Web 3.0+: The Future of the Internet
The internet can either be a dusty cobweb of fear, or an avenue for a new world. I reminisce here on my internet experiences, while defining the three stages of web development. Ongoing issues are discussed, along with a possible future.
The harsh buzzes and squawks of a 56k dial-up modem filled my early teens, which mainly consisted of text-based gaming across a few local bulletin board services¹. Mrs. Palmer’s 7-th grade English class at White Mountain Junior High changed everything. We were required to only use resources found on the then-nascent public internet. That afternoon in the school library, learning WebCrawler, Altavista, and Windows 95’s Internet Explorer, turned me into Amerigo Vespucci discovering a new world. A treasure trove accessible in minutes — rather than a few hours I’d need to spend at the local library — convinced me of its power. As I went through high school, and then college, my internet use kept up with this “portal of information” paradigm — a static view of readable data popularized by Tim Berners-Lee as Web 1.0.
Right after the turn of the millennium, use of peer-to-peer exchanges (e.g. Napster) and newer email clients (e.g. SquirrelMail) harked back to those early BBS chatrooms, turning one-way windows into two-way doors. Portals of information became portals of sharing! I could now participate and interact with the data before me, a concept whose exemplar manifested by joining Facebook in 2006. Around that time (almost overnight), every website and blog developed its own comments section. This dynamic ability to feed back to the data we were seeing — our two-way doors — gave rise to a new form of Web 2.0.
So where are we, nearly thirteen years after Facebook opened its doors to all? Berners-Lee’s read-write view to the internet’s second incarnation has exploded into every available aspect: our social profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram; our entertainment on YouTube, NetFlix, and Hulu; our travel with AirBnB, Uber, and Lime; our shopping with Amazon, Ebay, and AliExpress. Even our food is affected with HelloFresh, GrubHub, and Peapod — my local supermarket has online orders and delivery! And everyone has the option to share their opinion for every product ever offered or service streamed. Internet-of-Things devices such vehicular sensors and FitBits introduce yet even more data…it just keeps growing — an estimated 33 zettabytes² of data is expected to swarm to 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to IDC last November.
Amongst all this data are in-between relationships — the data within the data, such as with whom we post pictures (“Tag Your Friends!”), websites we’ve frequently visited (“Clear Your Browser History!”), how often we post (“Take the 10 Year Challenge!”), and what we purchase or how often we comment (“Complete a One-Minute Survey!”). This vein of interconnectivity is currently mined by bot software, and it’s a full-on destroy-the-mountain strip operation. Data and its relationships are formatted into query and ontology languages, allowing machine-to-machine communication and code execution — code such as machine-learning algorithms that develop computer-based inference. All of this is taking place under the bonnet, with the goal of a more ergonomic and human-friendly experience to the internet. As examples consider having purchase suggestions based on your past history, asking Siri for the nearest restaurant, tablet handwriting conversion, and even extended reality HUD overlays. We are smack-dab in the middle of this stage, building the semantic read-write-execute view of Web 3.0. Since this is ongoing, I can only extrapolate from here out. So Alexa, please cue Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brasil…
A machine is only as good as the instruction set the human coder provides: that old adage garbage in, garbage out still applies. While we try to make internet interaction more human, we forget that we ourselves as humans are flawed. Biases and stereotypes have been observed within machine-learning training sets, and cyber-harassment is on the rise. As we progress toward general artificial intelligence and the eventuality of Web 4.0, there is need for concern. Walter Scott’s epic Marmion springs to mind, in which our beloved Facebook becomes the titular character and Cambridge Analytica its Constance De Beverley.
Mind you, this isn’t just a Facebook problem — Amazon has an ongoing fight with policies to address bad fake reviews. An amazingly tangled web has been woven: trolls have come out from under bridges armed with mobile phones and multiple anonymous accounts, and there is a disconcerting lack of grazing billy goats. The delicate balance between privacy and security is severely under test online; yet despite such a dystopian shadow, I remain optimistic. Why?
Machine algorithms, just like human individuals, require an ethics system — or at least so saith Saint Asimov. Accountability, Transparency, and Trust are the trinity for Web 4.0, leading to a view of read-write-execute-behave. Blockchains and other distributed ledger technology may just be the avenue down this path. The redundancy of complete records held by multiple keepers, coupled with consensus agreements, offer a prevention to data corruption and erasure. The ability to delete a post or obfuscate a cover-up will become antiquated — deviancy will exist permanently on the record in the light for all to review. Interoperability will be a requirement for this — we are unfortunately in a blockchain analogue to the BBS era of Web 1.0. However, blockchain has a much fatter protocol than did Web 2.0, and will likely progress at leaps and bounds. I find exciting the possibility of a social credit system³ (like those considered in China), along with on-chain governance voting to determine “the rules”, might help us reach a more harmonious society. Humans typically play nice assuming their friends, their family, and their gods are watching — perhaps it’s time to carry that over to the internet’s new incarnations.
[1] For those of you young’uns, bulletin board services (BBS) were basically small chatrooms provided by your internet service provider. In my village of 20,000, there was only about 20 of us in the gaming board.
[2] One zettabyte is about one BILLION 1TB hard drives.
[3] As for anyone screaming “Orwellian!”, I ask you to first consider America’s current FICO system…
