| The post title immediately had me excited, because between the looming threat of dangerously fragmenting perspectives on truth and the fundamentals of automated artificial reasoning oriented towards meaning relevant to real world problems, ontology is of great interest. It's been the cause of much of my typing. Unfortunately, the first impression was not good. I grant that the amount of data so far is limited and other questionable experiential aspects of the site aren't a knock on the underlying goal, but I can't help but feel that the way it's being done is not the inevitable future. That may only be a surface appearance, but when people put something out there and promote it, I assume they believe it's a fair representation of where their vision is headed. There's also this nagging concern that the aim of this project can lead it to become an authoritative source on relationships which other software and services are forced to consume in order to compete, because the first open project of its type to reach escape velocity in respect to its data momentum may cement itself as the standard which suppresses the competition-promoting value of the data being forkable (not unlike Wikipedia). 15 years from now when it's passed a usefulness threshold, maybe most note taking apps, Microsoft Word, search engines, dictionaries, machine learning based services and more may come to rely upon it to improve access to context. At that scale it has non-negligible influence and the alpha-male status of it may limit evolutionary diversity around the intensity of the relatedness of things. Don't get me wrong, a project like this is necessary anyway regardless of the potential dangers if only to head off a Chinese implementation to brainwash the world. To rephrase Netflix wanting to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix, don't become China before China can become you. The last thing we need is a monopolistic ministry of truth produced by runaway network effects that don't care about Public Benefits Charters. :) Speaking of the Public Benefits Charter, Google never significantly defined "Don't Be Evil" in less vague terms, so the removal of it was harder to identify as a canary. The charter doesn't clarify what "scientific thinking" is, at a time when we are redefining what racism is with reckless abandon. I also didn't see any assurances about whether the charter would survive acquisition by another company and whether such an acquisition would be an exception to the promise to not sell user data. It also doesn't specify whether there's an active preservation clause. We've seen Chinese acquisitions of sensitive companies pass by without notice providing further evidence that governments cannot be trusted to preserve their countries, it's up to the people. Companies themselves need to integrate a binding promise (if legally possible) to bar those outcomes and to carry that promise forward to acquirers which means any company operating in a state or country where such a promise could not be legally enforced doesn't qualify as a suitable parent company. Maybe that's wishful thinking, not a lawyer. In any case, I think for this kind of project there is a likely leapfrog scenario that may cause it to be supplanted if the company doesn't do its own leapfrogging. Additionally, there's the concern about whether the majority of the data qualifies as articles of fact which supposedly can't be copyrighted and could potentially nullify most of the impact of the CC-SA license. Luckily, all facts are fiction now, so you might be able to skirt by that one! Hope that doesn't mean embedding lies will be a future strategy to establish copyright snags for preserving enterprise customers. :/ |