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For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today. I don't know. I think there's a little bit of a "you see what you're looking for" effect here. I look at the modern Internet, contrasted with the ideas we were talking about in the 90's and early 2000's and I see a lot of the good stuff has come to fruition in wonderful ways. I mean, right now I can use the Internet to sit in my home, jump on Youtube or Khan Academy, or videolectures.net, or Coursera, or Udemy, or Pluralsight, or Brilliant, etc. and for free or cheap learn just about anything I might want to learn. Math? Physics? Chemistry? Linguistics? AI? Geography? History? All there, in spades. And I can jump on Amazon or Alibris or Bookfinder and find cheap used copies of old / out-of-print books, not to mention tons and tons of (legal) free educational content such as the stuff listed at [1]. And if I'm willing to break the law, I can use ZLib, LibGen, etc. to get almost any book I could want. I can go to Stackoverflow, various niche sub-reddits, Mathoverflow, PhysicsForums, etc. etc. and ask questions of knowledgeable people who will help me with things I'm stuck on. And for free. I don't mean to paint an overly rosy picture here. Obviously there are negatives that have evolved as well. Constant surveillance, the ubiquity of misinformation and conspiracy theories, election manipulation, etc. My point is just that focusing only on the negatives is also a misleading way of looking at things. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains. Agreed, 100%. It's a common refrain (one I believe to be true) in evolutionary psychology circles, that "technology advances much faster than human evolution and we are poorly adapted for the world we find ourselves in right now." Unfortunately I'm not sure what exactly we can to to mitigate that. :-( [1]: https://cain.math.gatech.edu/textbooks/onlinebooks.html |