This honestly shouldn’t be surprising. Tech is often untrusted at first.
This caused the dot com bust and likely will fuel the AI bubble. New cool tech comes out and actually does cool stuff, people hate it, distrust it, don’t want to use it, meanwhile others think it’s the wave of the future and throw all their money at it.
And there’s one big problem with that, the last thing specifically… they throw their money at something new before a market is ready to trust and adopt it, and they do so in an unsustainable way. Unsustainable investments cause bubbles. This is money that can’t keep getting pumped into the tech, money that a lot of startups depend on.
People didn’t think you’d ever spend money on weird websites, trust credit cards to be entered online. So many groundbreaking ideas busted in the dot com bubble because they came too soon, not because they were bad ideas. WebVan was online groceries! Groundbreaking idea that was literally 30 years ahead of its time, and now they failed, but who does what they tried to do? Amazon, yes the little online marketplace for books Amazon, the quaint little site where you can buy books over http.
The market needed credit card safety measures, needed PayPal, stripe, fraud detection and management, needed new technologies to build consumer trust. Eventually, we started using the internet to buy shit and it worked out.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit. Same phenomenon really. It’ll take a while before the market adopts the tech and consumers trust it. Eventually they will, but not yet.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit.
As a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, the teachers were categorically correct. 2000s Wikipedia was, broadly, a trashfire where citations were mostly an afterthought and there really weren’t standards. Some of the most bare minimum standards that make Wikipedia actually functional weren’t codified until c. 2006 and took easily over a decade to really take hold culturally. And unfortunately, the popularization of Wikipedia made the late 2000s pretty bad too; whereas the early 2000s were a largely benign wild west, the late ones saw a flood of near-unfiltered garbage that’s still being cleaned up today.
I’d still say not to trust Wikipedia today and use its sources instead for anything even slightly consequential, but back in peak Wikipedia scare days, “use its sources” was very often a nonstarter.
This honestly shouldn’t be surprising. Tech is often untrusted at first.
This caused the dot com bust and likely will fuel the AI bubble. New cool tech comes out and actually does cool stuff, people hate it, distrust it, don’t want to use it, meanwhile others think it’s the wave of the future and throw all their money at it.
And there’s one big problem with that, the last thing specifically… they throw their money at something new before a market is ready to trust and adopt it, and they do so in an unsustainable way. Unsustainable investments cause bubbles. This is money that can’t keep getting pumped into the tech, money that a lot of startups depend on.
People didn’t think you’d ever spend money on weird websites, trust credit cards to be entered online. So many groundbreaking ideas busted in the dot com bubble because they came too soon, not because they were bad ideas. WebVan was online groceries! Groundbreaking idea that was literally 30 years ahead of its time, and now they failed, but who does what they tried to do? Amazon, yes the little online marketplace for books Amazon, the quaint little site where you can buy books over http.
The market needed credit card safety measures, needed PayPal, stripe, fraud detection and management, needed new technologies to build consumer trust. Eventually, we started using the internet to buy shit and it worked out.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit. Same phenomenon really. It’ll take a while before the market adopts the tech and consumers trust it. Eventually they will, but not yet.
As a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, the teachers were categorically correct. 2000s Wikipedia was, broadly, a trashfire where citations were mostly an afterthought and there really weren’t standards. Some of the most bare minimum standards that make Wikipedia actually functional weren’t codified until c. 2006 and took easily over a decade to really take hold culturally. And unfortunately, the popularization of Wikipedia made the late 2000s pretty bad too; whereas the early 2000s were a largely benign wild west, the late ones saw a flood of near-unfiltered garbage that’s still being cleaned up today.
I’d still say not to trust Wikipedia today and use its sources instead for anything even slightly consequential, but back in peak Wikipedia scare days, “use its sources” was very often a nonstarter.