I always assumed the web as it evolved would make everyone smarter by having everything we know as a world wide web of people at our fingertips.
Wrong.
Based on what the masses are believing today, the future of the misinformation highway scares the hell out of me. I can't believe the masses are so gullible about things that are easily debunked garbage. Many are not even willing to think for themselves or do any fact checking, that if their friend or family member forwards it along it must be true! Then they promote it to their list of followers, and it just spreads like wildfire.
When I sometimes bother to debunk something that I know to be false they don't bother to promote the truth to their followers so the misinformation persists.
When you consider that the Internet is our current "Borg Collective", I start to wonder how the Borg actually got anything done based on the sheer amount of misinformation that is being passed around. More importantly, how did they do anything right when the wrong information is spread. Perhaps the Borg solved this but it's still a rampant issue on our collective.
So how in the heck is the internet going to improve humanity when it turns out instead of giving us all enlightenment it's giving us enLIEtenment.
Just the volume of junk that I get being passed along from relatives that I have to debunk on a regular basis is damned scary.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that's had conversations with people that parrot all this misinformation and instead of having an actual discussion you end up debunking one wrong thing after another and end up passing the Snopes website back and forth on your tablet like it's a party game.
Now fast forward to the future where we possibly do have an actual neural interface with the web, or just Google glass, where the misinformation spreads even faster and the bulk of the population is walking around talking about these things like they're facts and taking action based on this misinformation.
What some governments, cults, emperors and dictators couldn't do, which is get everyone to mindlessly believe their garbage, the Internet does easily, often without even trying thanks to social networks!
Now imagine what wetware hackers could do by simply taking advantage of the naivety of the masses that propagate misinformation in the new social media outlets on the web.
I can see some scary stuff happening if it isn't already.
How do we know some of the current misinformation isn't being planted as experiments to test the penetration of the meme and working on perfecting the technology before doing something totally unexpected by manipulating the gullible masses in unimaginable ways.
Society as a whole is too gullible and mobile misinformation can be dangerous.
I hope the next generation is less gullible and capable or sorting out fact from crap better which is our only hope with this technology.
