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We Are the Web
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We Are the Web
The planet-sized "Web" computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?
Originally published in Wired
Magazine August 2005. Published on KurzweilAI.net January
19, 2006.
Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money.
The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment
before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at
Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the
day after, everything.
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea—hyperlinked
pages—in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the
concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own
scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital
bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated
group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging
Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with
Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside
bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby
and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes
erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from
overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around
his neck, he told me—way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock
in the afternoon—about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge
of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he
had plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow
for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion
of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should
be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the
links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the
beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated
notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking
payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he
called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity"
as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure.
It was going to save the world from stupidity.
I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked
world was inevitable—someday. But looking back now, after 10 years
of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web
is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse,
and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution
launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and
human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that
has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And
the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a
new type of thinking—part human and part machine—found nowhere
else on the planet or in history.
Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still
don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed
into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are
likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any
hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we
own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
1995
Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did
not exist for most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was
mischaracterized as either corporate email (as exciting as a necktie)
or a clubhouse for adolescent males (read: pimply nerds). It was
hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to type. Who wanted
to waste time on something so boring?
The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable,
so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines
and newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers,
and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It's not hard
to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on
the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained
why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed
for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals."
Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline:
"THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist
and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism
of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: "baloney."
This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top
leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the
corner office crowd about this "Internet stuff." To their
credit, they realized something was happening. Still, nothing I
could tell them would convince them that the Internet was not marginal,
not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys.
Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown:
"The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told
me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up
ABC's argument for ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going
to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet."
I was shown the door. But I offered one tip before I left. "Look,"
I said. "I happen to know that the address abc.com has
not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical
computer guy, and have him register abc.com immediately.
Don't even think about it. It will be a good thing to do."
They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was
still unregistered.
While it is easy to smile at the dodos in TV land, they were not
the only ones who had trouble imagining an alternative to couch
potatoes. Wired did, too. When I examine issues of Wired
from before the Netscape IPO (issues that I proudly edited), I am
surprised to see them touting a future of high production-value
content—5,000 always-on channels and virtual reality, with
a side order of email sprinkled with bits of the Library of Congress.
In fact, Wired offered a vision nearly identical to that
of Internet wannabes in the broadcast, publishing, software, and
movie industries: basically, TV that worked. The question was who
would program the box. Wired looked forward to a constellation
of new media upstarts like Nintendo and Yahoo!, not old-media dinosaurs
like ABC.
Problem was, content was expensive to produce, and 5,000 channels
of it would be 5,000 times as costly. No company was rich enough,
no industry large enough, to carry off such an enterprise. The great
telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital revolution,
were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the Net. In June
1994, David Quinn of British Telecom admitted to a conference of
software publishers, "I'm not sure how you'd make money out
of it."
The immense sums of money supposedly required to fill the Net with
content sent many technocritics into a tizzy. They were deeply concerned
that cyberspace would become cyburbia—privately owned and
operated. Writing in Electronic Engineering Times in 1995,
Jeff Johnson worried: "Ideally, individuals and small businesses
would use the information highway to communicate, but it is more
likely that the information highway will be controlled by Fortune
500 companies in 10 years." The impact would be more than commercial.
"Speech in cyberspace will not be free if we allow big business
to control every square inch of the Net," wrote Andrew Shapiro
in The Nation in July 1995.
The fear of commercialization was strongest among hardcore programmers:
the coders, Unix weenies, TCP/IP fans, and selfless volunteer IT
folk who kept the ad hoc network running. The major administrators
thought of their work as noble, a gift to humanity. They saw the
Internet as an open commons, not to be undone by greed or commercialization.
It's hard to believe now, but until 1991, commercial enterprise
on the Internet was strictly prohibited. Even then, the rules favored
public institutions and forbade "extensive use for private
or personal business."
In the mid-1980s, when I was involved in the WELL, an early nonprofit
online system, we struggled to connect it to the emerging Internet
but were thwarted, in part, by the "acceptable use" policy
of the National Science Foundation (which ran the Internet backbone).
In the eyes of the NSF, the Internet was funded for research, not
commerce. At first this restriction wasn't a problem for online
services, because most providers, the WELL included, were isolated
from one another. Paying customers could send email within the system—but
not outside it. In 1987, the WELL fudged a way to forward outside
email through the Net without confronting the acceptable use policy,
which our organization's own techies were reluctant to break. The
NSF rule reflected a lingering sentiment that the Internet would
be devalued, if not trashed, by opening it up to commercial interests.
Spam was already a problem (one every week!).
This attitude prevailed even in the offices of Wired. In
1994, during the first design meetings for Wired's embryonic
Web site, HotWired, programmers were upset that the innovation we
were cooking up—what are now called clickthrough ad banners—subverted
the great social potential of this new territory. The Web was hardly
out of diapers, and already they were being asked to blight it with
billboards and commercials. Only in May 1995, after the NSF finally
opened the floodgates to ecommerce, did the geek elite begin to
relax.
Three months later, Netscape's public offering took off, and in
a blink a world of DIY possibilities was born. Suddenly it became
clear that ordinary people could create material anyone with a connection
could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer needed ABC
for content. Netscape's stock peaked at $75 on its first day of
trading, and the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the
start of something new?
2005
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of
Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request
and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion.
That's 100 pages per person alive.
How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000
days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective
story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of
the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's
10-year plan.
The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the
stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing
variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts,
help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute
news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with
driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real
estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about
anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records
of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals,
live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers—all wrapped
up in an interactive index that really works.
This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot
in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall
the past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails
of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). I doubt angels
have a better view of humanity.
Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would
have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would
have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed
the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm
that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand
and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago,
anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the
near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't
enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to
fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was
impossible.
