on the Cartel’s resources, what with our advancing years. I don’t want to name names, but the recent tsunami, the re-election of George W Bush and Abhijeet Sawant winning Indian idol are all directly traceable to a particular Cartelian missing out on feeding some crucial variable into the Prime Radiant.
\n
\nWe are of course always trying to keep up with the expanding responsibilities of the Cartel by accelerating our recruiting and training efforts. But it is getting increasingly difficult to locate and hire new Cartelians of acceptable quality. Besides, as our number grows, the problem of co-ordination becomes more and more severe. For example, we had not really planned on the recent movements for democracy occurring in different countries all at once. It just happens that the Lebanon one got delayed while the Kyrgyz one, being handled by a younger Cartel member, took place ahead of schedule and it didn’t occur to the two of them to tell each other. I shudder to think what will happen when the time comes to engineer simultaneously the Collapse of China and the Crash of the Dollar, with all the complex interrelations between the two events. <\/p>\n

So to cut a long story short (too late), most of us in the Cartel would welcome help from technology. Actually all of us<\/i> support it in principle, but we differ in our assessment of to what extent<\/i> said help will be useful. Amit Varma is the most ardent proponent, his argument being that if technology helps improve umpiring decisions in Cricket, it will certainly help us run the world better. Strangely, Madman is the least enthusiastic, even though he is a former techie himself. His experience as a chef has made him increasingly sceptical of claims that creative work can be automated. Ravages was also sceptical, but was convinced when we were able to show ad copy generated by a computer, which he acknowledged was better than his. <\/p>\n

All this makes us very interested in the success of the experiment that Google has been carrying out over the past year. Of course, Google already knew everything about the objective world there was to know and its search data told it everything about what men<\/i> want. However, women’s<\/i> minds, being much more complex and confusing, could only be (partially) understood by capturing their ramblings as it was occurring. Hence the need for Gmail to complement Google’s product suite. <\/p>\n

With Gmail, Google has all the tools required to accurately model and predict everything in this world, including the progress of Ekta Kapoor’s soaps which had hitherto been outside the predictive powers of even the Cartel. More importantly, it has access to Cartel deliberations, which were all entirely carried out over Gmail. Consequently, if everything goes according to plan Google’s Expert System should be now sufficiently well trained to be able to take most routine Cartelian decisions on its own. <\/p>\n

Going forward, we hope that the Cartel’s Google Assisted World Domination (C – GAWD) plan will result in significant cost savings and efficiency gains. The perfect scenario would be that the Cartel just sketches out the broad direction for the world to follow and goes off on a vacation to Singapore, and C-GAWD takes care of the operational details. In reality there will always be the occasional crisis and we will have to intervene to set things right. But broadly we are satisfied with the way the system is going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite my best efforts, I been able to fill up only 10% of my 1 GB quota in Gmail. Now they’ve gone and decided to increase the limit as and when they can. Ah well, I must redouble my efforts. Secondly, I am greatly interested in knowing how Google’s plans for world domination are proceeding. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}