The End of the World (Wide Web) As We Know It

By Gordon Hopkins This is not a sports story. I just want to clarify that up front, because the beginning of this missive could be a little misleading to some.So, Tom Thibodeau, head coach of the New York Knicks, just got fired. This came as quite a shock to many, given he led the Knicks to the conference finals for the franchise's first appearance since 2000.This isn't a sports story, I swear.A few years ago, science guy and fashion renegade Neil deGrasse Tyson began predicting what he called “the death of the internet.” So, what could possible kill the internet?Number one suspect is, of course, Artificial Intelligence (AI).Here is what Dr. Tyson said a couple of years ago, “I foresee the day where AI becomes so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI. The day that happens, the entire role of the internet as a source of objectively true information will implode and that will be the death of the internet.” Or, to put it another way. People are fine with being lied to by people. They won't put up with being lied to by a machine.That doesn't mean the internet will go away entirely. As the good doctor explains, “The internet will return to just cat videos.” They tell me Dr. Tyson is kind of a clever guy, and suspect that's true because his words echo those of another clever guy who has been saying the same thing for the last year or so: me. If there is a better example of confirmation bias than the sentence I just wrote, I can't image what it could be.Now we are just starting to see a few examples of this very thing happening. And that brings us back to the recently unemployed Thibodeau. It seems that Thibodeau's fellow coach, Rick Carlisle of the Indiana Pacers didn't believe the reports about the New York Knicks firing Tom Thibodeau. He was quoted as saying he thought the story was “a fake AI thing.” This kind of thing is going to become more and more commonplace. The practical upshot for those who want to be informed is that they will soon start getting their news from other sources, sources that use human beings to gather information, rather than machines. In a word: newspapers.

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