[Judgmentality]

> I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.

:(

I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.

[zwaps]

My worry about AI isn't Skynet and Terminators.

It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier.

It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.

[317070]

> It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck

But all technology is like that. Cars work, because we conformed our environment to it. Email works, because we conform to checking our mailboxes regularly. Telephones work, because we pick them up when they ring.

If you are interested in knowing more, the whole work of the french philosopher Jacques Ellul is based around this idea.

AI is not going to be any different in this respect. It is going to be us meeting it halfway. And that is going to be dystopic in the same way as it has been with other types of technology.

[alistairSH]

Wow, not sure why you're getting all the down-votes. I don't necessarily agree with you, but it's an interesting perspective regardless.

You also touch on the Amish approach to new technology. Each new thing is assessed for impact on life/tradition/etc and adoption is limited accordingly. For example, phones might be considered useful enough to have one per town, but distracting enough to be kept out of individual homes. Or, a computer might be allowed in the back-office of a wood shop for purposes for managing online sales, but nowhere else in the community.

[andrewzah]

The difference is we have a choice in those matters. I.e. my telephone does not work in that sense, because I will not pick up for an unknown number in most cases. A communicable human is on the other end.

With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason.

"AI is not going to be any different in this respect"

The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck.

It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".

[317070]

So, I think I explained myself badly. I fully agree on the problems of AI you point out. I agree with you on the reduction of freedom AI will bring. But then again, every relevant piece of technology took away such a piece of freedom.

I think one might underestimate the freedom that have been let go when other technologies came in, even though those technologies feel established already. You can choose not to pick up on the unknown number when the phone rings, but the moment of connection with a real human being you might have had at that point was interrupted by the phone ringing.

Society expects us to be reachable at any time, but that came with trading in the freedom to not be arbitrarily disrupted by default.

The point I am trying to make is this: all technology requires and has required humans to adapt to it, and consequently handing in a bit of freedom. I want to point out that AI is no different in the fact that it does so, even though like every other piece of technology it will do so in a unique way.

Is that dystopian? Perhaps. Many philosophers on technology have thought so, and many have disagreed.

> The other examples all include accountable humans

But when those faceless corporations were being sexist because of bureaucratic reasons in the sixties, how were they being held accountable? Did anything really change?

Widely adopted technology is something that lies outside of the humans that make it up, like an ant colony is different from the ants it is made off. You cannot hold any individual ant accountable to the way the hive is organised. Technology is an entity that lies outside of those ants, and that has its own desires and goals.

[technofiend]

>At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.

That's one worst case scenario. I've been thinking once humans start deselecting Google (no more gmail, youtube red, etc) then there's more room to also start blocking google's ad network. I know Google's dark pattern to force compliance is to pretend they don't know you and put you on a captcha treadmill, but that too will crumble if their adsense network yields less and less value as users and website operators move on from being plugged into the googleverse.

At least today you can operate outside the googleverse but you're punished for it. We should be holding on to that and trying to expand it rather than end up in the future you described where we can do nothing but comply.

[throwaway316943]

Ha! I’m sorry but it’s already screwed. Compared to where we stood when people were actually arguing for a free and open internet and against centralization and corporatization we have arrived at almost all of their dire predictions and the last few seem to be well on their way. No one is fighting it anymore, they’re just trying to grab the scraps that fall off the table that the big five sit at and hoping they don’t get stomped into oblivion by the giants.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A lot of the free and open Internet arguments were about copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies.

Turns out being able to pirate MP3s is a poor consolation prize when you can have your startup permabanned from AdSense or Amazon for no good reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Wrong goal on the wrong sports field.

[tremon]

copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies.

What do you think the free software movement was all about, if it wasn't about avoiding Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies? Read Stallman's "The Right To Read", from 1997.

[wizzwizz4]

Open source, on the other hand, has been embraced by those automated Kafkaesque monopolistic bureaucracies.

[skeeter2020]

Do you mean the consumption of open source software has been embraced, i.e. they love using free software but are not big fans of the backside of the model?

[pessimizer]

They like using free software, but they hate Free Software. Open Source is their friend.

[leppr]

There's a reason for the hype around web3. The more time passes the more pressing the demand for it, and the better the UX becomes.

[rlayton2]

Do you have a good resource for how web 3 would work? All I read is hyperbole and "could be"s but I am looking for actual concepts of how it would work. Any ideas?

[vertis]

Web3 means a lot of things to a lot of people. In this context the decentralization enabled by blockchain or federation is probably what the GP is talking about. With a decentralized app you can't be banned in the same way (though this presents other problems).

While blockchain based technologies are often cited as an example of Web3, and some of the worst hype offenders are pushing this. It's not exclusively blockchain.

In some ways Web3 is a return to earlier internet where there were open protocols rather than everything being controlled by companies. Redecentralize[0] has a great set of founder interviews talking about some of the projects and challenges.

