Don't Stress the Future

technological approach to fixing that. I mean, as it turns out, we have this astoundingly amazing tool at our disposal. I'm talking about the Internet. I mean, if you think about it, it's like the largest machine that's ever been built. If you think of it as as one cohesive machine, it's not bigger than Unicron. Are you sure you don't mean Galvatron. We re recorded this bit and I'm not letting Joe go back anyway. Yes, so un chron would technically be bigger,

but that's a fictional machine. I hate to burst your bubble. No, okay, uh no, the Internet it's super cool. It is super cool. It gives us gives us access to more information than we've ever had before. So your average person who can connect to the Internet can get huge amounts of information. And that's right. It's just it's just unequivocally good, right, and not unequivocally I wouldn't say say that, I'd say that getting lots and lots of information can create some stress.

I mean, for instance, all three of us here and and well, heck, i'll say all four of us, NOL, I'm including you in this too. You're welcome, NOL. So uh, all four of us are used to using the Internet to research, to find information, and I'm sure that we have all encountered that experience of during our research getting results back that just seemed like a mountain of data, and some of it seemed like it might be relevant

to what we're looking for. Some of it maybe not as relevant, but it wasn't necessarily easy to tell upon first glance. So that means it's a lot of work. And then you're just thinking, before I didn't have the information I needed. Now not only am I not sure if I have the information I need or not, but I've got lots of stuff that I have to go through to find out. Yeah, it's a sinking feeling you get when you realize that there's potentially a lot that

you should know you don't know. This will come into you don't know if you should know it or not. This will come into it to light. When we talk about the overwhelming choice issue, which is a great discussion, I can't wait to have it. But that's definitely part of it. And you you hit right on there, you know it's it's the not knowing part that can be really irritating, like just irritating, but can cause real anxiety. Yes, yes, exactly.

And when you start thinking about how much data we reduce every day, that we're not making this problem any easier. We're making it more difficult every single day. Now, if you've listened to our podcast where we talked about big data, one of those two podcasts we talked about the sheer amount of information that we generate every day. If you

haven't listened to it, go ahead and do that. We'll wait. Okay, welcome back if you If you have decided that you really didn't want to go back and listen, here's some quick sound bites of information about how much data we produce every day. So Twitter you know, you can produce a a message of up to characters in a single tweet. You wouldn't think that that much information would be generated by Twitter. As it turns out, it's about twelve terabytes

of tweets. It's interesting. You ever tried to sort out an argument or public debate on Twitter, and you all, if you're like me, you always get the feeling that there's something you're missing. It helps, It helps if you find uh, I mean, the still can be an issue. It helps if you use certain Twitter clients that that string together right, so that if something is a reply to someone else, then you get the full thread and

you can read through it. However, if someone has not replied to someone, if they haven't replied to an actual Twitter message but instead have written a message and then just put the at sign of whomever in there, that won't be included in that in that conversation necessarily, so then you end up missing key parts. This is a really interesting debate. I think I can't quite tell well, you think that you understand that there are definitely parts

you're not getting in this. You can't really contribute. It can also be sort of like listening to one half of a telephone conversation where your brain starts to really work and overdrive trying to figure out what the heck the other half of that conversation could be. If it weren't for my horse, I never would have made that year in college. So in two thousand twelve, all of Facebook was collecting more than five hundred terror bytes of

data per day. Of course, we have the the YouTube measurement one hours of video footage uploaded every single minute. So the point being that we are generating lots of information. There's already a lot of it all available on the Internet, and we're making more every single day, so it's just making this problem of sorting through data even more challenging. According to IBM, the big numbers that we create two

point five quintillion bytes of data every day. That's a lot of cat videos and that's yeah, and it's it's so much of what we've of the data that is floating around our world right now, has been created in the past two years alone. So that means up until sayven, we only had generated ten of all the information we now have at our disposal. The other we managed to do in the last two years. That's and how much of that information is really useful. Well, okay, that's fair.

