Amazingly wrong prediction of the internet from 1995

I wouldn't say he was right about that. Yes, there is a cacophony of information out there. But, he makes out like it'd be a giant, unorganized junkyard, and the only thing you have to navigate it is AltaVista. Wikipedia by itself invalidates this argument. But, there's plenty of other work too that helps organize, evaluate and adjudicate information. Search engines have gotten better. Internet companies have consolidated and codified areas of the internet (Wikipedia for knowledge, Google for information, Amazon for shopping, Facebook and Twitter for interaction, DailyKos and Drudge for partisanship, etc). Virtual communities (like cf.net) let people give one another real advice. Compared to 1995, we're much better organized. There has been a lot of innovation here. Voices aren't all equal anymore, or at least you really have to have a lot of like-minded people for your voice to have resonance.

 

It could work if they were automated.

 

If you couldn't manual pilot it then it would just be flying Personal Rapid Transit and not exactly the flying car that most people envisioned. I think most were thinking of basically a Jetson's type vehicle that allowed you to soar over the rest of the traffic.

 

True it's not the chaos that the Newsweek writer envisioned but I don't think his argument is invalid. If you just look at our political debates shows how much misinformation is out there when people continually cite Internet sources who are highly questionable as authoritative. The fact that "It's gotta be true since I read it on the Internet" is a common joke just shows that is a problem.