dweinberger

Hi. I wrote Too Big to Know, and your post intertwingled me with this thread, these books, and you.

(Note: I'm taking Google Alerts & Ego Salve as an ironic agent of Ted Nelson's concept of intertwingularity.)

Yes. Lying requires being able to discern truth from falsity. But LLMs don't know what's true even when they say true things. That's why "hallucinate" is a better word ... better but not perfect because for an LLM it's all hallucinations all the time. Some of those hallucinations (most of them) happen to turn out to be true.

Thanks for spreading the ideas, gonzo. Good to meet you now, these many years later.

Hi, I'm one of the authors. I can certainly see why you'd take it as condescending. At the time, it was generally taken in the sense that we meant it: we were trying to articulate what Web users understood but the media and most businesses weren't getting.

Remember that in 1999, the Web wasn't as mainstream, and many users felt that being on the Web was a special experience. There was an "us vs. them" feeling, where the "us" were people enthusiastic about the Web and excited about how it was (we thought) transforming our lives, our culture, and our institutions. So the clues were absolutely not for our readers who, we assumed, were part of the Web "us," but for the media and businesses who weren't on the Web or weren't part of the Web culture, and who yet were attempting to impose their understanding upon it.

Now the Web has become such an accepted part of everyone's lives in our culture that it doesn't feel nearly as much like Us vs. Them. I think that explains why the Manifesto now reads as condescending, whereas at the time it was taken (at least by the readers who liked it) as an articulation of what they already felt.

Sure we should be trying to halt it! How? That's tough. We've got economies of scale and the network effect working against us. But there's a lot going on in a lot of places trying to address this. I'm no expert, but it's a topic of great interest at the Berkman Center (where I'm a senior researcher), e.g. AmberLink.org and Perma.cc. Tim Berners-Lee has the Solid project (http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift). BitCoin and especially the BlockChain tech underneath it offer some hope. The W3C WebID (https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID) initiative could help decentralize authentication. There's no shortage of projects underway. But the forces of centralization are well-entrenched, powerful, and often offer great user experiences.

I share your less than optimistic fears. But one of the hopeful things about the Net is that large centralized players can co-exist with decentralized sites and services. The long tail does not get the attention that the short head does (by its very nature), but there will always (?) be lots of creative work and lots of meaningful connections being made there.

I'm one of the authors. Yes, much of it seems silly. But the fundamental point was that the Internet is a social space, and that is still true. At the time, that was not obvious to most of the media or businesses.

In addition, markets are far far far more conversational than they were before the Net.

But, yes, in 1999 we did not predict the degree of recentralization and corruption that would occur.