World Net

The World Net, the dream of early visionaries on the ARPANET, is not the internet. The World Net isn't a network of machines but of human beings, it is a human-net linking every human being on Earth to every other, without intermediaries. The World Net is to the internet what democracy is to elections; they have nothing to do with each other.

I don't know who was dreaming on ARPANET to this extent, but Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, in their Turing Award lecture mentioned no such thing (althought they mentioned a lot of other visions and plans for the future of internet). http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2005/webcast.html
That's much too late. You have to look back at the 80s.
Only to find nothing worthy of mentioning.

The good old phone network has a far greater claim to being the World Net already than the internet is likely to ever have in the next 50 years. The greatest impediment to the World Net ever identified is linguistic barriers. Will translation software ever breach them? In real time?

We are left back where we started, asking what are the social implications of a real and effective World Net?

Contrast the World Net with overhyped dehumanizing trash like CyberSpace.

For translation software to do as well as humans is a StrongAi problem, so it will become possible if and only if we deal with that little issue. In which case we also have WorldNet becoming SkyNet. (Just kidding.)

And I think you're underestimating the value of being dehumanized; try it, you'll like it! (We're from the government and we're here to help you.)

Where did that line come from, anyway? It reminds me of an early black and white movie about the Tennessee Valley Authority building a dam and the efforts of some poor schmuck employee to evacuate people who, oddly, didn't want to leave their homes.

I don't think translation software has to do as well as humans to be reliably useful. Years ago, post 2000 probably, there was an article in Wired about Top 10 Worst Things To Come or something. One of the items on the list was that voice recognition's problem with accents had been "solved" by everyone learning a standardized monotone version of spoken English. The same could be applied to translation software if you provide users with enough feedback to modify their own behaviour. If translation software automatically and in real time provided double translations of what you're writing, that would constitute such feedback.

The thing about the World Net is that it was supposed to eliminate all war by letting everyone talk to everyone else. It wouldn't be possible to demonize foreign language speakers because they could talk without intermediation by two sets of hostile media. What's cyberspace compared to that? Just a playground....

Consider that it has never been hard for humans to demonize others, even if they speak the same language. This "dream", that universal intelligibility would resolve our differences, was always foolish

And its dismissal equally foolish. In the social sciences, the opposite of a stupid idea is another stupid idea. What you're missing is the evolution of human psychology that has occurred over the past thousands of years, the past hundreds of years, and yes even over the past decades. This makes it foolish to say "it has never been hard for humans" as if what humans did in the past is directly applicable to the present. To take just one example, German parenting after WW2 has made such strides that another holocaust is literally impossible.

Consider your own behavior, so rapid to insult others, all within the space of the few years that this Wiki has been around. The hatred you have shown in spite of this Wiki being mostly English stands as a perfect counterexample. Sure, at some hazy, indefinite future, humans may stop demonizing others, but language is hardly the barrier now.

By the way, can anyone imagine the headache involved in being "linked with every other human being"? Gee, only that might trigger the next holocaust on its own.

to eliminate all war [...] To take just one example, German parenting after WW2 has made such strides that another holocaust is literally impossible.

Or for another example, weapons development made such strides during the first half of the 20th century that after nuclear weapons and deterrent strategies were developed, it was literally impossible for any more conventional wars to ever take place. This is why all the wars that have occurred since WWII didn't really happen, right?

See:

CategoryComputingHistory