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# 2025-09-12 - Brewster Kahle On AI And Advertising
## Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bot
Recently i saw the EFF interview with Brewster Kahle about how to fix
the Internet.
Building and Preserving the Library of Everything
> AI is absolutely critical and actually has been used for, well, a
> long period of time. You just think of, how does the magic of
> Google search happen, where you can just type a few words and get
> 10 links and several of them are actually really quite relevant.
> ...
> And these materials are absolutely relevant now with climate change
> in our new environments because, well, things are moving. So the
> pests that used to be only in Mexico are now in Louisiana and
> Texas. It's completely relevant to go and learn from these...
Interesting to pose AI as a solution to climate change when it CAUSES
climate change.
Some time ago i watched the Nov 28, 1992 interview with Brewster
Kahle about WAIS, an early distributed search engine.
Interview with Brewster Kahle Regarding WAIS
I felt eerie watching this interview. It's as though AI were part of
the initial vision for creating Google Search and Internet Archive in
the first place. His answers seem prescient in many ways, talking
about technological convergence and people using their phone and TV
to post home videos. Sounds like Youtube and co. He was very
optimistic about how advertising would happen over the Internet.
Sadly, i think the human race has manifested something much darker
than his 1992 Utopian vision for the Internet.
What follows are relevant quotes from this 1992 interview.
36:20
My personal goal out of this doesn't really have much to do with
electronic publishing at all. What I'd really like to make is a
machine that can answer the hard questions. A wise server. A server
that is somewhat the equivalent of the old style town priest or the
wise man on the hill. One you ask hard questions of. You might ask
"Should i go back to graduate school?" or "What's going to be
happening in pen top computers?" or "Is that a fluke? Is it a fad?"
That's [sic] the hard questions... I'd like to build that.
What does it take to make such a thing? Well, it requires a machine
that has a lot of experience. That has watched a lot of things that
have gone on. How people have tried things, and how they've worked,
and not worked. The priest, because of their special position in
society, gets to hear everybody's confessions, hear what it is
they've tried, what has worked and didn't work. And basically their
deal is that they won't go and blab it about.
I see electronic publishing as a major step towards making [this wise
computer]. A system for people to find what it is that they want and
pass this information around as a mechanism for getting this
[wise computer] going, in a way.
1:32:42
One thing that i have a great deal of hope for is home publishing.
Instead of people just receiving information through their
television, through their mailbox, whatever; being able to put
information back out again through their computers, through their
telephones, through their television as a mechanism of encouraging
people in their homes to start producing things: little clips, home
videos, musical gigs, their ideas on whatever, can be packaged and
distributed from their homes.
1:35:53
You asked "What is the role of advertising in the future of
electronic publishing?" Good question! One thing that I hope is
that advertising in its current form, if you can call it advertising,
because it's information that you don't want: it's sort of barraged
at you. It's usually done really inefficiently: you get all this
stuff in the mail... If there were advertising that you wanted, you'd
call it information. Like the Yellow Pages is *solid* advertising.
But [suppose] you care about auto parts [and] you'd really like to
know about what it is that product's offering you...
So there's a distinction between advertising and information:
advertising is those annoying things you get in the mail that aren't
targeted for you, but if those are targeted for you correctly, you'd
care. And if you were looking for it, then you'd actually want to
hear what the producer of the thing thought you should hear about it
and put it in the best light.
In the electronic world you have better filtering devices, it's sort
of like having a smart mailbox. Your mailbox... knows what
it is you are interested in and it throws out all the crap that
shouldn't be there but would actually go out and pursue the
information that you are interested in. So if you're about to go buy
a new VCR or a new camcorder or something, go out and probe around to
all those manufacturers, find out that information, correlate it with
whatever people have said, whether those were lies or not, how others
held up. Collect that information from a variety of sources, and put
it together so that you can view it.
I think the barrage style of advertising could really diminish in an
electronic environment based on the smarter terminals that we'll have
that will help correlate and filter out the crap. So is that good or
bad? I'd say it's good.
Most producers of widgets would really like to spend a lot of time
and money on finding those people that are thinking about their
product or thinking about going to a competitor, and are willing to
give free samples, give a trial run... [rather then spend a small
amount per person in a broadcast, they'd rather spend a lot more on
people who are more likely to follow through]. Electronics can help
producers find the right customers and that just makes the whole
thing more efficient. The stupidity of current advertising i believe
is an artifact of mass media.
p.s.
A relevant quote:
The right would have loved John McCarthy who coined
"artificial intelligence" largely so that he could avoid dealing with
Norbert Wiener. Not surprisingly he was also contemptuous of
Joseph Weizenbaum's critique of AI, writing:
> This moralistic and incoherent book uses computer science and
> technology as an illustration to support the view promoted by
> Lewis Mumford, Theodore Roszak, and Jacques Ellul, that science has
> led to an immoral view of man and the world. I am frightened by its
> arguments that certain research should not be done if it is based
> on or might result in an "obscene" picture of the world and man.
> Worse yet, the book's notion of "obscenity" is vague enough to
> admit arbitrary interpretations by activist bureaucrats.
From: https://post.lurk.org/@loriemerson/115198157075352690
And from the comments:
> Weizenbaum's argument that computers should not be given tasks
> requiring empathy because computers are incapable of empathy seems
> fairly coherent to me...
This gets to the heart of the matter. If i were going to turn to an
external resource for wisdom that fundamentally lacked empathy, then
i may as well cling to a wire-monkey mother.
tags: political,technical
# Tags
political
technical
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