OM: Do you think that the future of the Internet will involve machines thinking on our behalf
Ev: Yes, they’ll have to. But it’s a combination of machines and the crowd. Data collected from the crowd that is analyzed by machines. For us, at least, that’s the future. Facebook is already like that. YouTube is like that. Anything that has a lot of information has to be like that. People are obsessed with social but it’s not really “social.” It’s making better decisions because of decisions of other people. It’s algorithms based on other people to help direct your attention another way.
I randomly ran across this interview with then-Twitter CEO Ev Williams. It made me nostalgic for days when technology company leaders said interesting things about technology, not about politics or random things, or spewed nonsense. My interview with Ev was published on the last working day of 2010. The whole conversation is worth reading because it gives you a historical timeline of the web, information, algorithms, and why we need AI-based answer machines.
