John Markoff reports in the New York Times about the evolution of the Web, with claimants that they are defining Web 3.0. As if Web 2.0 (oreilly, wiki) was settled, Arthur C. Clarke predicted a “Global Library” for 2005 in 1958. His chart of the future that runs to the year 2100 from his book Profiles of the Future. In the chapter Obsolescence of Man, he infers that all this Interneting is one great techno-rehearsal to build the ultimate robot and posits the logical endpoint of the Internet is a “world brain” appearing in 2095.
I don’t yet buy Web 3.0 which seems to be a rehash of the artificial intelligencers. Not as all as exciting as the ad-hoc Web 2.0 rebirth of the Internet. Even for Doug Lenat’s Cycorp, a 3.0 claimant, his thesauric common sense research first begun while at MCC, fails to recognize that there is a cybernetic epistemology, an objective language, and protocol whereby people and machines have to declare and project their representation. (similar ideas today are the Ontology Web). Continue reading
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