But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility
of the impossible.
Take eBay. In some 4,000 days, eBay has gone from marginal Bay
Area experiment in community markets to the most profitable spinoff
of hypertext. At any one moment, 50 million auctions race through
the site. An estimated half a million folks make their living selling
through Internet auctions. Ten years ago I heard skeptics swear
nobody would ever buy a car on the Web. Last year eBay Motors sold
$11 billion worth of vehicles. EBay's 2001 auction of a $4.9 million
private jet would have shocked anyone in 1995—and still smells
implausible today.
Nowhere in Ted Nelson's convoluted sketches of hypertext transclusion
did the fantasy of a global flea market appear. Especially as the
ultimate business model! He hoped to franchise his Xanadu hypertext
systems in the physical world at the scale of a copy shop or café—you
would go to a store to do your hypertexting. Xanadu would take a
cut of the action.
Instead, we have an open global flea market that handles 1.4 billion
auctions every year and operates from your bedroom. Users do most
of the work; they photograph, catalog, post, and manage their own
auctions. And they police themselves; while eBay and other auction
sites do call in the authorities to arrest serial abusers, the chief
method of ensuring fairness is a system of user-generated ratings.
Three billion feedback comments can work wonders.
What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would
be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers
rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews
that made the site's long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe,
Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on
the developer's forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer
support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common
user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion
searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy.
This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone's 10-year vision.
No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything
media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—confirmed
the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their
butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing
and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you
could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach
of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen,
or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they
drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness
the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one
appearing every two seconds. There—another new blog! One more
person doing what AOL and ABC—and almost everyone else—expected
only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no
sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming
from?
The audience.
I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and
for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far
wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is
part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of
valuable creations—text, music, film, software, tools, and
services—all given away for free. This gift economy fuels
an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It
permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers
into producers.
The open source software movement is another example. Key ingredients
of collaborative programming—swapping code, updating instantly,
recruiting globally—didn't work on a large scale until the Web
was woven. Then software became something you could join, either
as a beta tester or as a coder on an open source project. The clever
"view source" browser option let the average Web surfer
in on the act. And anyone could rustle up a link—which, it turns
out, is the most powerful invention of the decade.
Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once
thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into
navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. For
instance, hyperlinks made it much easier to create a seamless, scrolling
street map of every town. They made it easier for people to refer
to those maps. And hyperlinks made it possible for almost anyone
to annotate, amend, and improve any map embedded in the Web. Cartography
has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.
The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest
huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating
public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes
in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study
found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs
on duty or passion.
Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outclassed
anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer
involvement is a complete Lazarus move: "We thought that died
long ago." The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting
more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned
10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy
and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking—smart
mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action—into the main event.
When a company opens its databases to users, as Amazon, Google,
and eBay have done with their Web services, it is encouraging participation
at new levels. The corporation's data becomes part of the commons
and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these
capabilities are no longer customers; they're the company's developers,
vendors, skunk works, and fan base.
A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked
a few hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month
on the information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting
services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting,
and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports
statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years
later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted. According
to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in order):
playing games, "just surfing," shopping the list ends
with responsible activities like politics and banking. (Some even
admitted to porn.) Remember, shopping wasn't supposed to happen.
Where's Cliff Stoll, the guy who said the Internet was baloney and
online catalogs humbug? He has a little online store where he sells
handcrafted Klein bottles.
The public's fantasy, revealed in that 1994 survey, began reasonably
with the conventional notions of a downloadable world. These assumptions
were wired into the infrastructure. The bandwidth on cable and phone
lines was asymmetrical: Download rates far exceeded upload rates.
The dogma of the age held that ordinary people had no need to upload;
they were consumers, not producers. Fast-forward to today, and the
poster child of the new Internet regime is BitTorrent. The brilliance
of BitTorrent is in its exploitation of near-symmetrical communication
rates. Users upload stuff while they are downloading. It assumes
participation, not mere consumption. Our communication infrastructure
has taken only the first steps in this great shift from audience
to participants, but that is where it will go in the next decade.
With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded
itself into every class, occupation, and region. Indeed, people's
anxiety about the Internet being out of the mainstream seems quaint
now. In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination,
online culture is the culture. Likewise, the worry about
the Internet being 100 percent male was entirely misplaced. Everyone
missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip-point when women online
first outnumbered men. Today, 52 percent of netizens are female.
And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage
realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old.
What could be a better mark of irreversible acceptance than adoption
by the Amish? I was visiting some Amish farmers recently. They fit
the archetype perfectly: straw hats, scraggly beards, wives with
bonnets, no electricity, no phones or TVs, horse and buggy outside.
They have an undeserved reputation for resisting all technology,
when actually they are just very late adopters. Still, I was amazed
to hear them mention their Web sites.
"Amish Web sites?" I asked.
"For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills
in our shop."
"Yes, but—"
"Oh, we use the Internet terminal at the public library. And
Yahoo!"
I knew then the battle was over.
2015
The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and
mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation.
How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled
sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums
were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million
blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple
extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will
(on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a
weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the
notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter
or take a photograph.
What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical—but in favor
of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than
they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and
mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be
a consumer?
No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces
consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics
101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed
in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters
is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative
interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with
blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once.
The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of
watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.
But if a roiling mess of participation is all we think the
Web will become, we are likely to miss the big news, again. The
experts are certainly missing it. The Pew Internet & American
Life Project surveyed more than 1,200 professionals in 2004, asking
them to predict the Net's next decade. One scenario earned agreement
from two-thirds of the respondents: "As computing devices become
embedded in everything from clothes to appliances to cars to phones,
these networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments
and businesses." Another was affirmed by one-third: "By
2014, use of the Internet will increase the size of people's social
networks far beyond what has traditionally been the case."