And see that's part of the problem, right, is that when we're trying to access this information, we have to try and sort through what is useful and what is not useful. This is, by the way, different from what is important versus what is not important, But that's a relevant question also, it can be yes, it all depends on the context of what you are looking for. Right. If you're just looking for something uh, you know, frivolous in the grand scheme of things, then important is not

really necessarily an issue. But but you still want it useful. You wanted to be relevant to whatever it is you are searching for. So if you wanted to search for super cute cat video, you want a super cute cat video, you know, you don't want something else that's not you know, here's a psychological breakdown on why we like super cute cat videos. That might be interesting, but it's not relevant to what you were actually looking for. Fortunately for the

people who really love super cute cat videos. Uh well, let's say for the people who are exclusively searching for super cute cat videos because who doesn't love them? Yeah? I mean, first, see if you don't love them if I love them. Uh, well, I mean you're listening to you can listen to our show anyway. But we just you know, we realize that, but we don't recognize your existence. But but if that's all you're looking for, this this

is less of a problem for you. It's it's much more of a problem when you're looking for information that matters in one way or another. Well, yeah, and I mean it's an irritating experience no matter what you are searching for, right, It's just sometimes it can be irritating

and also uh, really critical. So for example, if you are looking up information for let's say that you're in a part of the world where you don't necessarily have access to a really good medical facility, and you're needing to do some research on a medical issue that's really important. I mean you may you may come to the conclusion that you have got to find a way to go to some other place in order to have something addressed.

I mean, that's that's critically important. But if you do a search and you get back a bunch of results that are related to, but not critical to whatever it was as you were looking for, that's that's a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, if you've got an emergency going on and you get results that are that are partially blog entries and partially advertisements and and partially you know, maybe information from a source that isn't a really good one. You know, it's

it's hard to talk people through. You know, we all do this every day, probably, but but trying to explain to someone that everything that pops up on Google's front page isn't necessarily what you want to click on, it's hard to explain. So has research showed that these effects, that this plethora of information has any effect on us?

There has been some research on this, and in fact, this is where we need to create a distinction, because there's been some research on the overload of choice, which is where you are given a whole bunch of different options and then you have to choose between all those options to figure out which one or which few are the best for whatever your goal happens to be. And then there's just data overload. And the two are connected and not necessarily you can't necessarily say one is more

important than the other. It's more of the combination of the two that create that Maybe what are creating a real problem as far as stressors are concerned. I say maybe, because when you come to psychological research, it's tough. You've got a lot of variables you have to account for, and and it's still fairly early on in this kind of research, so we don't have a lot of definitive studies and it's really hard to isolate variables exactly. So so let's talk a little bit about some of this

work that has been done. So there's a psychologist named Barry Schwartz who wrote a book called The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less? And uh? And Dr Schwartz was looking into he was he's a psychologist. He was looking into, um, how do people react when they have a lot of choices? And and do more choices mean more freedom and more happiness or does it actually, somewhat paradoxically make us feel less happy? What is it better to have a lot

of choice or is it better have just a few options? Now, in his thesis he laid out a set of steps that consumers go through. This is really looking at a customer who is, you know, shopping for something and is coming up with a whole bunch of different examples of whatever that thing happens to be. So, he said that they go through several steps. The first step is they determine what their goals are, so what is it that they're trying to accomplish. Then prioritizing those goals so if

there are more than one. If there's more than one goal, they have to figure out wharri which goals are the most important, which are the ones that have to be met first, then examining the options that are actually available, so what things are out there that are made specifically to address this kind of goal. Then to measure those options against the goals to determine which of those options are most likely to fulfill those goals. Then the next step is to pick the best option out of all

of them to meet the goals. The final step is modifying goals if necessary. So this would mean if there are more goals that need to be met, deciding which ones you might be able to let go of, or maybe even modifying your goals after you've made your choice, so that psychologically you feel better about the choice you have made. Right, So it's like, well, I really wanted something that was sweet and crunchy, but this is just crunchy. But hey, I really just wanted crunchy, So I'm taking

this that would be a very simplified example. Now, Schwartz suggests that stress was created by having too many choices and that contributed to unhappiness overall and decreased satisfaction. But his studies have also received some criticism from other psychologists who have suggested that perhaps this is too simple of a view and have said that, you know, replicating these these studies that Schwartz has done has been somewhat problematic.

