> The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines.
I mean, it always has been on its lowest layers. The "is this incoming data from the Internet originated by a human being" problem hasn't really been solved, and is probably not truly solveable. It probably wasn't a good idea to train most of the world to use a single private ad-driven service for answers to everything in the first place.
It doesn’t need to be solved before as most internet users could easily identify algorithmically generated stuff and stop spreading it, but not so anymore.
Maybe one day we’ll all be able to “smell” ai generate text easily, but we’re not there yet
We could also abandon the internet as a place to interact with people and go back to meat space. The internet can be a place exclusively for doing work such as filing taxes and paying bills, etc..
instead of abandoning the internet maybe just abandon www. The best technology enabled human interaction i have is a group imessage chat with some old college buddies. My teen son has done the same with his friend group at his middleschool.
Talking with people in real life is stressful (for someone like me with social anxiety.)
Rarely do I walk away from an encounter with a random person in “meat space” feeling any better than I did when I walked up to them. And even when I do, I replay the interaction over and over again until I’m sure I didn’t embarrass myself.
Plus, where I live, there is no tech community. It’s just not popular here, but it’s what I’m interested in. (I even tried starting a meet up, but got 0 turnout, then the local startup accelerator closed in 2020)
I mean, it always has been on its lowest layers. The "is this incoming data from the Internet originated by a human being" problem hasn't really been solved, and is probably not truly solveable. It probably wasn't a good idea to train most of the world to use a single private ad-driven service for answers to everything in the first place.