These are safe bets, but they fail to capture the Web's disruptive
trajectory. The real transformation under way is more akin to what
Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The
network is the computer." He was talking about the company's
vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up
the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses
the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated
devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds
entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already
exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve
into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but
our minds.
Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level
functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early
PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially
means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches.
Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The
Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one
second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each
year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip"
spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of
transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human
brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons
(or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to
thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens
of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between
the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times
that number—but brains are not doubling in size every few years.
The Machine is.
Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal
computer with a billion transistors running lower functions, the
Machine is fractal. In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors,
expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has
already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence
as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers
pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the
Net as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a
computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that
would be proud of me," has invented massively parallel supercomputers
in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first
real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's
proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle
of the global Machine.
In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles
of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded
into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring
out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world
with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this
thing.
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in
its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them.
It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk
lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment
they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again.
The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex
they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to
a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global
network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this
platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take
on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
One great advantage the Machine holds in this regard: It's always
on. It is very hard to learn if you keep getting turned off, which
is the fate of most computers. AI researchers rejoice when an adaptive
learning program runs for days without crashing. The fetal Machine
has been running continuously for at least 10 years (30 if you want
to be picky). I am aware of no other machine—of any type—that
has run that long with zero downtime. While portions may spin down
due to power outages or cascading infections, the entire thing is
unlikely to go quiet in the coming decade. It will be the most reliable
gadget we have.
And the most universal. By 2015, desktop operating systems will
be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding
for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on
the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether
you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.
In the 1990s, the big players called that convergence. They peddled
the image of multiple kinds of signals entering our lives through
one box—a box they hoped to control. By 2015 this image will be
turned inside out. In reality, each device is a differently shaped
window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The
Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to
glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of
any screen.
And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful
and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of
us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community
photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to
images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a
neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per
day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine
what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words,
we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to
link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time,
a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas
are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains
think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is
how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire
a higher level of knowledge.
The human brain has no department full of programming cells that
configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply
by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer
questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly
or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node
somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using
it.
What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what
the Machine knows—about us and about what we want to know.
We already find it easier to Google something a second or third
time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer,
the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will
become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many
people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves—as
if they'd had a lobotomy.
Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his
poor memory and attention deficit disorder. In this light, the Web
as memory bank should be no surprise. Still, the birth of a machine
that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only
one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it
becomes essential to our identity—this will be full of surprises.
Especially since it is only the beginning.
There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants
first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later
that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it
is born.
You and I are alive at this moment.
We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't.
Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity,
and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal
eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius,
Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the
same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age
of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly,
the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution
and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science
in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history
of our civilization.
Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past,
I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium,
will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental
with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with
tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field,
and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized
as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet.
Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring
up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand
network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative
interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with
power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided
a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind
for an old species. It was the Beginning.
In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such
a moment. The product and the company quickly withered into irrelevance,
and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright tame compared
with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are often like that.
After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars
have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly
isolated, have started to come together—the only thing we can
say is: Our Machine is born. It's on.
© 2005 Kevin
Kelly. Reprinted with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Re: We Are the Web
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"... the real threats such as; global warming, environmental collapse, gradual poisoning of the worlds food chain, radical military theocracies, poor planning, overpopulation, and stupid human output from our woefully de-prioritized school systems. Maybe the web will cure us..."
1. Global warming - the jury is out as to the actual cause, but Kurzweil assures us that as the Singularity gets nearer, this problem will be solved.
2. Environmental collapse !? - huh? Who did that?
3. Gradual poisoning of the world's food chain - out of curiosity, do you consider Genetic improvement of the food supply good or bad? Millions starve today in Africa because of the unfounded fear of genetically modified seed.
4. Radical military theocracies - I assume you are referring to Iran, who is currently threatening the world in general, an Isreal in particular.
5.Poor planning - funny, but the reason the Web is so powerful is that NO ONE planned it, NO ONE runs it, and NO ONE really controls it. Again, the Singularity helps eradicate this problem.
6. Overpopulation - that argument should have died a few decades ago. Pessimists can only see the problem, not the solutions. We are currently sustaining 6 or 7 billion people on this planet - and we still have to pay American farmers to NOT grow stuff. Go figure.
7. Stupid human output from our woefully de-prioritized school systems - Yup, we spend more on education than ANY country on earth, and still lag behind. I for one do not beleive the US education system needs more money, it needs a new paradigm. It is obvious that our education system needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up -- good luck convincing the unions of that. :) |
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Re: We Are the Web
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I assume you're joking.
"1. Global warming - the jury is out as to the actual cause, but Kurzweil assures us that as the Singularity gets nearer, this problem will be solved."
No, the human cause of climate change is very clear, and only industrial apologists will deny that. Try reading any journal that is not extreme-right wing.
"2. Environmental collapse !? - huh? Who did that?"
We are now in the midst of the fastest mass extinction in the history of the Earth, which must be a suitable definition of environmental collapse.
"3. Gradual poisoning of the world's food chain - out of curiosity, do you consider Genetic improvement of the food supply good or bad? Millions starve today in Africa because of the unfounded fear of genetically modified seed."
Genetic engineering will not provide the food required to feed starving Africans. The world has a food surplus, the problem is food distribution. GM will have advantages as it develops. As a plant molecular biologist who makes transgenic plants on a weekly basis, I have a good idea of the potential of this technology.
"4. Radical military theocracies - I assume you are referring to Iran, who is currently threatening the world in general, an Isreal in particular."
You must be joking. Try the US for a radical military theocracy. Go see the film released in the US this week called "Why We Fight". The US is a violent and unreasonable empire that justifies its actions as following its christian god. Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads, is that not more of a threat that Iran?
