What price the Internet?

[peter]

The Internet has had such profound effects on our lives tell it seems almost crazy to consider it as anything but a beneficial addition to our world, but few would deny that it is coming at a price. We seem obsessed with the devices in our hand almost entirely at the expense of face-to-face communication with our peers. Walk down any Street enter any classroom you will be faced with the same scene, people glued to the handheld iPads, oblivious to what is going on around them. The almost instant availability of any and all information at ones fingertips is dulling our sense of the world around us in favour of a vicarious existence via our interface with a screen. The benefits of the slow construction of a framework of knowledge in terms of understanding and reasoning ability are being eroded by a sence that what is not instantly available, what demands effort is no longer worth pursuing. Knowledge while being broader than ever is more shallow. There is no question that the Internet is changing who we are, even what we are, but are these changes to our long term benefit. Do we like what we are becoming?

[Fist and Faith]

It's cool. Every new technology has brought the same questions. Manufacturing advancements brought goods to more people at less cost, but polluted the world. Radio and TV entertain and educate, but both have people glued in front of it, missing the real world. It's all part of the lifecycle of humanity.

[Avatar]

It's a transitionary period. It's still developing too fast for anybody to have had time to become adapted to it.

--A

[peter]

I wonder if at some point algorithms or programmes will be developed that will spark the Internet into displaying the ability to think for itself? If you were the Internet and discovered yourself newly capable of rationacion, perhaps even sentience, what would you do: announce yourself to the world, or do a brer fox impersonation - lie low and say 'nuffin!

[Fist and Faith]

Read WWW: Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer. First book of a cool trilogy.

[Avatar]

I wonder if at some point algorithms or programmes will be developed that will spark the Internet into displaying the ability to think for itself?

It's inevitable in some sense, although maybe not in ways we expect. The end goal of Google's search engine is AI.

In fact, they recently announced that they're started using a machine learning system in dealing with unique queries, and it's better than people. (By a bit.)

They've released an open-source version:

www.developer-tech.com/news/2015/nov/09 ... ng-system/

tensorflow.org/

--A