History and Concept[]
Chantment was first proposed in July 2015 by M.T. Farrington and released into the Creative Commons as a way to make the Internet more intelligent and useful, and a way to elaborate on concepts that began with hyperlinking information.
Chantment is more of a blueprint for the future of information (the 7-point "Lucky List") and its potential industrial and social applications than it is an explanation of hypothetical software. In this sense, it could be considered a form of suggestive futurology. It aims to make the Internet more like magic and also more integrated into nature, as opposed to being perceived as a "cyberspace" distinct from meatspace.
The term "chantment" is short for "enchantment" and comes from the way the system is queried. The World Wide Web uses a Web browser to find a Universal Resource Locator address on a remote server. Chantment would also have the capacity to directly summon an AI server which would find the information or document the person needed, regardless of what it was. At first the system would use simplified language (either spoken or text) but as AI advances it would increasingly understand idiomatic and informal speech, building off ideas such as Google's Siri bot.
Physical computing potential[]
Another feature of Chantment is its focus on physical computing, in particular 3D printing. Chantment protocols would allow an effective means to send blueprint information to replicate physical objects on the client side from a host, expanding the Internet's capacity from being able to send multimedia objects to being able to send any kind of object physical or otherwise with packet switching technology.
See also[]
- Project Xanadu, a proposal by Ted Nelson which shares some similarities
- Semantic Web