The Internet Was Magic

I remember when the internet was magic. I could type a few words into a search bar and find the result that most people on the internet agreed was the most relevant. Nowadays, the internet no longer feels magical to me. It feels like a panopticon of many eyes that needs to know what is being done, said, bought, and loved to generate slop graspingly vying for my attention.

The old internet way of serving what most people thought was relevant is dead, because the grifters have their bots, pretending to be people, trying to make a dishonest dollar by shoving something you didn’t want in front of you. Pretending to be people is so cheap now that we can no longer rely on the old internet way.

You may have noticed the grifters are everywhere, not just the internet. What is wrong in the world today is the grifters are engaged in a bitter, colossal contest for a dishonest dollar. The most dishonest dollar is the one earned off the lie that we can dig up fossil fuels, burn them, and somehow escape from the consequences. The weight of that lie on our shoulders feels inescapably heavy sometimes. The new internet burns fossil fuels like a sin.

The old internet, the internet that people valued, is still out there, behind the ocean of slop. How do we find the good and filter the bad? How do we put the grifters in their proper place?

I treat AI like a list of links to read. An AI is trained on probable word associations, not correct outcomes. If I ask an AI for the answer, it will be wrong sometimes. If I ask an AI to cite the source for an answer, I can check the source to see if it’s right. Doing my own research means reading primary sources, not the AI summary.

The same is true for coding. AI can write code faster than I can look up how to write the same code, but I still have to wrestle with the hard engineering problems the code is intended to solve.

I can solve problems I couldn’t solve alone by getting a boost from AI, but I know each time I do that I am telling the panopticon something about myself. I need a better computer that runs an AI locally, consuming less power, without forcing me to subscribe to a service that will alter the deal tomorrow.

When we wrestle with evidence to incorporate new knowledge, we learn. And it’s by learning that we gain the magical ability to imagine what comes next, even when the probability of that is very small.

Human ingenuity is what made our old internet magical. We ought to try to bring that magic back.