The Future of the Internet Is the Past

What is the new new thing in Silicon Valley? What will come next after Web 2.0? What is the future of the Internet? Inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee has one vision of what the Internet should be. Sir Tim evangelizes about the “Semantic Web,” in which human ingenuity is replaced by intelligent machine.  

Here’s his vision of the Internet’s future, remixed as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech version 2.0. The only problem -- not an inconsiderable one -- is that Sir Tim’s Promised Land turns out to be a mechanistic nightmare:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web,’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge. But when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' that people have touted for ages will finally materialize. 

And, boy, what a nightmare! Sir Tim’s hubristic “Semantic Web” is a dystopian mash-up of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. His “intelligent agents” (Big Brother perhaps?) of the Web will have replaced the all-too-human institutions and cultures of our collective history.

In his dream, Sir Tim waves adieu to the human “day-to-day” interactions of politics (“bureaucracy”), economics (“trade”), and society (“daily lives”). The Internet, then, as an artificially “intelligent” interpreter of human information, will replace physical life as the hub and spoke of human activity.  

Sir Tim’s radical vision of Web 3.0 is shared by many other digital utopians in Silicon Valley -- from the virtual lifers at Second Life, to soulless aesthetes at the appropriately named Pandora, to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s militia of Wikilunatics, to, of course, the artificial algorithm boys at the Googleplex.

Take Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, for example, the crown prince of intelligent Internet data. Last year, Schmidt was asked where he hoped Google would be in a decade. Ten years hence, Google’s CEO prophesized, the search engine’s artificial algorithm will be so smart that it will not only know what job we human beings would like to have but also what we would like to do tomorrow. 

The truth is that -- aside from the flatulent predictions of digital utopians -- there is no evidence of intelligent agents on the horizon. The data on today’s Internet is more dumb than intelligent. It’s full of crappy user-generated-content, crappy artificial taste engines, and even crappier search engines like Google.

Neither our traditional political, economic, or social transactions have been replaced by machine-to-machine intercourse. The Web 2.0 Internet contains no more truth about human intentionality than a crystal ball. Akin to other intellectual confidence tricks, like life-after-death and heaven and hell, artificial agency is both an illusion and a delusion.  

So, if the Semantic Web is, in reality, just seductive garbage, what is the new new thing in Silicon Valley? What will come next after Web 2.0? What is the future of the Internet? The future of the Internet is the past.

The future of the Internet lies with the traditional authority of human expertise. The future is with genuine, non-virtual human beings who, using the Internet’s revolutionary publishing tools, communicate their wisdom with one another.  

Tomorrow’s Internet will offer knowledgeable human beings a low-cost and logistically convenient way to distribute their wisdom. Instead of machines talking to machines, the future of the Internet is about flesh-and-blood humans educating equally fleshy humans with their professional knowledge and expertise. Web 3.0 is all about smart Homo sapiens catching up to dumb technology. It’s about us shaping the Internet to make machines effective agents for valuable human communications.

If you look hard enough, you can already see Web 3.0. Jason Calcanis’s Mahalo.com, for example, is an accountable, handmade search engine -- created by real people -- that reveals the profound limitations of Google’s artificial algorithm. In contrast with Digg and Reddit, newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times are using the Internet to distribute reliable knowledge created by experts. Governments and corporations are already using the Internet to communicate more effectively with their citizens, clients, and consumers.  

Expect to see the same revolutionary developments for professionals in the medical and educational worlds. Even Google seems to be getting it. Their new knowledge initiative -- Knol -- recognizes that reliable information needs accountable authors and can’t be wikified by gangs of anonymous editors into a thing of real value. (For more on Knol, see Googlepedia?)

That’s my dream then. The future of the Internet isn’t about the miracle of intelligent data; instead, it’s about data being used intelligently by humans. Computers -- networked or otherwise -- will never be able to reproduce intelligent human agency.  

So the next time some pathological digital utopian tries to proselytize you with the Semantic Web, push back. Think semantically. Ask them what, exactly, the Semantic Web means. And then ask them if they really believe that a machine could know the “mechanism” of human knowledge better than we know it ourselves.

— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur