I see most people stating that the internet as we know it could be gone because of AI.
I’m asking you: Why not? The internet is not even a typical human lifespan old. It’s crazy young on a large scale. Why would anyone assume that it will (and has to) stay the way it is today?
There are so many downsides of the current web. Slob everywhere (even long before AI) because of all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money.
I welcome a change. An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet, so be it. And this phase won’t be the last either.
> all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money
Because they could. In AI-first web, people can't really do anything about anything - only those in control of training the handful of "big popular AI models" are the gatekeepers of all knowledge.
> with less ads, more genuine information
That's orthogonal to AI. Models are already being trained to favour certain products/services and they already (re)produce factually incorrect information with no way to verify or correct them.
> only those in control of training the handful of "big popular AI models" are the gatekeepers of all knowledge.
I think that's certainly the case now, and it will be for a while, but slowly we're getting closer to that "AI personal assistant" sci-fi inspired future, where everything runs on "your" infra and gathers data / answers questions locally. You'd still need "raw" data access for that. A way to micro-pay for that would certainly help, imo.
You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs. In many cases, a goal someone may have is that if they publish content on the internet, they will attract people to return for more of the content they produce. Google acted as a broker, helping facilitate interactions between producers and consumers. Consumers would supply a query they want an answer to, and a producer would provide an answer or facilitate a space for the answers to be found (in the recent era, replace answer with product or store-front).
There was a mostly healthy interaction between the producers and consumers (I won't die on this hill; I understand the challenges of SEO optimization and an advertisement-laden internet). With AI, Google is taking on the roles of both broker and provider. It aims to collect everyone's data and use it as its own authoritative answer without any attribution to the source (or traffic back to the original source at all!).
In this new model, I am not incentivized to produce content on the internet, I am incentivized to simply sell my data to Google (or other centralized AI company) and that's it.
A clearer picture to help you understand what's going on: the internet of the past few decades was a bazaar marketplace. Every corner featured different shops with distinct artistic styles, showcasing a great deal of diversity. It was teeming with life. If you managed your storefront well, people would come back and you could grow. In this new era, we are moving to a centralized, top-down enterprise. Diversity of content and so many other important attributes (ethos, innovation, aestheticism) go out of the window.
> You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
While it technically isn't free, the cost is virtually zero for text and low-volume images these days. I run a few different websites for literally $0.
(Video and high-volume images are another story of course)
> An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet
How is AI supposed to create an internet "with more genuine information", based on what we have seen so far? These two statements appear to be mutually exclusive.
We are in agreement that AI will destroy the current one. I don't see how the new iteration that AI would produce would have "more genuine information" seeing as how LLMs are just predicting what word follows the previous word. How is that genuine?
The current state of the internet brought the Fediverse, a new breed of social network(s) that, by design, has evaded corporate/government/salesmen capture so far.
Nevertheless, I can't say if the Fediverse will become irreversibly captured using new tactics. If that happens, a new iteration will happen.
I agree with the premise about impermanence. But moving in the direction of "less ads, more genuine" is comical if not tied to the userbase completely falling out and most never coming back.
this. it's changed several times over its lifetime and every change until recently has made it a better thing for the average person to use. We're out of the discovery phase and into the encirclement and exploitation phase.
“A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.”
Absolutely but this is not “recent” knowledge. This is known in neuro sciences for at least a decade.
My biggest hope is many western countries that see a decline in education results since the 90s/00s will finally start to reform education and use scienctific knowledge as a bases for how to structure it.
If you can - it’s German, maybe there’s some Auto translation available these days - watch Manfred Spitzer’s talk about “Digitale Demenz” (digital dementia). It’s eye opening!
> “A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.”
If this "recent study" is the one posted a few weeks ago here, then the methodology was shoddy at best. They compared handwriting to typing but constrained to "one finger typing". Monitoring brain activity on that task is surely flawed. No idea why they did it like that, but I'd wait till better tests are done.
I think your comment comes from a very specific point of view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).
There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.
Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.
And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.
In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this.
As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point.
I’m asking you: Why not? The internet is not even a typical human lifespan old. It’s crazy young on a large scale. Why would anyone assume that it will (and has to) stay the way it is today?
There are so many downsides of the current web. Slob everywhere (even long before AI) because of all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money.
I welcome a change. An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet, so be it. And this phase won’t be the last either.