Search this Blog

What’s Up with Web 3.0?

Courtesy of WorkingTheWebToWin.com
By Carl Weiss

This ain’t your daddy’s world wide web.  If you thought that Web 2.0 was mind blowing, wait until you see what’s coming.  Where Web 2.0 turned an online research tool into a global social phenomenon that redefined how we interact with one another, Web 3.0 promises to take us where no web surfer has gone before.  That’s chiefly due to the fact that the next generation of online technology will be AI enabled and able to deliver more information faster and in more ways than is now possible.  If you want to see what Web 3.0 has in store for you in the not too distant future, buckle up as I give you a sneak preview in this week’s blog.

Skynet is REAL!

If you watched the recently released Terminator Genisys movie, the story’s central theme was the 2017 release of a global operating system that promises to link all computing devices.  This artificially intelligent system, whose core is protected in a subterranean vault, is set to launch Armageddon once it comes online, since it will be wired into everything with a processor, including military hardware.  The movie’s plot revolves around destroying the Cyberdyne mainframe before Genisys comes online.

Courtesy of  www.youtube.com
Granted, while some portion of the plot is farfetched, the main premise, that the World Wide Web will be controlled by AI is all too real.  In an earlier blog of mine entitled, “Do Smartphones Dream About Facebook?” I pointed out that most of the movers and shakers in the online industry, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and IBM are investing heavily in AI.  Google has admitted that 30% of their ranking is already being performed by AI.  Microsoft, owner of Bing, has AI built into its Cortana virtual assistant.  So the die is cast and it is only a matter of time before AI rules the roost online.
l

To understand where the web is going, you have to understand where it has been. Back in the 90’s, the Internet was nothing like what we have come to know and love today.  Connections back then were via dialup that was so slow that not only was streaming video an impossibility, even graphics were scant since they slowed the time it took a homepage to load to a snail’s crawl.  Search engines prior to 2000 were plentiful, but rudimentary lists designed to help web users navigate a network composed of a couple million sites.  (Today 250,000 websites are routinely added to the Internet on a daily basis.)

Courtesy of  en.wikipedia.org
In fact, it wasn’t until the accessibility of broadband connections on a massive scale was worked out that the web that we all know today came to be.  And that took nearly a decade to accomplish.  Face it, without high speed connections there would be no YouTube or Netflix.  Social nets would be much less popular if all you could post was text.  In essence, it was the ready availability and affordability of high speed internet and cloud computing that made Web 2.0 a reality.  For many people on this planet, that would have been enough.  But as we have seen as of late, the Internet is no longer the exclusive domain of people.  Today’s worldwide web is also used to communicate with and control an ever growing legion of devices. 

Rise of the Machines

Today, everything from our cellphones to our appliances and automobiles are web enabled.  This has created what is referred to as the “Internet of things” otherwise known as IoT.  Like Skynet, the IoT is into everything.  A quote from a blog I wrote 2 years ago called, “Is The Internet of Everything Really, Everything They're Cracking It Up to Be?sums it up quite nicely,

Courtesy of Working The Web To Win.
When the Internet was young, there was enthusiasm about being able to connect to people and places worldwide.  As the World Wide Web grew, so did the amount of people and things connected to it. Somewhere during the past couple of years the sheer amount of devices that have become web-enabled has gotten to the point where there are more things connected to the Internet than people.  As everything from computers, to cellphones, to appliances, to cars and even clothing begin to become internet-enabled, the internet will start to take on a life of its own. What all of us need to realize is that everything we do, everyplace we go, as well as how we live, shop, play and learn, have been fundamentally changed due to its existence.  

While the term was only coined in 1999, the concept for the IoT has been around since the 1960’s.  It was in 1962 that a researcher working for DARPA by the name of John Licklider described his vision of a galactic network where everything could talk to everything.  (Sound familiar?)  Licklider went even further by positing that by employing interconnected machines, mankind would eventually be able to improve our world experience without having to get involved.  While Lick’s vision went on to be the nucleus for the ARPANET, even he would have been surprised by recent developments in machine intelligence and robotics that have created virtual digital assistants, wearable computers and autonomous vehicles.
Courtesy of  de.wikipedia.org


More importantly, he could not possibly have envisioned the birth of an industry that has spawned legions of web enabled machines that already outnumber us.  Take for instance the fact that in 2003 there were 6.3 billion people on the planet and roughly 500 million devices connected to the Internet. (From the 2011 report by Cisco entitled, “The Internet of Things – How the Next Evolution of the Internet is Changing Everything.”)  

