WIRED article toread: We Are The Web
Kevin Kelly writes a fascinating article titled "We Are The Web" in the August issue of WIRED.
"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."
What follows is a great summary of examples of internet culture-- which is now the culture-- is created by the audiences that are consuming it. Over the span of the article he grows more and more rhapsodic and science fictional about the next ten years. I'd place my bets on his predictions.
Comments
stormgren on Jul. 28, 2005 9:22 PM
I was agreeing with the article up until the last two pages, whereupon the author started taking liberties with the prognostications.
Couple of things that he's not taking account for:
1. Energy: Unless we do something soon, there will be a crunch. To get to the superscalar planes he's talking about will need a lot of horsepower, figuratively and literally. We need to stop navel gazing and start thinking new sources of power.
2. Bandwidth. There's still a huge problem getting diversity of bandwidth to the door of the average consumer, and the next round of upgrades may not be done until 2018 or better.
3. He takes liberties with Kurzweil's hypotheses, and doesn't completely understand them. THere is no one unifying force to tie all this together.
It would require a homogenization of operating systems and software to the point that the diversity that makes the global networks so damn useful would go away.
In essence, he's trying to implement Jesus, Allah and Zoroaster (or insert your favorite deity here) in silicon.
If you're looking for the first true AI to arise, my bet's on Google's systems. Based on the services and the brain trust over there hacking out new algolrithms, Google may spawn it. And then it'd take over the Internet about as fast as the rest of their products did.
Being the iconoclastic type (and having done much thinking on it lately, I won't be ordering a Google Implant when it becomes available. It'd be useful, but I'd feel too Borged.
In all seriousness, these predictions have been made time and again for the last 15 years. I won't be holding my breath.
matt-arnold on Jul. 29, 2005 3:08 AM
Time and time again for the last 15 years, their facts were spectacularly wrong, and their vision was gloriously right. That's probably a bad way to phrase it. If villagers native to the middle ages were transported into the 20th century and back again, their reports of our wonders would read like the book of Revelation. They'd misinterpret what they had seen, but they'd be onto something. That's kind of like this. We have no idea how energy and bandwidth will be overcome, or whether they will be overcome at all. Maybe they won't, but something else astounding will happen. Kelly doesn't know or understand the future. But he imparts a taste of how strangely awesome the present is, and how strangely awesome the future will be no matter which way it evolves. What happened between 1995 and 2005 was like something out of a fabulist's vision, and here is the world sitting back and not even noticing they're living smack dab in science fiction, still expecting tomorrow to be just like today. If there's any lesson to be learned, it's that the future will be wild.
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