It was right there with flying cars and domed cities on the moon. That was part of the whole Disneyworld/OMNI Magazine promise about life in the year 2000.
Speaking of utopias, have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates?
The idea was that people would be exposed to opposing viewpoints since everyone could communicate effortlessly with everyone. Information would also be easily available to everyone, which would make it clear who is right and who is wrong.
Yeah, that worked out perfectly…
I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.
Turns out, having the facts is only a partial solution. If people don’t want to take them as facts, you’re still going to have stupid debates about anything and everything all of the time.
We’ve fixed the information availability problem, but human psychology hasn’t changed one bit.
It has.
The fact that we’re in others people’s faces isn’t a bug, unlike before we actually can confront each other and see their arguments, in the past we just made up what the other side believed.
This is a huge improvement, and we can disprove obvious lies to everyone except the truly stupid.
Yeah, growing pains, but still a massive improvement.
Totally agree. It’s an improvement, but there was a lot of hype around it, which lead to inflated expectations. As a matter of fact, nowadays we have similarly silly expectations about AI. History repeats itself…
The internet, like every other man-made thing, is a tool. And therefore its usage is determined by how people wield it. e.g. much of the anti-vaccine disinformation has been traced back to Russian troll farms - this is a known fact. The movement might have predated that, or it might not, but either way it undeniably received a massive boosting, especially in its formative stages, by such outside agitation.
At the same time the internet also provides tools to debunk such anti-“knowledge”. Though like so many other things, it falls into an arms race where the disinformation can move quickly ahead to cover new ground, while getting properly factual information out to people takes more time, especially if refusing to use tools like rage-baiting that increases a message’s ability to spread quickly.
Sadly, we just don’t seem to have an immune system to attack sources of disinformation - at least not one that could ensure that all or even most people who can and will vote have what they need to be properly equipped to handle the continual onslaughts. Which makes me very much fear for the structure of democracy itself in our current age.
We are growing one.
Immunity comes from exposure, either to the infection, or to a vaccine.
Boomers see something on the internet they agree with, it’s gospel truth, because it proves them right!
Younger generations are slightly more skeptical, and it gets better with time (filter bubbles notwithstanding, and as an artifact of people still wanting to believe).
We will get there.
Well, not everyone, the Russians and Chinese are just plain perma-fucked.
The internet has proven that the majority of the population doesn’t want to think for themselves. That part of the population wants to be told what to think so they can fit into a group and feel better than some other group because we are social animals and that tended to work out for the vast majority of humanity’s existence.
This includes people who do positive things to fit in too, and I don’t think free thinkers are special, they are just not in the majority.
That’s basically how innate tribalism manifests in a modern society. That used to be a killer feature to have in a human brain when you’re mostly surrounded by predators and wilderness. Being part of your local in-group was a matter of life and death, so tribalism wasn’t really optional.
Who ever said this about the internet?
On the alt.* newsgroups, long before the average non-techie started having “internet” access through prodigy or aol or genie or whatever, it was plain to see this would be nothing but arguments between strangers.
I think that was in documentary about Darpa net and how it evolved into the early internet. It contained interviews of some of the early pioneers and they had interesting stories to tell about what the atmosphere was at the time. So, that was around the time when they were still developing the communication protocols and hardware needed for running a large network. What we think of as the web, didn’t even exist back then.
Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.
This one I’ve seen pretty darn realized. My last “in office” job was more than 5 years ago, but while there were printers available they were not used often. Nobody would hand you a piece of paper with any exception you’d have to keep it safe or for any period of time, and even then you’d also have a digital copy sent to you. Then and now, I still keep an notepad, but its only for things I need to remember for less than 24 hours or that get entered electronically very shortly after.
This was a fortune 100 company too, not some Mom-and-pop office.
I can’t remember when I’ve last needed paper in an office setting. I doubt I have a printer set up on my work computers. Don’t even need to sign anything or pass contracts or doctor’s notes around.