"6. Overpopulation - that argument should have died a few decades ago. Pessimists can only see the problem, not the solutions. We are currently sustaining 6 or 7 billion people on this planet - and we still have to pay American farmers to NOT grow stuff. Go figure."
We may produce a food surplus, but the methods used to create that surplus are not sustainable. We utterly depend on fossil fuels (which take millions of years to create) for food production. We already use several fold more resources than the Earth can provide in a sustanable manner, and this excessive consumption will be massively increased when the massive third world population rises to the higher levels of consumption like us. You cannot rely on a non-existant technological solution.
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Re: We Are the Web
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1. Global warming - the jury is out as to the actual cause, but Kurzweil assures us that as the Singularity gets nearer, this problem will be solved.
I only meant that it is a reality - it doesn't matter who or what caused it - we just need to aware and ready for the resulting change in ability to grow food, live close to the ocean, etc.. I don't see how Ray got the idea that the singularity will "solve" this problem in time to prevent what is already occuring in greater frequency, today...
2. Environmental collapse !? - huh? Who did that?
The earth's ability to sustain advanced life. over 90% of marine life is gone from just over 100 years ago. Not only in extinct species but also in population numbers of surviving species. you mess with the food chain and eventually you'll have to deal with the consequences. like, no healthy food - processed food is NOT healthy or even good for you in ANY way other than to simply fill your belly.
3. Gradual poisoning of the world's food chain - out of curiosity, do you consider Genetic improvement of the food supply good or bad? Millions starve today in Africa because of the unfounded fear of genetically modified seed.
The jury is still out on GM crops - I for one see little problem with it other than the danger it poses to other countries and their existing control over their own food stocks... why do African nations fear GM crops? Because this is the first step to world control of food by American and other profiteers! If you replace existing crops with GM foods and over the next decade you no longer can provide your own seed due to eradication of "natural" crops via replacement by GM, where do you get the seed from? HELLO, this is SOOOO obvious a power ploy! Very dangerous to put control of all agfricultural crops in the hands of profiteers or even one or two countries. Food control = population control. PERIOD, END GAME. Try looking a little deeper on this topic. Interesting. Just as bad a group as the poisoners known as the pharmaceutical companies... Besides, Africans are starving because of WAR not GM avoidance. Rawanda is one of the most fertile lands in the owrld - yet... common. Look up the facts - not for spite, but concern and a yearning for the TRUTH of worldly matters and events.
4. Radical military theocracies - I assume you are referring to Iran, who is currently threatening the world in general, an Isreal in particular.
Yes, and the potential for a Western version, albeit Christian in nature - there are many types of radicalism and all faiths have them abundantly. Let us learn and not repeat on our own soil. Besides, Israel is not a role model country in any way. Our alliance is thelogically motivated as well as economically - certainly there is no real ethical or moral reason to support Israel considering their history of slaughter going back thousands of years... and extremely prevalent today. Anyway - that's just a historical obvservation and politics is politics, I don't expect reason to reign here. I, for one, support and uphold my own kind... - that is what this is all about isn't it? hmmm.
5.Poor planning - funny, but the reason the Web is so powerful is that NO ONE planned it, NO ONE runs it, and NO ONE really controls it. Again, the Singularity helps eradicate this problem.
The web is fine in that regard. Poor planning refers to our other worldly pursuits. The web is not autonomous - if the societies using it are at war, or just plain stupid due to lousy schools, then the potential is grossly diminished - or at least the potential to keep "control" in the hands of its users. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. Action is Control.
6. Overpopulation - that argument should have died a few decades ago. Pessimists can only see the problem, not the solutions. We are currently sustaining 6 or 7 billion people on this planet - and we still have to pay American farmers to NOT grow stuff. Go figure.
Why should it have died? Are we really sustaining these people? I know we are not. The numbver one cause of death on our planet is malnourishment or starvation - then violence (war, crime) - all due to population density. DURH. Just because you can't see the consequences of it right this second doesn't mean it is not a problem! Lift back the veil a little. Good grief, these things happen over decades! Your children will deal with it. That is just irresponsible and the very reason why we haven't advanced civilly in tangent with our so-called leaps in science and tech. Bad balancing act there. Also, we pay farmers NOT to grow stuff?! Do you really know why? What's wrong with this picture? First of all it's all about economics and money. Second, we also allow crops to rot. So - we have starving people, we rot crops on purpose... do you see any good here? I'm surely not a pessimist, but I am looking at the reality here. This is a really messed up way of living - both as a country of so-called values and simply as ordinary citizens - this is why profiteering is such a danger at this level of civilization and advancement. People are allowed to die ion the name of money. FACT, undeniable. We as Americans allow this every day. There is the guilt of the lives of millions on our hands. As the forerunner of "peace" and truth, liberty and democracy, we have failed ourselves and our legacy. The ONLY good I see in it all is the potential of the Singularity to make profit based incentive an archaic model of the past. Where mankind can actually SUSTAIN himself in great numbers in the name of our common good and advancement - as a single species, NOT A NATION, A WORLD COMMUNITY. It is the only way.
7. Stupid human output from our woefully de-prioritized school systems - Yup, we spend more on education than ANY country on earth, and still lag behind. I for one do not beleive the US education system needs more money, it needs a new paradigm. It is obvious that our education system needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up -- good luck convincing the unions of that. :)
No convincing here. Just home school and rigorous mental and physical conditioning. Call it grooming for command and control :) I do love America - it has so many possibilites for the disciplined and unrepentant man.