To be clear it's not necessarily anti-company, just a recognition that a handful of companies controlling everything is problematic. Coupled with a recognition that running at the scale of the Big 5 is prohibitive (e.g. server costs, preventing malicious actors, people to handle problems).

The UX around these things is hard, though getting better. Mastodon[1] is a reasonable alternative to twitter now (doubly so if you cross-post).

Gitcoin[2] is a good example of a Web3 app (all the core functions are smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain).

There are plenty of example of Web3 apps(dapps) on Webby[3] and DApp.com[4] (though the latter you have to wade through all the Decentralized Finance stuff).

[0]: https://redecentralize.org/interviews/ [1]: https://mastodon.social [2]: https://gitcoin.co/ [3]: https://heywebby.app/webby [4]: https://www.dapp.com/topics

[imagine99]

That's actually very interesting. One problem I have started to run into recently however, is that you can't mention the word "blockchain" any more without being laughed out of the room (in some circles), and in many cases rightly so. The word has just been to much vaporware-ified and misused because VCs and other decision-makers were eating it up like crazy.

However, it seems like blockchain-based technologies are to be an integral part of web3, or are there alternatives to it? Is there a way to talk about the concept without mentioning blockchain?

[vertis]

Blockchain(s) are certainly one of the building blocks, but it should be possible to talk about what you're building without mentioning the underlying technology. Indeed, it should be somewhat irrelevant unless people want to dig into the detail.

That's why efforts like redecentralize are so important. It's more talking about objectives like privacy, censorship resistance, etc.

There are a subset of people that go, let's build with "the blockchain" for the hype and another subset that recognizes that blockchains are one of a number of tools in the arsenal of solving a problem.

Efforts like Matrix, SSB, OpenBazaar, and IPFS are all 'Web3' technologies without being on the blockchain.

If you do need to talk blockchains, two terms that likely aren't so loaded are 'smart contracts' and 'dapps' (distributed apps).

[TomSwirly]

Cryptography is not blockchain.

Blockchain is a very heavy technology that solves the Consensus Problem. That's amazing, but almost no real world problems except cryptocurrency has a Consensus Problem.

For almost everything else, there are much simpler, easier-to-understand and _far_ computationally lighter cryptographic solutions that aren't blockchain.

[KDJohnBrown]

When the blockchain / dapp hype got huge for a minute in 2017, I asked a “crypto enthusiast” friend to pitch me on why I should use his dapp (some sort of gambling game).

He went on and on about double spending and consensus. i asked him why anybody, even his “ico investors” would care about any of that just to play a (slow) game.

He went back into double spending and byzantium generals and using Brave for tokenized payments.

This pattern repeated with every single dapp I came across.

[kangnkodos]

The real problem is this. How do we determine which speech to punish in 2021? The algorithm is if one person in a non dominant group reports that the words made them feel bad, after the fact, then the words caused actual harm and must be punished. How do we know ahead of time? I don't know. But I do know that it leads us to strange situations where certain words cannot even be quoted, and the even the banning itself cannot be discussed. And the outlawing of discussing the ban cannot be discussed. And so on.

[diggan]

web3 as a whole is very early and still being built and developed, that's why there is not one definition of web3. The biggest commonality is that the solutions are focused on decentralization and censorship-resistance, as those are two of the main issues plaguing the web today.

Imagine the web in the 90s, some people saw promise while others asked themselves what it actually is. Fast forward 5/10/20 years and what web3 is will be a lot more clear as we'll have mainstream web3 applications deployed and used then.

[8note]

Are those the main issues plaguing the web? I would lean that the foremost problem is radicalization, and that decentralization and censorship resistance will make the internet an even better tool for radicalization than it is today

[jk7tarYZAQNpTQa]

> I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.

The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.

[ctvo]

Asking for sacrifice from others is often hard, simple, and ineffective.

> Stop eating calories and you'll lose weight

As America approaches 50% obesity

> Stop using AWS, Microsoft Office, AdSense, and Instagram (If we want to talk about domineering monopolies)

Sure. Let me count the ways you've inconvenienced me.

A better approach would be to provide a viable alternative to change the underlying systems that put us in this state. That's never simple though.

[wly_cdgr]

You will never, ever get a critical mass until your freedom-based burger tastes better than a real Google burger. It's not "not easy". It's Impossible

[angry_octet]

God damn, now I want to eat a burger.

[Brian_K_White]

It's like they didn't hear you say "the solution isn't easy", and so they had to say what you already said, and probably feel like they are saying something smart and worth hearing as they do.

[TomSwirly]

Now, you know these things aren't going to happen, not in any quantity to make the slightest difference.

So why even suggest it?

Strong regulation is the only solution. The Magic Invisible Hand just is not working.