Explosive growth of smartphones and tablet PCs brought the number of devices connected to the Internet to 12.5 billion in 2010, while the world’s human population increased to 6.8 billion, making the number of connected devices per person more than 1 (1.84 to be exact) for the first time in history.
Courtesy of  www.flickr.com

Bear in mind that this report is five years old and that when it was written, the iPhone had only been introduced 4 years previously.  The report goes on to predict that the ratio of connected devices to people would continue to escalate to 3.6 per person by 2015 to 6.5 by 2020 and the conclusion is obvious.  Just as teenagers today would not know what to do if texting and social networks were suddenly to disappear overnight, so too will society’s dependence on smart devices become ever more ingrained.  Just as the youth of my generation rallied around the cry of “I want my MTV,” will the cry of millennials and their progeny rally around the theme of “I want my IoT?”  More importantly, will the next generation, whose life will start, stop and revolve around a wired world from cradle to grave and whose lives will be tracked, programmed and computed by a technological trove of IoT devices that do everything from order their groceries to drive their cars be better or worse off in the long run?  Will the very technology that connects everyone and everything to each other help or hurt our evolution?  Or, will it prove to be our Achilles’ Heel as everyone from nation states and hacking collectives to our own government uses the IoT to control a population that can no longer exist without technology?

The Semantics of Web 3.0

Courtesy of  www.youtube.com
From a user’s perspective, the chief difference between Web 2.0 & 3.0 will be in the way the web understands and process your needs and wants.  With Web 2.0, a web search about Saturn will bring up information about both the planet and the car company.  Likewise, trying to book a trip from say Philly to San Francisco while easier than 20 years ago, still requires a bit of searching for the best deals.  In the not too distant future, you will be able to ask your virtual assistant to search for, find and book the trip better and quicker than you could today.  That’s because in the not too distant future, your virtual assistant, not to mention search engines and a number of other AI enhanced IoT devices will be able to understand the semantics of any request. 

In a glimpse of things to come, Amazon recently debuted an internet connected Bluetooth speaker called Echo that not only plays music but listens and learns.  Equipped with a female virtual assistant named Alexa, this device is much more than a music director.  Capable of hearing you from across the room, even with the music playing, Alexa will answer questions, read Audiobooks to you, report on the news, traffic and weather, provide information on business and sports, tell jokes, control lights and switches in your home, as well as ordering you a pizza or Uber.  As more apps become available, Echo will become even more useful.  At $180.00 Echo is affordable to the masses. 


Watch this short Demo video of echo.

As Echo and other artificially intelligent devices make their way onto the shelves and into our homes, they like smartphones will soon become something that we can’t do without.  The lure of convenience has always been something that is irresistible to most humans.
As to whether the very machines that today knit our global community together will one day rise up to bite the hand that feeds them is a story for another day.  To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, all I have to say is, “I’ll be Back.”

In this article I have discussed how we are entering the age of Web 3.0 and how it will affect our use and interaction with the Internet of Things. This article explores the difference between web 2.0 and 3.0 and how the new AI paradigm will affect human usage of IoT devices, its growth, effects on quality of life, safety, privacy and the long term survival of our species.

If you found this article useful please share it with your friends, family and co-workers. If you
Get your copy today!
would like to learn more about this subject, visit the notes page on this blog for the BlogTalkRadio show dated 2/09/16. I recommend checking out "Has the Internet Made Us Smarter?“, "Hector the Connector Predictions for 2016 and Beyond!", "Is The Internet of Everything Really, Everything They're Cracking it Up to Be?andThe Piracy of Privacy - The Looting of Privacy in America”. You can also search for other related articles by typing in “IoT or the Internet of Things” in the search box top of this blog.

If you feel your business could use some help with its marketing, contact us at 904-410-2091,We will provide a free marketing analysis to help you get better results. If you'd like a free copy of our eBook, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century," please fill in the form below and we will give you immediate access to it. Your information is always kept private and is never sold. Don't forget to Plus us on Google+.





Carl Weiss is president of WorkingtheWebtoWin.com a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida that routinely works with bloggers and other online marketers to grow their businesses.

Related articles

1 comment:

  1. Weird! Wild! Wacky! And, apparently, there's much more to come. Thanks for putting the information out there.

    ReplyDelete