Since years the hackers' movement warns about it. For a huge cultural misunderstanding, we are going on trying to learn new technologies according to the rules of the old school or using them as if we could learn directly from the market. The most cannot properly use the present devices too powerful and easy, and many ideas on the future come from science fiction. It's difficult to understand that the Web is made by each of us and depends on what we put in it, more than on our visits online. Once the Internet was attended by a small vanguard capable of managing websites and blogs, gathering in communities, innovating audiovisual and media, sharing experiences and knowledge. Since several years we are billions crowded in networks much more commercial than social, where no technical skills or references to reality are required: Really “ready” for the incoming metaverse, AI and the Web3?
Top1. Introduction
In latest decades, the huge amount of information and novelties has led to some bizarre observations and predictions about a “future” that often, instead, has taken different directions, sometimes beyond imagination.
There is a big underlying cultural problem in our society. We are still accustomed to the idea of a coded knowledge that is transmitted by teachers to students and attested through certifications, while recent technological evolution is inducing the widespread production of a new and much more dynamic culture. It’s what hackers have described as the contradiction between the academy and the monastic school. This leads to confusion, power struggles, cultural barriers, which often hinder the resolution of important and vital problems on the global planet.
The web, for example, one of the greatest invention in history, after the first pioneering phase inevitably led by a narrow vanguard, has reached the mass of consumer citizens in the form of a global supermarket, an often inextricable bureaucracy, and for the daily use of general public but private and rigid commercial spaces such as social networks, to which everyone is admitted, but from which the possibility of really affecting society is minimal, if not for a small group of influencers, selected according to competitive methods that have little correspondence to the nature and potential of the medium. Though, some forms of popular culture appear and spread.
Metaverse and artificial intelligence are also proposed in mainly commercial ways that risk limiting their potential. In fact, to the fascinating descriptions that the avant-garde makes of what we could do using new technologies, often it corresponds in the real world a tired repeating always the same things, simply using different means. And some descriptions for example of a highly decentralized web 3 appear out of reach of increasingly passive citizens, accustomed to downloading apps that free them from any choice and responsibility. This is a significant threat to democracy.
Top2. When Books Were To Be Soon Replaced By Video Cassettes…
When the author was still very young, many commentators already ruled the next death of the book. The designated killer, at that time, was indicated in video cassettes.
What, please? Do you mean that, instead of writing a book, in the “future” people will be always making films, with screenplays, cameras, actors, editors? But do you ever think about what you write?
In the so-called information society, since decades, the more and more increasing amount of information we all have at our disposal does not prevent us from directing entire seasons of the cultural debate literally on nothing, with a diminished ability to understand reality, an increasing loneliness of individuals, who feel small and powerless in the face of a world whose working mechanisms are beyond our comprehension.
Today it's chatting with artificial intelligence, that feeds on the words that humans think and write, on how they repeat, chase, and enter in relationship with one another. Overwhelmed by this flood of words, living and sentient people with their bodies, emotions, thoughts, and the natural and artificial environment in which they live, they seem to lose meaning, and it may be strong the temptation to give up once and for all and rely on the impersonal ability of machines to use at this point our logic and grammar better than us. While apparently, judging by the enormous blunders that appear in an increasing number of published texts, at all levels, almost no one now reads and corrects the errors of artificial intelligence for example in translations. It seems to be an unconditional surrender that certainly does not promote effective communication and does not make people happier.
Many things appear to happen without a purpose, we do not set ourselves goals, as if everything was already decided by someone or something greater than ourselves. And if that something is an artificial intelligence, the situation is perfect to remove from us any residual responsibility once more.
We could make our human intelligence work a bit more. To think not superficially, wonder whether it is really possible for books to be replaced by video cassettes or something like this, or whether it is really possible for machines to think for themselves, and not on the basis of human material, for example books and newspaper articles, with which they have been informed by humans:
Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round – They trade merely in probabilities that change over time. (Chomsky, 2023)