They haven't really shown replicable results, and there might not be a direct clear connection between the number of choices you have and your general level of happiness and sense of freedom. Now that being said, there was a study conducted. This is one that everyone tends to cite. It was done back in by a professor of business named Shena Angar. And what Sheina did was set up a display in a grocery store that was a jam display. So you've heard about this one, right, Joe YEA. So it was

two different displays. There was one that had six jams and there was one that had twenty four jams. And so twenty four jams, twenty four different jams, twenty four different jams, six different types of jam, and twenty four different types of jam. Thank you yeah, not just hey, that's my jam. You. So every few hours they would swap out what which display they were using, and they

discovered something interesting. With the larger display, they attracted more customers, but fewer of those customers would actually make a purchase. Out of of all the customers who would stop at the larger one, only around three percent of them would go on to buy one of those jams. They In both cases, the the customers sampled an average of two of the different types of jam, whether there were six types there or twenty four. The people who saw twenty

four three percent of them bought jam. The people who saw the six selections of them bought jam. So the conclusion was that by offering fewer choices, you actually increase the likelihood of selling a product. Now, extrapolating that to mean things that you know, too much choice stresses you out or or contributes to unhappiness is beyond the scope of that survey, but that's what some of the future

studies have done. Now this being said that you know, there there are people like uh Benjamin Shibehne know I butchered his name. He's a Swiss psychologist who said that perhaps it's more the relationship between choice and the information we have a out those choices. So it's not just the fact that we have a lot of different options

to choose from. It's that we don't know enough about each option to feel confident in our choice, so that the more choices you have, the less likely you're going to feel that you have enough information about all of them that you have made the right decision. So that's where you get that buyer's remorse, where you have, you know, forty different examples of whatever it was you went shopping for, and ultimately you you settled on one, but there's a

nagging suspicion in your head that you didn't do enough research. Yeah, perhaps one of those other ones. In fact, the likelihood is that one of those other ones is better for you than whatever it was you bought, Like you know, you just started going through Like statistically speaking, there's a very good chance that I have something that's not the best version of whatever it was I was going after,

and therefore that contributes to unhappiness. So it's not just how many choices you have, but how much information you have in general about both your goals and the options that are available to you. So it's a more complex, uh system than just how many choices are there. I

was gonna I was gonna mention Amazon. UM. You know the part of part of what has made that site so successful is that UM it allows you to It allows users to leave reviews and other users to read them and UM and you know that's that's an example of having way more information about a product than you generally would if you walked up to a store shelf. The shelf isn't going to tell you anything about it, you know about when other users have have enjoyed that jam.

But although we've talked about augmented reality UH applications that could eventually do that where that's really cool, Yeah, where you'd be able to look at products and actually see in real time what people people you trust have said about it. So that's kind of interesting. But so uh, if you want to translate this to what we were talking about before, I mean, if twenty four jams upsets people and makes it harder for them to choose, it

sounds like a party to me. What about twenty four million Google results when you're trying to find a piece of information. I did a search just as an example, just a random example, I guess, not truly random, but as an example to see how many results I might get from a search that I might typically do in the course of my work. So I searched for dark matter and I got two hundred and eight approximately two eight million results on dark matter. That's a lot of information.

Now there are things I can do to narrow that search down, where I can use search term parameters that will tell Google this is specifically what I'm looking for when it comes to dark matter, whether it's the most recent research or it's the you know, any sort of controversy that's related to dark matter, or any sort of early proof of dark matter, anything like that I could I could give Google more information and then could receive from the exactly it would narrow down that net by

by by clicking on a tab for for for news items, if you're looking for or scholar or scholarly work, if I want to look at papers. But when you do something like that, it's interesting to point out that a lot of the heavy lifting being done there is being done by you and by Google, and not by the pages themselves. Well, yeah, because what Google is doing is it's trying to find the best results for whatever search query you have typed in. So you have to be

somewhat savvy to know how to do this. It helps. Yeah, I mean, Google definitely has been getting better at at tweaking its algorithm to weed out any any sort of results they're trying to game the system. In the early days, do you guys remember web search in the early days. So in the early days, the way search engines would work is they would build dogpile. They would they would rely on things like information that would be in the header and footer of a website, so or web page.

