Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

Terry Pratchett -

>'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it all up.'

Bill Gates -

>'Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only recieve a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way you can check on someone's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net than it is in print today.'

Well, it appears that a children's comedy novelist had more insight into this subject than the guy who ran Microsoft. How would Bill's mystical reputation system deal with this?

edit - I did not think that calling Pratchett a children's comedy novelist would raise so much ire. I think there might be one or two books of his I have not (yet) read and I am currently in a mania of fear and excitement over whether Sky will do justice to 'Good Omens' in the upcoming TV series.

For those who think I am denigrating Pratchett in some way by the description, I am put in mind of the quote from C.S. Lewis - “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”

Gates was a blue-blood capitalist, and literally could not imagine people cooperating in a commons with sophisticated computers, because money. Whatever Gates is referring to in that quote very likely has some hobbled assumptions that are hard to conceptualize in 2020.

Bill Gates is smart and successful, but that doesn't mean he is omniscient. He has made mistakes and said many things through his career that turned out to be false. As have we all. This isn't a personal flaw, it is just being human. But people do need to remember that his success doesn't make him wise or prescient, just successful.

I think what Gates suggest is something like the "web of trust" which W3C was working on as part of the semantic web. The idea is basically if I trust A and A trust B then I can trust news articles written by B.

I'm pretty skeptical it is workable online as a technical solution. But basically this is how trust worked in the newspaper age. ("This was published in the reputable newspaper XXX")

I was thinking it might just be a fox vs hedgehog thing.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette...

On tech, Gates is more of a hedgehog and Pratchett is more of a fox, so we might actually expect Pratchett's predictions to be better.