Posted by edward 3 hours ago
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
Isn't that the point of TFA and this whole conversation?
BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
(Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).
Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).
Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.
Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.
Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.
The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.