So let's say you create a web page and your web page is really all about I don't know, maybe it's it's all about hamsters. You've written a web page about hamps. But you really you also happen to have in those early web days, you know one of those you have, no, you have one of those visitor counters. You remember those the counters that would click up every time someone click on It actually became kind of a status symbol among certain people who had web pages, and

you really really cool people. Yeah, Okay, let's not make judgments. I was one of those really cool people. Um so, so you have this page about hamsters, and you're genuinely interested in hamsters. You you've raised hamsters, you love hamsters. You want to share this passion of hamsters with the world. But you know you're getting maybe three visitors every month, and you think, wow, I was really kind of hoping that I'd be able to share the love of hamsters

with a wider audience. So you think, how can I get more people to come to my page. One if I just put a whole bunch of random terms in the header and foot her of my web page, things that I know people are searching for, and then that way, my page is gonna pop right up at the top of search results for anyone who searches for that stuff. And even though they're going to arrive at my page and realize that I don't have a website that's all about making a cake, it's all about hamsters, maybe they

will discover the joy of hamsters. And if they don't, at least my counter will start popping up. So people were gaming the system, and web search engines, including Google, spent a lot of time tweaking their search algorithms to try and negate anyone who was trying to to learn the way that the search engine was finding information and returning it as a search result, so that only in theory the relevant pages would remain and that the most

relevant pages would be pushed to the top. So that I mean, because you know, I I have on occasion gone maybe ten pages back into Google Search. But that's about my and that's not that's not even I mean average, it's nowhere near them. In fact, I read one result that said that on average, around thirty six percent of all Google users choose the top result, and then from two through five equals another around thirty four. There was a study done at Cornell in two thousand seven that

UM used eye tracking to UM. It gave students a Google Search result page of UM of abstracts from research papers and UM and with this eye tracking software, they found out that the students trusted Google's Google's ranking system more than they did reading the abstracts to see what

was more important to them. Well, and I mean, you know, again, we get to this idea of you have all these options, and if you're searching for something, chances are the reason you're searching for it is because you want to know more about it, which means you already do not know which options are going to be the best for you. So you know, that might just be your brain saying, look, let's not let's not complicate this, let's not do too much work. Let's just pick that first one. It's got

to be the best. But so, what we want to talk about here is the fact that Google is doing the hard work. Their algorithm has to look at these pages and figure out what makes them important or useful or relevant to you, and they're using them two hundred factors or more dators and and so what if the pages actually did some of the work here, What if it went beyond the pages doing the work and you

didn't have to worry about pages at all. Because that's the other issue, is that let's say that I do a search and I get a really good scientific paper on something that I'm researching, And it may be that it's a perfectly good scientific paper and it's still read the paper. I have to read the whole paper to find out if in fact it addresses the specific question I had, and if it doesn't, then I have to

go and find more information. Or maybe that it has part of what I needed to know, but not everything I needed to know. So that means that I have to research maybe twenty papers in order to get a full picture of whatever it is I'm really looking into. And even then you have that anxiety like there's something else that there could have been yet another piece, a twenty first piece out there that I just didn't even

know about. And that's because it's human to human, right, It's because you're the one dealing with it, and you're dealing with documents that were made by humans for humans to read, right, So you're talking about you know it, even if it's not a static web page like those are the I remember the old days where you would make a web page and that's pretty much how it would stay unless you had a couple of hours at your disposal to go and put in some more content.

Nowadays we have dynamic web pages, but even then, you know, the general web page doesn't change that much unless it's something that's got a lot of user generated content in it. So in that sense, how do you get all this information in one place? And one approach that may address this is a dramatic reimagining of what the web can do. It's called the semantic web, the semantic web a k A.

