If I had a penny
> having the entirety of human knowledge in one's pocket can and should be used for good.
No. That is a fallacy. You have quick access to a large amount of knowledge both true and false.
You dont have access to everything that has been published, and yes I'm talking of the books you can get from a library or a second hand bookshop today, not ancient tomes.
You dont have access to every doccumentary etc ever broadcast. A lot of that is trapped on VHS tape and more trapped on UMATIC tapes and locked in the BBC archives etc. Now maybe some documentaries have been updated with newer releases such as Carl Sagans Cosmos which of course needed an update as Astronomy answered questions and found new ones. Now the original Cosmos is easily avalaible and should be watched in tandem with the new stuff as the original one has loads to offer and teach, only lacking the new information.
When you really look at it you find that much of the knowledge on the internet is also locked behind a paywall. DRM is rife, even ebooks delete themselves overnight, they dont wait for you to finish making notes.
So the entirety of human knowledge is not on the internet. It is in fact spread across multiple media types, some of which are locked behind paywalls or legal issues etc. What you think is the entirety of knowledge on the internet is actually a mish mash of knowledge and made up psuedo factoids as well as downright lies. You only know the truth that a serach engine algorithim decided to show you and even then you, or your kid, have no idea if its real or fake. You cant even trust a video as deepfakes are childs play to create and can make anyone say anything. Then there is something like ChatGPT, an overhyped language simulator that on paper (well on screed) looks like it is actually thinking, searching, teaching you things, but when you REALLY talk to it, and read what others have said, you find that it can do those thinsg as well as make the whole load of crap up. It's a language simulator and it is not surprising it can make everything and anything asked of it up, it only knows how to put words together, yet people are reading it and it reads so well that "it must be true".
So, is the tosh that people are making ChatGPT spit out also part of the entirety of knowledge you think little kiddies have?
My young cousins once asked me "whats an index"? They had no clue how to use a book. They just asked google and google spat out what was the most popular thing, even if it was total shit ripped off a website that had been popular for some reason. No checking, no cross referencing, nothing. The word, the FIRST words from Google were unimpeachable. Even I have fallen into that trap.
So if I had a penny for every time someone who doenst understand the enourmous danger of saying "the internet has the entirety of human knowledge on it and my 3 year old is a superbrain because of it" I'd be a lot richer.