Knowledge, People and Cats
2015-07-21 15:39:21.837875+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Web Design: The First 100 Years was posted in a Facebook group, and I started musing and figured I should copy it here.
I think yesterday's thread on Amy's Drive Thru[*] was instructive in this. Marc's examples of how that design failed to feed the Googlebots were spot-on, and I think speak to some of the concerns about AI (ie: we build 5 pagers for Google where 1 pagers would better suit the humans), but there's this larger notion of "CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS".
This is a purely subjective concern, two decades have gone by and I've changed and society has changed and technology has changed, but I've spent some time in the last decade trying to re-capture the sense of enabling human connection that I got from technology back in the ྖs. Usenet is gone, buried under the weight of SPAM and trolls. For the most part, we've traded unsolicited advertising for advertising which supports (and intrudes on) the conversations we're having, but we're doing so at the cost of content filtering. We can only have the conversations that the advertisers want us to have, and we see this with the Nymwars and Nipplegates and what-not.
And even when we think we're following the rules, the automated systems sometimes decide that those conversations are straying into un-endorsed territory.
So I'm with him on knowledge, people, and cats, but I think what we have to fear from AI is already here, and it's important that we think about building another web that puts the people first, rather than the AIs...
[*] So the thread on Amy's Drive Thru: Amy's Kitchen, which you may have experienced in the frozen section of your grocery store, recently opened a vegan drive through restaurant. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the local web design community because they went with a British design firm, and ended up with a site that has a PDF menu(!), but also because there's nothing on the page that'd help a search engine find it if you went looking for "Sonoma County vegetarian restaurant" or similar. Marc Harris came up with some particularly good examples of how you might want to find it, but can't.