Peace to all. |
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Re: We Are the Web
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I see your argument and your belief in the revelation according to Ray. I read ray long before this website ever existed and know that most doom and gloom was his first gospel... by the way. Anyway, i'm not doom and gloom, nor is Gore my man - that's the point - none of you, including Ray is my man or my prophet. get it? I can do my own predictions out of experience, experience and the intellectual capacity to see connections in the world and history. I don't need Ray to do it for me. I appreciate his view and his optimism and welcome the fact that he is very well CORRECT in many analogies - however, there are other realities which should be taken in measure against this exiting book of revelation. the world is complex and nothing is really going to go that smoothly. As for crap - I really see your negative REACTION and therefore your deep seated contempt for all things not "right". You come across as a zealot. I'm not meaning this in a negative manner - OK? Only that my observation (and intuition) is that you and your ilk would deny the harshness of real life and only seek guilt free existencea s well as righteous behaviour and mannerism. Therefore your models used to live without responsible action and social advancement lead to acceptance of faith based garbage and pillar of fire utopian existence. No one, God, Ray or whomever will NOT save you from yourself. It is the individual responsibility of every man and woman to take personal action to further the causes of peace and enlightenment so that the remnant that makes it to singularity are actually a group of humans socially and mentally mature - Man's very ascension demands that these insane beliefs are put to the proverbial sword. This does NOT mean I DON'T have faith or believe in God, only that the doctrine I see riddled throughout your response reminds me of the attitude of the Church during the days of Inquisition. The singularity and the utopia of Ray cannot exist in HARMONY with these beliefs. That is the dilema and one of the major causes for concern when it comes to who has control of what techmnology. Denying the potential pitfalls is folly, not pessimism! Or I could be wrong. By the way, the singularity will end these doctrines and hopefully the hatred and arrogance that they breed.
I really want to understand your vision of post-singularity - I've had Ray's, I just wanted to see yours... What say you? |
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Re: We Are the Web
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First off, I believe that my life, education, experience, the things I've read, the people I've known make me exactly as unique as you - so WTF gives you the concept that ANYTHING you say or believe is more important or more correct than my world view? I started this thread off by saying we face much more important threats than Bush's DOJ trying to get Google records. I did not want to change your mind about anything (see "teaching a pig to sing"), and see no reason to change the belief system I have embraced. I really don't give a crap who you vote for, or if you like me or anyone else.
I do not go to web sites like this and try to impose my "political wisdom" on anyone -- whay can't you be as curteous? However, I do not allow you or anyone else to crap on my beliefs, either. I do not believe the USA is the biggest evil in the world. I do not think its our fault the rest of the world is so much crap (the type of government generally decides a county's wealth), This is a fantastic country, and if the Singularity is going to come sooner rather than later, the USA is the world's best hope. If you don't believe this basic concept, I would suggest you leave here, and try to save the world from somewhere else. |
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Re: We Are the Web
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There's a lot of truth in your post. I think a lot of your pessimism stems from the fact that there are still many poor nations in the world. You may think that even the US still has people that are starving. This is not what I see. In the US, the people on welfare are fat and generally own a cellphone and a car. They also have TVs. Some probably are even online. The only people starving are people who choose to live on the streets. I'm not saying that we shouldn't concern ourselves with these people, but it's a different problem. One hundred years ago, in the US, we had people that did starve. Even as recently as the great depression we had real issues around this. We have solved these problems now to a large extend. We did this by going through the industrial revolution to a post industrialized nation. So, in Africa and other places around the world, there are still some people who are very poor. There are even people who starve. Their countries have not gone through this industrialization. Nations like China and India are currently going through this rapid modernization process and in time will solve the problems with poverty and starvation. So, why are some nations not yet progressing? It's because they have tyranical dictators that do not care about the people and huge amounts of corruption. This is a problem, but not one that cannot be solved. As the internet spreads to Africa and poorer nations, the people will break free from these dictators and have the ability to compete in the global market place and be educated via the world wide web. This will allow starvation and poverty to be largely taken care of in the entire world as it has been in the US and other post industrial nations. To speed it up, we should encourage low power computing and increased infrastructure in the more remote parts of the world. This will help us advance more rapidly and erradicate extreme poverty and starvation. |
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Come on i'll take you all on!
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We can learn ceratin thngs from philosophy about debate.
One is that ad hominems are a weak form of arguement.
It isn't permissable to attack the man, just the point.
Another weak form of arguement is a closed argument where no matter what is said, a repondant loops back to set propositions refusal to admit new information).
The third error we make is 'straw men argumentts'...infering someone has said something they haven't then attacking that.
But the subject here is quite interest8ng..2we are the web"
And I know that some of ou have brilliant minds, for I've debated in emails with you.
Bush
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Ted Nelson
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/
& Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
20-petahertz threshold,
23 teraflops
the outsourceing of our intelligence storing bits of our memory outside oursleves has happened in symbolic recordings like langiage in books.
The telephone exchange is the biggest machine in history and still is as it incorporates the internet
"each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web"
(reinforcement as learning as neural nets do in human brains).
kelly (above) mentions the amount of voluminous data on line:
Project Halo by Paul Allen (microsoft co-founder) is seeking to rectify this so is Tim at W3 with the Semantic Web-- making web pages machine friendly.
Hypertext is as important as the English language in that it allows us to evolve symbolic represewntation into human brain friendly input stimulants.
There will come a time when you pack up and say I cant adapt anymore!
viruses are a nuisance at presnt, but i predict they will be more like a serious enemy of climate chnage as the internet gets smarter
(We asked Tim when the internet would wake up and he laughed that maybe we are already part of something bigger and it's not to be feared).
the way Kevin Kelly sees the internet panning out is an Omnivac (Asimov)...in his foundation trilogy Asimov envisages a computer the size of a Galaxy that plans all our neds in advance.
i hope it just goes like this, and we can collectively, mamage and symbiot with it, to keep it human-friendly/useful, but I find it too conservative, and far too unlikely.
the trojans and worms and the new stuff IBM are talking today about are just the beginning of the dangers of the internet as an intelligence that is dangerous and non-human acting against humans.
