My Master Plan to Destroy the Internet as we know it
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
One of the realizations of the brick project was that there are only 4 ways you respond to material: I like it, I don't like it, Reply, and Save-for-later. This is indicated by the buttons on the right.
As each button is pressed, the system categorizes the material and your response, sharing and aggregating those responses among thousands of users.
If the magic brick works well and I can find articles which benefit me well, then I wont need save-for-later.
If I hit reply then suddenly I'll need a keyboard full of buttons which don't seem present.
And what goals does Magic Brick help the user achieve? I lament on HN and Reddit the lack of distinction between "i like/dislike it" and "it's a good/bad contribution". The reason I care is because I want to follow interesting debates and encourage a place where they happen instead of "you're wrong" rebuttals. Magic Brick means there is no place and I can't go somewhere good or avoid somewhere bad, whatever my definitions of good and bad are. If I can't choose where to go, I can't subscribe to sites that are good either, to give them deliberate revenue.
It's a lot like an iPad if it only had apps and no web browser.
To reply you just hit the reply button and speak. The system will try to do voice-to-text recognition and then it will send out both the initial message and your voice reply to an overseas service that would QA the voice-to-speech conversion. This allows you to train your system without having to do all of that stupid setup work. It also eliminates a keyboard. It's 2010 already. We might not have voice-to-speech worked out, but it's not like we can't just talk and have the system work it out, either. This also provides seamless integration with cellphone devices by use of voicemail.
"Going somewhere good" and "sites" are concepts that are only about 20 years old. You want material that interests you, wherever the source. The internet doesn't have to be some huge virtual city, with the browser taking the place of the tour bus, where you drive from site to site participating or observing. The model doesn't have to work that way, and it's fundamentally broken if only from an efficiency standpoint.
The system can keep track of all the sites you might like, your responses, and even aggregate you in groups with other like-minded folks. You don't go to a site, the material comes to you. Which is as it should be. The brick would handle whatever subscriptions were required behind the scenes, allocating traffic to and from perhaps millions of sites based on your preferences over time.
Look at it this way. Let's say you participate in 3 aggregation sites. Each site has article X. For each site to function correctly for you, you'd really have to consistently upvote or downvote article X on each site. In a P2P system all of that nonsense goes away.
Please don't destroy the internet for everyone - some of us like the control we have in choosing our sources, and are not particularly bothered by the hassle of having to choose which bookmark to use to do so. Much as I can see the value a magic button would have to a lot of people, it would be a torture to me.
Actually, there would be no box and what you want would just be there.
Neural interface would be the end result, of course. The project can also be restated as "what is the minimum amount of stimulus needed in the brain for it to do most executive functions"
Neural interfaces are still a ways off, though.
I really don't want Facebook running in my brain in 20 years time. And as much as I love you guys, I really don't want HN running up there either.
UPDATE: Now that I think about it, no, we are both wrong. Information should not just appear in my brain waiting to be processed. At least not in any fashion I can conceive right now. A physical abstract, such as a tablet, is probably a handy way of addressing technology and separating the inner from the outer world. At least for the next few decades, I think. An external device would be a critical part of this. Sort of training wheels for the mind. I'm not sure our sensory-processing capabilities are up to snuff with receiving something like a real-time news feed, at least not without massive filtering and pre and post processing. There's just too much noise, as I point out in the article.
The key issue here is whether technology use is a passive or active activity. If it were a passive activity, like watching a movie, yes, things could just "play" in my mind. Whatever I wanted would just be there. But if it an active activity, which I think it is, then technology's role is to distill things down and prioritize things into chunks my mind can work with.
I think sometimes we use the wrong metaphors.
We'll get there, however.
Taking it one step further, something like "Skynet" will realize that humans have inefficient brains compared to whatever technology it is using, and attempt to eliminate us, completely resolving the issue. However, then it will realize it was destroying information that it should keep, so it will then morph into something like the "Borg" to start collecting info, until it realizes that is too "high-touch" and interferes with the processes it is trying to study, at which point it will just watch us from a distance and only interfere when needed or when we fail.
Both extremes are really bad, so let's work on things that determine where the line between being a caveman and being a Borg is. It's fine if people want to set their own boundaries, but we shouldn't let the system itself determine where they are. Nor should we let societal pressure. Nor should we let commercial businesses hacking the limbic system just so they can make a buck.
One could make the case that biological entities aren't really very interesting or significant in the universe, that until you find the balance and evolve into some kind of symbiotic being you're really just so much carbon-based noise. Don't know if I'd go that far, but it's a fascinating thought.