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hermitShelltoday at 4:16 PM5 repliesview on HN

In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans. The problem is further compounded by the fact that searching and accessing the internet will be noticed by AI agents that will generate still more swamp content in response.

Unfortunately, it seems that this fiction ended up being prophetic. The open internet will fall to entropy, not legislation or one-sided international trade agreements. I think we need more projects like Anna's Archive, where the public uses torrents and distributed infrastructure to save and organize the world's information. Google has abjectly failed in its original mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.


Replies

lxgrtoday at 5:16 PM

It's a recurring theme in Stephenson's books. "Fall" had a similar take on the same idea. It's one of his most impressive theories/predictions to me.

boredhedgehogtoday at 5:08 PM

> we need more projects like Anna's Archive

How would that be immune? It already has many copies of the same books and no way to tell which ones are erroneous or incomplete. A malicious actor could easily flood it with garbage.

kridsdale1today at 4:42 PM

Perhaps there is a nonfinacial future for blockchain after all. Certified human provenance.

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nullbiotoday at 5:01 PM

It doesn't help when you have Anthropic destroying books so that no one else can use them. These are crimes against humanity as far as I'm concerned.

wayeqtoday at 4:56 PM

> The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.

turns out we didn't even need AI for that