Semantic understanding (including the Semantic Web) will always be alluring, but it's just not going to happen. We can't agree on semantics in real life except

Semantic understanding (including the Semantic Web) will always be alluring, but it's just not going to happen. We can't agree on semantics in real life except in small groups or in very shallow ways. Computers just aren't going to be any better at it until we create something smarter than ourselves. I'm not saying some of the automated semantic extraction technologies are useless. Some of them are very cool, and it is absolutely the way we should be heading (waiting for humans to tag everything is a waste of time). However, we need to recognize while this path is taking us somewhere good it will ultimately fall short of the vision--much in the same way that the AI field has given us some great improvements without approaching a true artificial general intelligence.