I spend time researching on the Internet Archive and Wayback. It offers a first-person perspective on the last time a general-purpose technology ripped through our world. In it, I found a four-part BBC Radio 4 program from October 2000 called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future. Douglas Adams hosted it. He discussed how the digital world would reshape music, publishing, and society. https://lnkd.in/eK-wzSA5 Adams in 2000 was Nicholas Thompson in 2026. A smart witness asking what an emerging technology was about to do to us. Much of my AI literacy program is built in literacy of past changes. When the next general-purpose technology shows up, future parents, teachers, researchers, writers, thinkers, and even business leaders will look back (I hope they won’t just ask an AI). They'll want to know who saw it clearly and who didn't, what we feared and what we missed, where we were honest and where we performed. The Wayback Machine is where they'll look. I understand the risks, copyright, and abuses, but those should be secondary to the preservation of thought, perspective, and insight. The archive only works if we leave the complete picture. #WaybackMachine #InternetArchive #AssistingIntelligence #DouglasAdams #DontPanic #BringATowel
The most interesting thing in tech: will the Wayback Machine become a casualty of the battle between bot blockers and scrapers? It is an amazing resource, but lots of publishers---including us---have had to cut off the site to keep AI companies from scraping it for their content. This is a very hard problem to solve, and I worry it’s a sign of things to come for services that rely on data from publishers and content creators.