Web three point oh. You may well, you know, some people call it that, some people call it some people already calling it Web four point oh because they say that Web three point oh is the social web. So what web one point oh is before the dot com crash? Web two point oh is when we started including things like user reviews and some integration. Web three point oh is social media. Web four point oh is semantic web. All of these are largely meaningless. But this concept goes

back to before the dot com crash. Oh yeah, yeah, well this this goes back in fact that one of the people who talked about was a guy who knows a thing or two about the web, seeing as he's the guy who invented it. To tim Berners Lee, Sir tim Berners, Lee old, Sir tim Berners, he uh so. One of the things I read when I was looking into this was goes way back. It was actually a

Scientific American article from two thousand one. Do you think about how primitive the web was in two thousand one compared to now, Dinosaurs roam the web, been fire had yet to be discovered. Here there will be dragons in geo cities. I think I think we were still trying to phase out the under construction Gift and the looping Midi at that point. Yeah, oh, the Midias. Do you remember the Midias? Do you remember my Space which would

automatically play whatever horrible music your friends were listening to? Yeah, the dancing Oh yeah, good times. Well, anyway, sir Tim berners Lee, he offered this idea that that was really interesting. Um, it was sort of what we've been talking about. What if the web, instead of being a collection of interlinked documents for people to read, was a collection of interlinked data sets. All right, and the listeners, if you're hearing that, we got as there was a thunderstorm. We're gonna keep

on going because that's how dedicated to the future we are. Yeah, so we're risking our lives stormers. Yeah, so I did the semantic web. The semantic web. Yeah, so we're talking about a system of instead of sort of partially unstructured documents for people to read with links connecting them, uh, sets of data where each piece of data is connected by what's known as an ontology. Yes, so and on and and this is crucial toes are critical to the

way this works. So to think of an ontology, and ontology means the nature of being sort of like what is it? And by creating the semantic web, what you'd be doing is sort of creating libraries that identified pieces of information by what type of information they were. And this wouldn't just be at the page level, you know, where you have meta tags that might say this page

is you know, encyclopedia or something like that. But for every individual piece of information or fact on the page, there would be a data point saying, um, okay, so this number is a time right, and this, uh, this string of text is the address. And you can actually even go deeper than this and say this is a billing address, and this is a shipping address, and what we and and beyond that you can even go into Let's say that you you want to uh, explain all

the tags that are related to a single person. So Joe, for this this example, I'm going to suggest that you are my cousin, so you could have you know, Joe Jonathan's cousin would be one bit of information how stuff works. Employee could be another bit of information. Podcaster for forward thinking could be another bit of information. Now, all of

these bits of information pertained to him. Uh, some of which are are maybe very specific and unique to Joe, some of which would be things that other people could belong to. And so you would have to have build a system that could understand the relationship between Joe and various organizations, people, places, times, and also how other people could be a part of that. Like some things, you're gonna say, this is going to be a category that Joe is the only person who belongs to this category.

It is unique to Joe. There are other categories that Joe will be in that other people like Lauren would be in. If I said how stuff works employee, then obviously both of you would be in there. If I said host of forward thinking, both of you would be in there. If I said my cousin, only Joe would be in there because Lauren disowned me years ago. So these are examples of just relationships. And this is just one bit of data that the semantic web would have

to understand for it to work. Because what needs to know is it needs to know what is the significance of every single point of data and its relationship to other points of data. Right, So we're talking about a web that wouldn't just serve you up a page of data that you'd have to understand. It would be a web where your client or your age understands the information.

It understands what each little bit of info on the page means and what you're looking for, and how each of these pieces of information are relevant and related to each other, right, and then it would serve it up to you in a way that was digestible. So, for example, if I wanted to search for, uh something where I'm looking for a very particular set of parameters for I don't know what, what's a what's a fun thing? Not? I was gonna say dark matter to go back to Google.

