It’s time for the next moon shot. We can have an Internet For The People.
Let the current owners of the Internet keep it, along with all of the corruptible social media companies, search engines, fake users, and AI involvement.
We need to build a new Internet where only humans can participate, and genuine everyday people at that, not social engineers and propaganda machines. It’s time to build an Internet For The People, from the seed of innocence that reflects our humanity, rather than the seed of control and manipulation which has given us the current Internet which distorts human relations.
The Internet For The People would entail:
-Search engines that include ALL results and which cannot be manipulated to hide or distort topics the searcher is looking for.
-Message boards and forums which are impervious to concerted manipulation tactics. PR firms and the like could not use real people as proxies for manipulating public discourse.
-Blocking of any and all AI involvement. If users wish to engage with AI, they may use the old Internet. Humanity must have a free will choice to contribute to AI learning or not.
-Incompatibility with bots; meaning bot farms and fake users would be instantly recognized and barred from participating.
-Transparency. The human user base would know how this new Internet works and nothing would be hidden.
-Respect for human dignity by not harvesting any data in any form from the users.
These are some basic tennents. What is your wish list for the New Internet?
This vision needs help to flesh out the details from our technology ambassadors. Imagine what we can accomplish when our best and brightest start working for us instead of them.
For example, to minimize manipulation, it would probably need to have a decentralized architecture. Unfortunately, this would also make it impossible to ban AI slop or botfarms, at least to my limited knowledge.
I’d love to hear any ideas you have about how to accomplish your wishlist.
We can copy what universities are doing. Our universities are currently heavily involved in building a separate private internet for only university staffs/students to use. They are stringing new fiber all across the country so they have their own backbone and their own distribution nodes. There’s quite a few companies currently developing infrastructure as code for this new internet providing dynamic scaling and automated virtual network management and network resilience.
That’s the idea. Fundamentally rebuilding the Internet in a new way. Tech engineers can come up with a wholly new concept, or it could be borrowed.
There have been hints that the intelligence apparatus has files on every person. If that is true, then that database should have the capability of knowing and differentiating between real people and bots. It could also have profiles on those who have worked or employed others in online propaganda and PR campaigns and flag them as unsafe to the new Internet. When the people regain control of our intelligence agencies, we can use the technology they developed for good, to build the new Internet.
We also need to be able to flag bad actors and scammers and have system wide consequences.
With technology and AI advancing at such a fast rate, it’s too easy to have bad people do bad things.
They’d think twice if after they did a bad thing it would punish them some how.