The Future of the Web

"We" magazine (which you've probably never heard of, and you'll discover why shortly) has been looking at the future of the Internet, and one thing seems sure: it's going to suck.  Here we look at their implications, and why you might want a blindfold for some of these future visions:

1. The Pragmatic Internet

The writer gushes about the idea of a browser that always knows exactly where you've been, what you're doing, and what you're likely to do next - which you might recognize as the wet dream of online advertisers, and by "online advertisers" we mean "the people who are doing their level best to destroy everything good about the internet." 

This vision of a privacy-less internet is the nightmare that open source coders and internet activists worldwide strive desperately to prevent.  The envisioned all-knowing machine isn't your best buddy or a kindly teacher: it's the culmination of all the company-cookies that pile up at such a rate you have to flush your browser cache every half hour. 

Worse, they praise the benefits of an internet where you'll never be exposed to anything you don't like, don't understand or don't already know about.  While we do love the idea of a web where it's impossible to be RickRoll'd, going to all the bother of networking the sum of human knowledge, then installing a filter to make sure people don't learn anything new, seems a bit backward.

2.  The Human Grid

The piece rather optimistically describes a world where a vast connected network of human minds will be a valuable computational resource, able to address such varied issues as ore processing and renewable energy.  We're sorry, but unless smelting involves infinity-percent more Dragon Ball Z references than previously believed, the idea of harnessing a huge forum of unpaid, unqualified cerebrums for any such useful work is small in the extreme.

The idea also ignores the colossal waste factor inherent in using multiple human minds for anything, especially online.  At least 50% of your processing power will be wasted by half your network calling the other half a bunch of idiots, and another 10% spent cleaning up the other 20% with nothing better to do than post memes. That leaves 20%, which will consist of people claiming to have the answer if you just look at their blog. 

The Inter-mind is a great resource if you need a fat kid swinging a stick dubbed into a truly frightening number of Star Wars situations, but not so good for useful or productive labor.

3.  "Living art" communication

This section starts with "When sentential utterances (words and sentences) are abandoned as a means of communication..."  We're sorry, but you're going to have to provide better proof that people are going to stop talking than writing a particularly unwieldy sentence yourself.  They go on to suggest that the beginning of language replacement can be seen in such masterworks of modern technology is LOLcats and YouTube. Tell Stephen King to quit because you've just read the most terrifying sentence in existence.

If that's the future of internet communication you can look forward to blank space on this website, as we'll all be very busy working on a time machine in a Faraday-shielded room.

Of course, when this point goes on to talk about Harry Potter wizards conjuring owls to deliver messages, you realize there may be slightly less rigorous thought put into the list than you might hope.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

US Broadband Speeds Stuck Behind Japan for Next 101 Years
The Google Phone -Our "Android" Future
Exponential Technologies: Cheer Up World—We Are On the Verge of Great Thing
Quest for Identity in the Digital Village -Daily Video Classic
Internet Going Galactic -To & Beyond
Beyond Google 3: Why a Semantic Web Will Be Smarter, Faster & All-Around Better
Quantum Physics & the Quest for the Perfect Internet
IBM "Cell" Tech Driving Emergence of the 3-D Web

http://www.we-magazine.net/volumes/volume-01/ten-futures_neu/

Comments

[Joseph]

"9. Global (Non-)Government
This is kind of an obvious one, but it should be clear that we will not have ’nations‘ in any geography-based sense of the term in the future.
This will become necessary due to the clamour of refugees trying to get to the highly developed regions of central Asia and Africa from their economically backward homes in North America and Europe. Many of these will be brought over by formally American and European corporations, which will relocate to the centre of their major markets in India, the Congo and China."

Luke, I wouldn't mess with this guy...He's obviously capable of seeing the future with grate detail.

[jack butler]

Seems more likely those unusable and mostly dumb biological computing units will be incorporated into the net as adjunct devices. Are we sure that is not what has happened already? Sure, we're talking about Dragonball Z (or whatever the heck it is), but those are only the signals along the neurons. Do our neurons know what we are thinking about? Do we know what the internet is thinking? We keep mistaking our thinking for its thinking, but our thinking is only the signal processing for its thinking. Have maintained in several places already that the internet/telephone network is an existing artificial intelligence.