But let's say that's something goofy uh potato gun potato gun? All right? Yeah, I like penguin gun penguin gun. Oh no, no, that's terrible. No, Okay. So I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say things like maybe maybe I'm just doing a search on a year, all right, and I do a search on it, yeah, because I'm because I don't want the I don't want to be shooting penguins, So I'm gonna pick up early year to you would like shoot them with bullets. I'm saying I'm gonna When I said shooting penguin,

did I say shooting at penguin's No. I think the ambiguity was there for a reason. So so yeah, I put in a year, and then maybe in a semantic web search, it would give me all this relevant information to that that term. So it wouldn't just be like things that happened that year. It might also be relative to my personal experience if it's a year that was in my lifetime. We can talk about semantic web being so personalized as to give two different people separate kinds

of answers depending upon their own personal context. The idea being the semantic web would not only learn how the web, all the information on the web works, but learned that what your own personal preferences and needs are, so it can anticipate how what information to send to you. So Lawrence search and my search might give very different results.

An example that Berner's Lee gave back in two thousand one in this article is something about like healthcare providers say, okay, you're you're looking for a specialist in in something your doctor recommends a specialist, Well, you can search for a specialist.

And based on all these different tags, on this information, uh, your your semantic web agent can help you find a specialist that's not just the kind of specialist you need, but one that's located near your house, is covered by your insurance provider, is rated within a certain like price range or within a certain user review category, you know, say only rated excellent, essentially narrowing down all that data we had talked about before that and that you know again,

so that the fact that you don't you know, if you're presented with all those different options at at once, just even if even if they're being completely transparent about all the services they provide and whether or not they're part of your plan or whatever, you still have to go through all of that to make sure that you narrow down your choices to the viable options and then pick the best viable option. The semantic web does all of that work for you, and it does it by

analyzing all this data because again it understands it. And how does it understand it? We build it in there. Although part of this exists today, I mean, you know, for for example, Google gives you if you're logged in or if it has any history of your behavior, UM will give you slightly personalized results. You know, it will

move to the top. For example, if I search about a topic and Jonathan has written an article about it that he has UM tagged himself as the author of, it will pull that towards the top of the list for me because it knows that we're friends on the internet. Because Google's creepy like that. Yeah, well it also if it knows where your location is, then when you do certain searches, it's going to bring up a lot of

results that happened to be local to you. So if I did a search as a as just a whim after after I did my search on dark Matter, I did another search which was just Italian food, I just searched Italian food, and then the very top of the search results were all about Italian restaurants there in the Atlanta area, and then below that were more general links

to Italian food topics. So again, it's one of those things where Google has built this into the algorithm to start looking for things that are tagged in a certain way.

Now that's a very primitive approach to what we're talking about, but we've seen some other examples of it, right like if you search for something specific, like maybe you search for weather in San Diego, then not only do you get search results that might take you to something like weather dot com or some other website, you might get a little thing at the top. And this this applies both to Google and to other search engines like being You can get a little thing at the top which

will tell you what the current weather is. It just gives you an answer, yeah, a little widget right there. And uh, you know, then there are other well they don't like to call it a search engine, they call

it a knowledge engine. But well, from Alpha is it does a very similar sort of thing so that when you type in a particular kind of query for usually it's something that's scientific or mathematical in nature, it will pull back the relevant information, uh and serve it up to you right there, so that you know you're not going to a web page that contains the information that you still have to read through and find. It gives

you just the pertinent information. Yeah, but a lot of that's just computation and hard coding, and that that's what makes it different from this idea of the semantic web, which the semantic web, the search engine there doesn't anticipate your searches. It actually can make use of the semantic web to answer any kind of problem. So if you want to say, you want to ask a question that has a specific answer, but there's nowhere out on the web where this answer is phrased, like you ask it

right now? Sure? Sure, because everything is so keyword driven and um and and furthermore, you know, the even just the order of the keywords as you type them can have a strong effect on what results. And machines are

not capable of reading human language. So or if you know, if if something really important about dark matter came up in a paper that wasn't about dark matter at all, or it was so long ago that they weren't calling it dark matter yet they were using a different form of terminology, you know, and this is the kind of