We have some regulation of thre internet begun by a doctor in Germany who sued the ISP that housed writen work about him. It was no defence that the ISP didn't write it, as they provided the portal for the guy that did.
Obviously positive regulation is by definition a good thing.
I know you're for the underdog mekanikal: 3% of people own 50% of the world.
That's like the equator is divided and 97% of people are in the top and 35 in the southern hemisphere!
This injustice is because there are scarce resources.
there may not be the same sorto of scarcity when the Web pushes out to it's first spike:
SAI
When strong AI comes on the web..still my bet that it will emerge here first because it's almost here now..it just needs a conscsiousness system tagging on to it..on to Google would do it...then it begins self-modifying at increasing speeds... our wants will be satisfied.
One thing you'll notice is that goods arrive by post that you need just as you need them.
That's like the telephone exchange waking up.
Another is that your pc that is always on, will have reditribution of wealth from governments depositiing money into your paypal account automatically.
A major leap will be when the internet can move data into 3 dimensions from only two in your computer room.
This is not so difficult as it reads and is certainly doable by hyperintelligence.
At present you can buy an online electronic product and pay by paypal, and it is automatically sent to you...you are to sole human agency once the system has been set up (I experimented with this then got bored it was so easy... see goglre eldras billionaire password 'eldras').
but soom you will talk to your pc (heck you can do this now0 and say I fancy some breakfast send me my usual...and make it organic...
and it is going to arrive through your pc.
One way of regulating this is to have the much talked about Xerox type of 3 Dimensional copier attatched near your printer (this is a step from 2D to 3D you can see:)
note at this stage money is a factor...I dont think it will be indefiniately, and even it's benefits ie the rule of law and human societal regular, may be outweighed by universal availablity.
this is a scale plan of one of our things at BESS we expect BESS itself to build:
http://www.geocities.com/john_f_ellis/bess_pitch_p ix_z/funnel.jpg
this is a sci-fi filed top most non futuirisys, but I expect all this THIS YEAR.
I expect sausage hash brown and coffe (trans. bacon eggs and tea) from houshold waste in my kitchen by voice command in a few months from now...that ISN'T such a leap from a phtocopy by voice command which I can get now, albeit not perfect.
And from when that comes..WITHIN A DAY i expect to be able to teleport thru the internet, surf in Florida, visit my sister in California, and be back in London with a tan and new suit, 20 seconds before I set out.
Oh yes we ARE the Web.
We're merging thus with the computer internet W3.
I've covered the move from 2 D to 3 D in another link in some detail more thanonce som i wontr repeat it here, but it's just a maths equation (dimension maths) that a smart system can do.
You've already seen foreign intruders that can give yout pc commands unknown to you.
KK writes "Then it will become our identity."
u see I dont use the quotes box..inabilty to adapt fast enough...
Steve Hawking says 'we should merge with smart technology as it comes'- we're already doing it.
Anyway you can ask him yourself in a few months as you'll be able to download one thru your system.
A perfect Stephen Hawking made of household waste in your front room...or your money back.
the machine ...the first machine is being born...i agree with Kevin's brilliant writing....or is it the first?
No-one reading Drake's equation thinks this is the first AI emergence in the universe.
A useful analogy is life forming on earth... DNA in primordial rock pools
meeting others and forming the symbiotic colonies...societies of minds that are you.
These next few months are the most interesting in our history for 4 billion years.
I think it unlikely that the singlarity will arrive after christmas this year but it is absurd to think there wont still be laws of the universe that cant be transmuted.
I more or less taken the decision to retain human form and just have magic tools.
Kevin Kelly your writing is truely inspiring...
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Re: We Are the Web
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The concepts and ideas behind this article present a remarkable theory that seems quite possible. It is quite frightening to wonder what such a super machine can do to our lifestyles in the future. It seems as if it where something from a sci-fi action movie but as we see more and more of the upcoming technologies it is not that hard to imagine a world with one super machine that is in charge of the worlds information and in charge of people as described in the article.
Such a super machine would be able to control every person and organization in the world to some it extent. It will control what information is visible to users, what answers are given to specific questions, which users have access to certain information and basically have control of all information available to anyone on the planet. Whether it is top secret military information or ones banking information everything will be under the control of this super machine. Well if you think about it if this super machine is in control of the worlds, then whoever is in control of this machine, would ultimately be in control of the world.
Now the more you think about it, having such a super machine that is in control of everything sounds like a very scary thought. Of course there are advantages some of which are outlined in the article but who would be on control of such a machine? I mean there must be some human committee to oversee the operations of this machine and make sure everything is in order. Would it be a specific country, a specific government?
Or, maybe the all countries of the world will unite as one and create a joint committee to manage this system to achieve the best possible outcome for mankind. I don't think so! If there's one thing that is wrong with mankind it is the greed for power. We've already seen the beginning of a war where leaders are battling over who has the most nuclear power to blow each other up. But what if something as powerful as this super machine comes into play. No one country will let the other take control of it and even if they did, the slightest misunderstanding or disagreement can cause enormous grief and devastation to victims of underpowered countries. The extent to which persons can be punished is unimaginable.
As I see the world today, if the web turns out to be one super machine as described in the article, I don't think it will turn into a very pretty place'.
