This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Fiction writers have explored some possibilities.

In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.

The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Stephenson’s record as a prognosticator has been impressive – he anticipated the metaverse in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and a key plot element of his “Diamond Age,” released in 1995, is an interactive primer that functions much like a chatbot.

On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren’t cordoned off by paywalls.

Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web – one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The rise of the chatbots

Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way.

The developers of large language models, or LLMs – the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini – have taken advantage of this resource.

To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.

The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn’t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce, leading to what The New York Times called an “emerging crisis in content.”

This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026.

As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.

And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content.

Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.

An infinite — and useless — library

It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.

A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there –but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed – lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

President-elect Donald Trump has reaffirmed that once he takes office he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military on American streets to accomplish his promises to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants.

Many experts’ concerns about this program have included the facts that immigrants contribute enormous value to the U.S. economy and mass deportation would hurt food production, housing construction and other crucial industries. Other scholars have analyzed how deportation traumatizes families.

I have an additional concern about a renewed focus on deportation as someone who has studied U.S. domestic militias for more than 15 years: Some militia units may see it as their duty to assist with such efforts. In fact, local police may even deputize certain militias to help them deport immigrants.

Anti-government, but supporting national defense

Militias are generally wary of the government. They’ve even been known to use violence against politicians and other government representatives, including police. I have found in my research that the militias’ disdain for the federal government is especially strong because they believe it is too big and corrupt and takes too much of their income through taxation.

But militia members’ negative beliefs about immigration and self-declared mission to protect the country could lead them to join a national mass-deportation effort.

My research finds that militia members generally believe the falsehoods that undocumented migrants are a threat to public safety.

For some, my research finds, this perception is rooted in xenophobia and racism. Other militia members misunderstand what is required to obtain U.S. citizenship: They believe that anyone who enters the country illegally is, by definition, a criminal and has therefore already proven their intention to not follow the laws and generally be a good American. This is not true, because migrants may seek asylum regardless of their immigration status for up to a year after entering the country.

Members with both sets of motives believe that undocumented migrants are taking jobs away from more deserving citizens and are generally receiving unearned benefits from being in the country. Trump’s promises to crack down on immigration appeal to militia members of both types.

Militia members also believe that one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government as outlined by the Constitution is national defense. In that sense, those who believe migrants are an urgent threat could see the military’s involvement in a mass-deportation operation as consistent with a duty to defend the nation.

Most scholars agree that even if it were technically legal, domestic deployment of the military would be an alarming threat to democracy.

Active participation

Some militia units in border states have been engaged in deportation efforts for a long time. They typically patrol the border, sometimes detain migrants and regularly call the U.S. Border Patrol to report their findings.

Border Patrol agents have historically expressed skepticism and concerns about militia involvement with border monitoring due to the unverifiable skills and motives of civilian support.

Some state, county and local police also do immigration enforcement, and in recent years they have seemed to become more open to civilian assistance.

Some local police agencies, particularly sheriffs, are already asking for civilian assistance managing perceived problems with migrants. Others have hosted anti-immigration events with militias who patrol the border under an effective, if not formal, deputization of their actions.

Militias may also be called on directly. In the past, Trump has directly addressed militias. The most cited example is his instruction in a Sept. 29, 2020, presidential debate, directing the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” People had similar interpretations of his comments in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

But I have long believed these appeals started much earlier. In 2018 Trump pardoned the men who inspired the Bundy family occupation and standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I believe that was an early attempt to garner support from people in militia circles.

A volatile combination

The military has already been getting involved in immigration enforcement in unprecedented ways. In early 2024, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed the U.S. Border Patrol was not protecting his state from an “invasion” from would-be immigrants. He deployed his state’s National Guard to an area of the border, blocking the Border Patrol from working in that section. That blockade continues.

In a second term, Trump has little incentive to restrain his rhetoric or his actions. The Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office. Even if he does not directly appeal to private citizens to control the border or detain people whom they believe to be undocumented migrants, his official presence and hard-line stance on immigration may be enough to provide legitimacy to vigilante action.

In November 2024, two militia members were convicted of a variety of federal offenses, including conspiracy to murder federal agents, for a plot to kill Border Patrol agents whom the men believed were failing to adequately protect the border from crossing migrants.

Not all militia members support mass deportation, especially if it involves unconstitutionally deploying military forces on U.S. soil. That’s clear from my research.

“The military is the military, and law enforcement is law enforcement,” one militia member replied when I asked some of my long-term contacts for their perspectives on Trump’s declaration to use the military. “They are separate for a reason.”

This man believes undocumented migrants pose dangers – but thinks shifting the military’s role would be even more harmful. Not all militia members are so circumspect.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.