Notebooks or hand drawn diagrams and things exist if you want them, of course.
YMMV.
have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates
I don’t know why anyone would ever think that.
People are always going to have differing opinions.
I was one of those people. I still maintain hope, but the fear of what the algorithms will do outweighs that hope some days.
The thinking was that people’s core opinions are formed while they are young. They are mostly inherited from your family and society around you, so that information bubbles are formed early that are hard to break out of.
I thought that if people were exposed to multiple cultures and ideas from a young age through the Internet, they would understand them better – not just as foreign concepts told to them through a thick lens of bias from their parents and teachers.
However, I failed to predict the opposite powers. First were the echo chambers that formed, strengthening the deepest dark sides of humanity that, before, were kept locked away in basements lacking anyone with whom to discuss and provide validity. Then the corpos and MBAs figured out they could psychology game us all with algorithms. They didn’t necessarily know at first that the negative content would be the best for driving engagement; but they didn’t care either.
So right now I think the bad is outweighing the good. But I don’t think it has to stay this way forever.
As you might remember, it used to be called “information superhighway.” As it turns out, not only does it make information flow faster from A to B, it also divides people that lie to either side of the road, in a metaphorical sense.
Required reading See especially figure 3b. TLDR: Increased information access and increased connections lead to more echo chambers.
Hmm… That’s an interesting result. Makes sense too. When more and more people have access to the internet, they can form more and more specialized niche groups with each other. Just in Reddit alone, there’s already a sub for anything you can think of and also many things you would never think of in a million years.
‘You won’t have a calculator on you everywhere you go’ was another one.
This is the result of us seeing a shift from technology being benignly applied to technology being used as a tool for an unmitigated profits.
As with any product, all of the good is sucked out of it for the sake of making more money for the greedy tech billionaires.
While capitalism is definitely a big part of it, the desire to control others for non-monetary reasons plays a huge part in it as well. LGBTQ+ harassment and abortion bans don’t really play into the capitalist goals, they are there to cause suffering.
Lots of these predictions were actually quite horrible. e.g. flying cars would be so much worse than regular cars in so many ways.
Yep. Imagine a flying car breaking down or crashing mid-air. All the passengers dead and possibly people on the ground too.
I’m pretty sure that depends on the technology. For instance planes just become gliders in the worse possible case.
The bigger issue is when the crash by result of error. There is a limited amount of air space anyway so if you had tons of cars there would need to be highways which would create traffic equivalent to what’s on the street.
In short, way more deadly for the same result.
It’s a horrible idea if you assume that flying cars would be made using the technology currently available to us. Imagine what it would be like to own a computer the size of a house. At one point, that was the only kind of computer there was, so it was pretty obvious nobody would want one. Also, the UI was horrible, power consumption was ridiculous, capabilities were very limited etc. If technological development had gotten stuck at that level, computers and the internet would not have become very popular.
However, many things have changed since then, carrying a personal computer in your pocket became possible, many of the old downsides were eliminated, capabilities were expanded, many use cases were invented etc. What was called a computer back then and what we use the word for today are only vaguely related.
Similarly, what we think of as a flying car today, is a complete disaster, because we’re thinking about it in the context of modern technology. In order to make that dream a bit more realistic, we would need to many breakthroughs in many different fields.
Khan Academy Kids is incredible. Watching a toddler battle brain fatigue learning the number two because they want to is terrible and terrifying. If you let them pace themselves and treat it as a game without forcing a schedule they easily get two years ahead of schedule. But it is so much an outlier.
And I’m guessing you wouldn’t substitute school entirely for Khan Academy.
No. wouldn’t. And the kids themselves wean themselves off the kids version at about age 6 suddenly by whatever interests them - seems all:zero for all the kids I’m aware of using the kids version. But the greatest impact in my opinion is understanding a structured lesson is a skill they mastered before formal schooling which puts them ahead. Not to mention early use of english - not our mother tongue.