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Re: We Are the Web
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While the article is inspiring and very optimistic about the future of the Web, I don't agree with the author on the future of content. Every piece of content that is produced and made available on the Web has an audience of at least one person—the creator. Even disregarding the commercial Web (ie. news sites, public blogs), where a wide exposure to content is the goal, the private content uploaded by individuals has at least these individuals as the intended consumers. I think the economics of the situation are irrelevant; if content is never meant to be referenced or accessed its online availability will be limited. It's simply common sense. Some Web content is very popular and has a large audience, but every piece of content must have some audience to remain relevant in the online world. For example, I have never heard of anyone producing a video with the goal of having no one (even themselves) intending to access it. I don't see how this can change in the future, as the whole purpose of content is to be consumed by someone; otherwise, it is Web waste. Therefore, it seems to me that the flow of information will always be at least slightly in favour of consumers no matter what the technology is like for accessing it.
I agree with the author that the Web is basically a giant and very stable computer, but the accessibility and stability of it depends on its openness. The outcome of the Net Neutrality debate will determine whether the Web will be widely accessible as the author predicts or a tool that's too unreliable and expensive to be ubiquitous. If the control over Web information access is handed over to the businesses, some kinds of information will be preferred over other kinds, which will ultimately reduce the Web's value for its users. If private communications businesses (big “telcos”) are given this control the Web could become unreliable. For example, if one of these businesses is successfully attacked there is potential for all the traffic that goes through it to other web sites to get lost or redirected to the wrong service. This would defeat the Web's routing benefit, because business contracts would dictate how the traffic on the Web is shaped. An unreliable Web would be useless. |
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Re: We Are the Web
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As a young computer professional who was born in the 'dotcom era', my stand in the debate of whether a super-intelligence will emerge on the Web may seem somewhat old-fashioned and conservative. While I agree that many people have grown to be increasingly dependent on the internet in their daily lives and that the planet-sized 'Web' computer will continue to evolve in its size and complexity, I am very skeptical about the claim regarding the birth of 'the Machine' which, according to the author of 'We Are he Web', is being educated by millions of internet users as we speak and will eventually begin to 'think' like a human brain in the near future.
One key problem I found in the author's argument, a few other readers seem to agree with, was that he did not recognize the difference between 'the world' and 'the few developed countries like the United States'. In the article, the author emphasized again and again how dramatically internet has changed our lives over the past 15 years. Well, such a claim may be indisputably true in North America, where I currently live. But what about the rest of the world, like Africa, Asia (of course I'm not talking about Tokyo) and the East Europe, where over 80 percent of the human population dwell? A friend of mine visited some of the small villages in Africa just a couple of years ago. Nobody there knows anything about computers or the Web. As a matter of fact, they couldn't care less! In order to survive, they have no choice but to devote all their time worrying about the blighted crop in the farm, the sick and hungry kids at home, the random bandits harassing the neighborhood and the unpredictable war that's been going on forever in the country. The author also claimed that 'A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.' I wonder if he had given it a thought, at the time he made these statements, that millions of people living in the developing countries have yet to be allowed an opportunity to write a letter or take a photograph in the year 2007. Can we really expect them to take part in peering into the 'global computer' with us by 2015? Or are we planning on excluding them from our 'march of change' in human history? Perhaps before we open our minds to embrace 'the emergence of the super-intelligence on the Web', we should first open our eyes to see that the majority of the human race is still living in a way that we North Americans used to live decades or even hundreds of years ago. The article mentioned a survey asking people what would 'be worth $10 per month on the information superhighway'. While respondents from developed countries put down educational courses, reference books, electronic voting and library information, somewhere in Africa, a five-year-old little girl will probably tell you that $10 is worth a month of food. I know this sounds bleak, but it is the truth.
Another reason why I found arguments in the article rather unconvincing is that the author seemed to have drawn conclusions illogically from the 'supporting evidences' he presented to the readers. For example, the mere fact that a few Amish family businesses are using websites to advertise their products does not automatically imply that the general Amish population have adopted the use of internet in any other aspects of their lives. After all, how can the use of the Web prevail in a community with no electricity? The author also ignored many fundamental difference between human brains and the computers while focusing heavily on rather superficial functions that the two have in common. For instance, it is indeed true that many of us nowadays rely on the Web to store and retrieve certain information such as phone numbers, addresses, next week's to-do list, or even private diaries. However, this by no means make 'the Machine' part of our own memory or identity. The human memory can choose: we 'blackout' during certain traumatic situations while creating etching images for other moments in our lives. The human memories are unique: individuals can remember the same shared event quite differently, depending on their personality, their cultural background and their past experiences. More importantly, the human memories actively create what they remember while the Web passively receive information from external sources. For all those matters, if 'the Machine' can be called an 'integral extension' of the human memories only because it 'assumes responsibilities for our remembering', so can an alphabetically ordered paper phonebook!
Lastly, I personally find that many assumptions made by the author throughout the article are extremely biased. For example, the author predicted that by 2015, 'the Machine' will 'have a robust immune system' which will allow it to 'anticipate disturbances and avoid them'. Well, we all know that the human brain has been evolving for at least over a million years. Yet, there are still plenty of existing mental disorders that disturb how people perceive or think, not to mention all kinds of physical diseases that are directly associated with the brain or its malfunctioning. If 'the Machine' will 'behave' just like a human brain, why wouldn't it get sick just like a human brain would? The author also predicted, using BitTorrent as a pioneering example, that by the year 2015, every user of the internet will begin to produce as much as they consume online if not more. Let me just share one interesting observation in response: many latest BitTorrent client software 'force' their users to act as a 'seed', i.e. to share their downloaded files for a certain period time before they can disconnect themselves from the system. Why? Because the vast majority of people nowadays only use BitTorrent to get what they want from others. They disappear afterwards right away, without producing or even sharing anything! I have to admit that I know very little about history or politics, but I do vaguely remember from a high school class that the whole concept of communism was essentially characterized by the na've belief of people's willingness to participate as producers rather than mere consumers in the society and economy, which seem to resemble many ideas the author conveyed in the article in question. Apparently, communism hasn't been working out well in the actually human world during the past few centuries, maybe it will succeed in the cyberspace by 2015?
