Entrepreneurs continue (trying) to improve the Internet:
From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.
The Internet is getting bigger and more effective, but as I see it, it is mostly still in it’s childhood. It is a relatively new invention: when people talk about the limitations of the Internet, I always think to myself that there is so much to experience, so much to ‘invent’ regarding the Internet, that it is much too early to talk about its ‘limitations’.
This sounds great and all but as a liberal conservative and as such almost obsessed with privacy I cannot help but being bothered by the ‘new’ Internet revolution as well.
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