This site here (sorry, I can’t figure out who the author is) recently posted some nonsense about how Web 3.0 is going to be about using AI to create farms of people who think they’re playing games but are actually doing the bidding of corporations for no pay. This is absolutely sick nonsense. Go read the article if you don’t believe me.

My first issue with this idea is that it’s slavery. Game development companies are very good at creating very addictive games. Embedding puzzles or whatever into the game that solve problems for third-party companies will turn gamers into unpaid laborers, or at the very best, underpaid and unskilled laborers. Ya, that’s a pretty glamorous new technology you got there.

My other problem with this article is my usual thing about people wanting to both have and eat their cake.

The author is careful to put in caveats about how he doesn’t like Web “versions” and how this exciting new world of slave-gamers will only happen if we work really hard and don’t get too excited. Tim O’Reilly was saying the same thing last year at the Web 2.0 conference. I find it funny that each time someone invents some idea they want people to get excited about related to the Web, they say that THIS time we’re not going to go overboard with excitement, and that we’re going to be very serious and very professional about it all.

It’s as if people who run Internet companies want people to take them seriously (“we’re a mature industry now and this isn’t just a bubble!”), but they still want people to get wildly excited about their “new paradigm” (to use a phrase no one would dare use to describe their new web version today). What will happen, of course, is that people will get wildly excited and continue to think of the Web as a magic place full of good-looking, super-smart, and super-rich people who just keep on cranking out these great new versions! This isn’t really the truth at all….oh, except the part about us being good looking and super-smart.