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When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened | Aeon Essays aeon.co/essays/when-ai-summaries-replace-hyperlinks-thought-itself-is-flattened

257 sats \ 5 comments \ @Scoresby 1 Oct hyperlinks

We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?

In this era, prominent philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, debated the extent to which a person controls the succession of ideas that appears in her mind. They posited that the succession of ideas reflects the interaction between the data received from the senses and one’s mental faculties – reason and imagination. Subsequently, David Hume argued that all successive ideas are linked by association.

"The mind follows connections found in the world."

The article has a section on Pope's Dunciad as an early example of hypterxtual writing. It's been a long time since I read it -- but I must have read one of the earlier versions, because I don't remember quite so many annotations and footnotes.

There's also this article that includes in which the term hypertext is coined:

material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.

There's also this early concept for a browser called Xanadu:

If you quote a writer in text, then that text should link to the original document, and the reader should be able to view the quoting document and the original side by side, much as Bush envisioned for the layout of the memex. Nelson in a sense imagined a universal version of Pope’s Dunciad – a history of human thought in which the user could trace how lines and phrases moved from one work to another.

It reminds me a little of how hovering on an SN link brings up a brief window of the link's meta data.

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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 1 Oct

You shouldn't replace the link; you should replace/augment the link text. This battles clickbait.

[Here are 20 ways you will die young](example.com)

into

[Lorum Ipsum](example.com)

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 1 Oct

So:

BAD :(

Optimization daemons.

GOOD :)

I'm still struggling with the idea that optimization pressure can produce something that is at odds with the broader system in which is it running and from which the pressure stems.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 1 Oct

Hmm no it doesn't matter how you link it. What matters is how my LLM reads what you linked and then summarizes it, for me.

Don't trust, verify... and then verify the verifier.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 1 Oct

I also meant to include this:

Once I wrote a hypertext novel. It was a series of about 60 little interconnected chapters, but rather than arranged in any order, the site displayed a random chapter when you first arrived. each chapter had a number of links to related chapters, and so depending on where you started, your passage through the story was very different.

Should have kept that project online.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 1 Oct

I'm not sure I'm really following what you or the article is trying to say, but I sense that it is important haha

Probably related, I think it would be awesome if we had tools to automatically find primary source material from secondary references. I was recently reading a history book and it would say stuff like "Contemporary sources indicate that..." with a footnote to the primary source, but it didn't provide the direct quote of the primary source. Trying to find the primary source to get the direct quote was an extremely difficult task... which I did pull off... but it would've been great if all that was automated somehow.