:: Saturday, July 30, 2005 ::

Welcome my son, Welcome to The Machine

There's an interesting article in the current issue of Wired Magazine called We Are the Web that looks at the development of the world wide web/internet in the 10 years since the IPO of Netscape, an event that arguably opened up the internet for the widespread use that we all enjoy today. It looks at what people then thought the internet would become, and what it has actually developed into. The author, Kevin Kelly, then goes on to present his views of what the internet will become in the next 10 years:

[The Web will be] 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.
....
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.
....
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.

Kelly heralds this as a watershed moment in history, one that we are present for at its very beginning. A bold new future for mankind, as it were. But am I the only one who finds this projected future a little bit creepy? A vast Machine that encompasses every aspect of our daily lives, "which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity"? Visions of The Matrix and The Terminator immediately spring to mind.

Yes, the internet is a wonderful and amazing tool. I can barely remember life without it. But it's always been a tool, nothing more. And the idea that this tool could become The Machine, an artificial intelligence more powerful than the human brain, so vast that humanity itself is subsumed beneath its inhuman might, scares the living bejeesus out of me. If this were to happen, what would become of humanity? Would we even be human anymore?

The full article can be found here. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing. Food for thought, indeed.

:: posted by Rob 10:34 AM [+] ::

3 Comments:

Your apocalyptic premonition of a dark future where Humanity is subverted by the Machine assumes a fundamental opposition of the two. If the genesis of the Machine extends from Humanity, would not a symbiotic relationship be as likely? -- O.o

By  Anonymous, at 3:44 AM  

It's not so much a subversion that I'm concerned about as a loss of whatever it is that makes us human. Maybe a symbiotic relationship isn't *necessarily* bad, but if we need the Machine as a part of ourselves, then we've become something that's not human anymore - something that is instead part-human, part-Machine.

And I don't want to be part-Machine, dammit, and I don't want to be a symbiote! I want to be me, human me, just the way I am.

We don't understand the brain, the mind, the soul, and we won't know what we might lose if we combine that with a distinctly non-human Machine.

And *that* is what scares me.

By  Rob, at 5:45 PM  

The only thing we ever lose is innocence, and reliance on a machine does not lessen our humanity.

It is impossible for a human being to conceive and construct or otherwise bring about the existence of any entity or thing that is not in itself of human origin. All future developments and advancements are Pandora's Boxes. They open us up to previously unrealized potentials within ourselves, while simultaneously closing the door on what we once were. It is called Change.

If this Machine ultimately comes to share our consciousness, we will meet in a middle ground relative to where we and the Machine stand now. From our perspective of today, people in that future may seem "less human," but the Machine of that time will be more human than even we can presently imagine.

By  Anonymous, at 8:05 PM  

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