It’s hard to put this into words succinctly. But when I was a kid before the Internet, the library was the main source of human knowledge, and it was very organized through the Dewey Decimal System which imposed a kind of tree-like hierarchy across a wide spectrum of topics. And while I imagined that one day this might all wind up served by computers, I thought this organization would survive the transition. But it didn’t.
I suppose in the early days of the Internet, they tried? Yahoo was kind of an Internet directory in the beginning, and the Whole Internet catalog was another such effort. But these eventually fell apart and we had to resort to search engines to find anything. Frankly, it’s a bit like the early days of personal computing when we used flat file systems instead of hierarchical ones with proper directory trees. When you were limited to what could fit on a floppy, this wasn’t such a big burden. But the Internet as it stands might as well be a giant flat file system.
Today, even the search engines are failing us, and we are turning to AI. In the pre-Internet era, we had sort of an equivalent to this also. They were called librarians. But a librarian’s job was made easier by the fact that all the books were carefully organized by topic. For AI, it’s as though the library were just a massive pile of books tossed around haphazardly and the librarian had to make sense of it enough to pull whatever you’re looking for out of the chaos. Is it at all surprising, then, that it takes a huge amount of energy and computing resources to make any of this work?
Yes, the internet is decentralised in every way, not only its infrastructure. Even unorganised. If that’s your big discovery, I respect that. But…
Not all of humanity uses the DD system.
This simply isn’t true, and everything you write after that. It’s an insult to actual librarians.
There is no “Artifical Intelligence”.
Indexing the internet is a big job. We had data centers even before A-not-I. And people were complaining about how much energy they use. Had we known then how much worse this is going to get very soon…
Artificial Unintelligence does not do that job better btw. It doesn’t do the indexing at all. It just wastes energy. And, as another commenter pointed out, it actively makes the situation you describe worse.
What’s intriguing to me about the fediverse is it’s trying to layer some order over a decentralized physical infrastructure. I think that’s so cool and really want this sort of idea to work!
Yeah that’s fair. I think even my university was using a different system, and of course there’s a lot more out there than book knowledge.
I may not be quite as cynical about AI in its present state, as I feel it has helped me find solutions that had been evading me. I do think it is massively overhyped, however, and am concerned about the directions it’s heading. Concerned a lot, actually.
I’m not sure I follow you. The Fediverse is about social networking which is not all, not even most of the internet.
And the internet itself is a layer of order over its decentralised physical infrastructure.
That’s fair. But you can have different layers of order that manifest in various human pursuits, and the Fediverse seems a fertile ground for exploring such ideas.
In the early days, the Internet was just a bunch of institutional networks all linked together, with little islands of data that may have had some internal organization. But no big picture view existed, and it never really emerged.
It seems to me that what’s happened in recent years is individual companies that offer some sort of information service have been centralizing and gatekeeping their product more and more, which does bring some order but at the expense of what makes a decentralized network powerful in the first place.