> The "information age" might be coming to an end.
Or we weren't in it all the way quite yet, and the real information age is not defined only by the availability of information, but also by the massive quantity which drowns out simplistic search methodologies.
Maybe this is the natural end state of information systems. First they gather useful information, then they gather all information, then information starts being generated that is tailored to the system for the purpose of being in the system and affecting how it's used, often negatively. I can think of lots of examples, from internal wikis to rumor mills at work.
Anything you can’t replicate using given instructions isn’t valid or interesting information. Once machines can be made to understand this, they’ll know to ignore useless information like we (sometimes) do as humans. The situation is not beyond hope by any means if you ask me.
That's possible, but I'm not convinced it's as simple as that. Machines able to understand the information means more machine generated information that is similar but with small differences which may or may not be useful and may carry small inconsistencies. I find most solutions that rely on computers can often be negated easily enough if the incentives are perverse enough.
I think the idea of translating something through a few languages back to the source language again, and the inconsistencies and weirdness of that will be prevalent, just to a lesser degree (that's not a problem of machine translation, it's just a problem of translation which was used to comedic effect as it was exacerbated by automatic machine translation problems). Good translation requires an immense amount of context, which I don't think will be taken into account in most cases as it's expensive, yet translation of material will be a large market going forward IMO, and any automated defeat of it (which will be the only option at the volume I think we'll see) will just be an arms race.
Or we weren't in it all the way quite yet, and the real information age is not defined only by the availability of information, but also by the massive quantity which drowns out simplistic search methodologies.
Maybe this is the natural end state of information systems. First they gather useful information, then they gather all information, then information starts being generated that is tailored to the system for the purpose of being in the system and affecting how it's used, often negatively. I can think of lots of examples, from internal wikis to rumor mills at work.