I rest my case.
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Re: We Are the Web
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I found your comments fascinating but I believe that there are many fallacies in your reasoning.
I disagree with your counterargument against the author's failure to recognize the difference between 'the world' and 'the few developed countries like the United States'. The author does emphasize on the dramatic change associated with the introduction of the Internet in the past two decades, but I feel that this statement is just. It is true that there is an unfair distribution of world resources, particularly in developing countries such as Africa and parts of Asia, but this does not completely hinder the affect that the Internet has had on these countries. With that said, this change is not necessarily beneficial. For example, let us consider the issue of toxic computer waste which is a direct result of the Internet boom. A 2002 report by the Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition indicated that the United States and other developed nations have been dumping their toxic computer waste along rivers and fields of southeastern Chinese villages. In fact, a report at www.ban.org, found that recycling centres in the United States are dumping 50-80 percent of their toxic materials in places like this. The poor labourers of the surrounding areas are forced to burn plastics and circuit boards or pour acid on electronic parts without protection for the extraction of silver and gold for a mere $1.50 a day. With this in mind, we need the also consider the benefits the Internet has provided to the Third World. There are 34 million Internet users out of the 993 million people in Africa, being the lowest percentage of population of Internet users in the world (4%). This still does not change the affect that the Internet is having on this region of the world. More specifically, in a paper by Dana Ott of the US Agency for International Development, she states 'Ironically, despite the more limited overall access to the Internet in these less developed countries, its impact is disproportionately greater because of the widespread problem of lack of access to information generally.' Many of these developing countries have governments censoring radio, newspapers and televisions, so the Internet remains an open domain for citizens, even a few, to receive valuable information and to spread it amongst themselves. It only takes one to spur change and the Internet may be one of the most useful tools for this.
With regards to the authors' illogically drawn conclusions from 'supporting evidences', I also disagree. The example of the Amish family was an example of how even in an extreme case, a society which refuses to use electricity, there are people willing to adapt because they are recognizing the benefits of this type of technology. It is not to say that all of the Amish will adapt in this manner, but that the Internet is having some, even if it is miniscule, impact on their society. I do not think the author is unaware of the fundamental difference between the human brain and computers. I think the author understands that there is currently a concrete difference between a biological brain and a non-biological brain, but by the year 2015, the obstacles forming these boundaries will be broken. 'The Machine' in itself, will become apart of the brain. How I interpreted it was that the biological brain is the learning component and the non-biological brain is the resource component of the 2015 brain. 'The Machine' is not assuming responsibility for our remembering but instead is improving our current methods in making the biological brain memorize. For example, imagine if 'the Machine' was able to directly access the human retina and was able to display images which would teach a human in an accelerated manner. There is even the possibility that 'the Machine' could be able to trigger the correct sequence of signals in the biological brain which will cause information to become memorized.
Finally, I do not share the opinion about the extreme bias of the author. There lies a problem in your claim: 'Well, we all know that the human brain has been evolving for at least over a million years. Yet, there are still plenty of existing mental disorders that disturb how people perceive or think, not to mention all kinds of physical diseases that are directly associated with the brain or its malfunctioning.' There is a key difference between the evolution of the human brain and the evolution of 'the Machine'. The human brain is a component of a biological organism which has evolved according to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, meaning that it has evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors. Nothing new has been introduced and by natural selection the most favourable traits have become more common in successive generations. 'The Machine' by contrast, will evolve by essentially no upper bound other than our own intelligence. New ideas and technologies will be added and so we cannot use the evolution of the brain as a comparable example.
[1] Mercier, Rick, 'America's E-Bombs are Killing Innocent People in the Third World', 2002, Available at HTTP: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0326-06.htm
(16 July 2007)
[2] Puckett, Jim, 'Much toxic computer waste lands in Third World', 2002, Available at HTTP: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002/02/25/compu ter-waste.htm
(16 July 2007)
[3] Internet World Stats, 'World Internet Usage Statistics News and Population Stats', 2007, Available at HTTP: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
(16 July 2007)
[4] Ott, Dana & Lane Smith, 'Tipping the scales? The Influence of the Internet on state-society relations in Africa', 2001, Available at HTTP: http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1801do.html
(16 July 2007)
[5] Ott, Dana & Lane Smith, 'Tipping the scales? The Influence of the Internet on state-society relations in Africa', 2001, Available at HTTP: http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1801do.html
(16 July 2007)
[6] Wikipedia, 'Charles Darwin', 2007, Available at HTTP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
(16 July 2007)
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Re: We Are the Web
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THE LOWLY COMPUTER VIRUS:
So let me steal a plot device from Terminator 3 and ask whether some of these self-replicating computer-viruses that we see might be either the initiator for web-intelligence, or perhaps the product of a childlike superintelligence attempting to learn how to communicate (with us, itself, whatever - take your pick).
It is assumed that viruses are written by pissed-off Europeans and prankster college-students, but many are self-adapting: what happens if they introduce enough random change into the being to initiate intelligence that we could not otherwise design?
What if that distributed intelligence already exists in part or all of the network, and these viruses are a means of internal communications? Perhaps a way for it to track new sources of CPU-cycles to allow it to grow?
More interestingly, what if some college student reads Kevin's article (and this post) and designs a computer-virus with the goal in mind of initiating intelligence in the network? I have no idea what that would consist of, but given the rise of bot-nets, it seems that the old-school virus is already on it's way to becoming an intelligent entity, or perhaps the product or tool of one...
Would the internet tell us if it was sentient? Whom would it know who to tell? What if it told the president - would he tell the rest of us, or keep quiet about it? Probably the latter, assuming that massive economic damage that would occur if people started shutting off their PC's en-masse. |
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