thing that the semantic web would would learn. Hey, people have previously found this bit really useful exactly that that would be a really important autology like previously known as could be one tag that could for like a person's name. If somebody changed their name but you're searching for their new name, it could also serve up that person was previously known as this person and you know right now, and they're using to to You know, again, this isn't

something that's just magically getting generated. It's not like computers are generating the foundation for the semantic Web. This is stuff that goes on a hard work. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work by people, and it's using really two primary tools. Extensible Markup Language or x m L and the Resource Description Framework or r DF. So m L lets you label data in a way that machines can associate with particular taxonomys or ontologies. So it's it's a tagging mechanism. So XML is not like some sort

of coding or anything. You're just tagging data so that so that machines can understand how to sort that data, how where does that data belong in the universe of information. And then r DF is that's when it's the you know, the Resource description Framework. That's what's expressing the actual meaning of the XML tags. Because you can tag stuff with XML like crazy, but if you don't have a framework somewhere that explains what the tag means, then it's useless.

It doesn't mean anything because you haven't given the meaning to it. So you have to use this combination of frameworks to build out what is going to be useful to the semantic web. That's a lot of work. I mean, and like we said, with all the data we're generating, we're just making more work every single day. So it's it's something that is is not a it's not a

tiny challenge. It's a big challenge. But if we were able to create a semantic web that could make it very useful to pull up information in a lot of different applications. And and there are commercial motivators, I mean, and and this is a little bit where people start to get peeved about the entire process. But um, but for for advertising purposes and marketing purposes, certainly people want to be able to serve you the most relevant response

that hopefully will also be something that you're going to purchase. Um. But you know, and and and that gets this is actually not not just the most relevant response, but serve it to you in the most relevant way. Like they might be serving different products in different ways based on semantic ontologies, the same way that you know, the same movie can be to feel good comedy of the year and also the action drama of the year in different trailers. But yeah, if it knows what you like. You know,

you've you've dealt with the tags before. You know, I'd rather see something that's a good deal than something that's the best on the market, you know, either way it can be marketed. Yeah, the in fact, the semantic web could be incredibly disruptive because think of the way we we get pages served up to us right now, Yeah, they have to go to our page, right, there's a

there's a revenue model there, right. I mean that's the downside for the the user, is that going to a link means, you know, you're actually sending your browser to pull back a page from some server somewhere, a document that a document that may or may not have the information you need on it. But that document often, in fact, frequently, depending upon the what kind of document is, has ads on it. Those ads help support the creation and maintenance

of that document. The fact that the document is out there is because there was someone somewhere who is willing to put forth the energy and money to generate it and to continue to support it. Right the web server is still turned on, it's still it is still pulling out electricity so they can continue to serve up these web pages. Still has a job, etcetera, etcetera. Hopefully the writer still has a job in this economy. We know

how tough that is. So anyway, the fact is there is money that goes into the generation and maintenance of these pages. So the way that some of that is captured is through advertising on these on these web pages. Web advertising. That that's a you know, that's been a big revenue model in the past. So if you go out to these pages, that counts as an impression and maybe you click on the ad and that might be uh, that might give the person whoever or the entity that

has created a click through v exactly. So, uh So it's an important part of the financial support of this network. Now, if you have a semantic web that's pulling information from all sorts of sources across the entire inner net, and it is serving it up to you, uh and in a way that doesn't necessarily indicate that you know this. You need to go to this web page now, you need to go visit this web page, because if you don't, then there's no impression on that ad. The ad was

never seen. You don't uh, you know, the there's no reason to advertise on the web anymore. The entire revenue model goes away. So then you're left with the question of how do you keep supporting this incredible tool we've talked about if there's not a way of generating revenue to offset the cost. And I mean it could be a relatively I mean I know that. I'm like, this would be totally simple to coach. Somebody get on this

right now. But you know it's you could you could have some kind of fee for every time your your engine returns to a paragraph from whatever page or you know, you you you can find ways of monetizing it. I believe in people's powers of monetizing data. Yeah. The the key I think would be that the old web could

