I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious?
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.
The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm.
The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.
>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.
Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.
>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.
Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content.
technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)
But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids
So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s
i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary
Now that we have the technology - and AI is massively amplifying what PR and propaganda have always done in manipulating public opinion - maybe it’s time to finally build Ted Nelson’s web: an interconnected graph of true accountability.
I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept.
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device.
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
> That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.
I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea.
But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington.
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."
26 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 48.3 ms ] threadPS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.
>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.
Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.
>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.
Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)
But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids
So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s
i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
I think the answer is hardware, not software.
Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.
But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
It's not his fault that most people use the web through the lens of a few tech oligopolies. The state of the web is not his fault.
This site used to recognize its heroes, not any more apparently.