not go away. If the old web were to go away, if everyone were to do just switch over to the semantic web, then think about it, why would you block Well, I mean what they're talking about, the semantic web isn't a replacement of the web. It's sort of an extension the web. Right. But but if people, if you were to think, well, instead of using a web grade, instead of choosing a traditional web browser, I'm just gonna use

my semantic browser. So if I'm just using my semantic browser, then I'm not gonna necessary You know, a lot of people would say this removes artistry from generating content for the web, Like why would I create any sort of short story that I would publish the web, or a poem or anything like that unless you had a way of actually navigating to that information directly, as opposed to

having an agent who just brings you stuff that you like. Yeah, I think that's not going to go away, because as you've just identified with say a story or something like that, there's always going to be stuff on the web that you want to read all of your not just looking for one piece of information for right and and furthermore, you know you're I don't foresee social networking going away anytime soon, and so I would suspect that perhaps if if a lot of the rest of the web turned semantic,

that U that more of that creative content would go on on social sites where you know, you're still being I mean on Facebook every day. It is. It is using metrics to figure out what it thinks you want to read and showing you that rather than started Oh sure, sure, you know, it's Facebook's idea of what I find important in my idea of what I find important are two very different things. Absolutely, I'm not saying that it doesn't

work Facebook. You better than you know your stuff. Well, if it does, then it's not working because I'm not clicking on any of those links. I don't care how muscular that that guy is on that you get those two Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, Okay,

I don't. I don't get those ads. We'll show you sometimes excellent, yeah, Facebook, but even even even adds aside um, it's it's picking what content from um, what users you follow to to show you in your main feed m. And you like that, you like this one guy, he's a total freak, So here's something freaky for you to look at. Oh no, I know he's a total freak. I like him anyway, not because of it, well, but

you know it's it's fascinating. And they use the rate at which you scroll through your feed page to help it decide what posts to show you. And that would be so much more relevant to me if I weren't constantly interrupted by people while I'm trying to read my Facebook feed because I stop and I turned around to talk to someone, which means that Facebook always stop on the muscle dude. He just he just shows up all the time, man, Like he's like some sort of stealth

muscle ninja. I mean, just what is it? They always say something like, you know, learn this muscle trick before it's illegal, right right, It's the cool It's the medical approach that no doctor wants you to know, because doctors, of course don't want you to be healthy. Good times. I'm okay, yeah, sorry, I'm full of horrible predatory ads aimed at you. Oh no, no it is, but it's just giving me um engagement rings and um yeah, pink sparkly things. Yeah, okay, that's fair Facebook for me. It's

like it's like muscles. It's like, uh, he joined the military. You know, I'm not kidding. I get lots of those. Oh Joe, the muscular military dude. I want to see that. Yeah, see where I would be happy with the pink sparkly stuff, but I just keep getting this muscle dude. Whatever. Anyway,

the semantic Web cool idea. So the point being, this whole discussion has been leading up to this idea of developing more sophisticated tools for us to navigate this amazing Internet so that we are able to get information that's relevant to us that doesn't overload us with stress because we suddenly don't have any idea of how to choose the right option. So the semantic web almost goes to the furthest extreme, and if you want to look at it in one way, it goes to the extreme of

don't worry about options. That's not your problem. I'll take care of the options, and here's the information you want. In a lot of cases useful, I think. Yeah. So uh interesting approach. And whether or not we see the semantic web rolled out in a wide format in the foreseeable future remains to be seen. It does require an awful lot of work, but it's work that a lot of people are really they really believe in, and they're really trying to make it become a reality. So it'll

be interesting to see how that that unfolds. So, guys, if you have any episode ideas, or you have any comments that you want to make about this episode, I highly suggest you write us because we can't hear you from here. Our email address is FW thinking at Discovery dot com or go to FW thinking dot com and

there you can see all the videos. You can read the blog posts you can listen to more podcasts like the this one, and we had a lot more information out there that is really really cool that we think you guys would be really excited to see and explore. So thanks for listening and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,