Tomorrow Elephant

Cyberspace stalwart Kevin Kelly says very interesting things about the development of the Internet in this excellent Wired piece. In addition to some fascinating stuff about the early history of hypertext (famously conceived by Vannevar Bush and taken further by the index-card-obsessed Ted Nelson), Kelly has a cool vision of the Internet as a vast Machine with a fractal structure:

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.

Kelly believes that we’re living in a very special time at the moment, and the piece has some echoes of the Singularity meme:

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.

Reading Kelly’s article got me thinking. Is our time really special? Are we really headed towards some sort of a global phase shift? There are those who take to this idea with a nearly religious fervor. Others want to pour cold water on the overheating superprocessor of the Machine.

Bruce Sterling, for example, is convinced that we may be on the edge of nothing important. He argues that there have been many events in history that have “Singularity nature” — notably the first nuclear explosion and the discovery of psychedelic drugs — but in each case, after the glow of the initial explosion fades, the world settles into the new groove without breaking its stride. In Finland, we have our own doomsayer, Ilkka Tuomi, who has been predicting the demise of the Internet for years now. But perhaps the most radical and visible innovation pessimist is Jonathan Huebner, whose research was the subject of a New Scientist article recently, claims that the rate of innovation is — far from increasing exponentially like rapturous nerds like myself like to argue — declining, has been doing so since 1915, and is at present comparable to the rate of technological progress circa 1600!

I, of course, disagree.

It’s certainly true that we’ll never discover fire again: the inverse pyramid one has to traverse to get up to the point where one can make truly groundbreaking innovations is so high that it takes most people a lifetime just to attain mastery over a specific sub-field of a single scientific or engineering discipline.. But that doesn’t mean we’re not innovating – just that a lot of the innovation is invisible. Like John Smart points out, a modern gadget – a cameraphone, say – contains layers and layers of invisible engineering, possibly thousands of person-years of work. Optics, integrated circuits, image processing software, an operating system, a processor — and, of course, all the giant shoulders, the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering these things dance upon. It is no coincedence that Bruce Sterling calls the cameraphone the definitive gizmo of our times: a device so complex that most people have no time to learn how to use the majority of its features before it becomes obsolete.

Tools for innovation are more widely available than ever. The open source movement consists of millions of hobbyist innovators. Counting patents is meaningless: the majority of modern-day innovation flashes consists of hacks, using existing technology in novel ways. Huebner would doubtlessly argue that this just means that we’re recycling old ideas, and have explored most of the possible branches of technology. I don’t think so: the frontiers are moving forward too, it’s just taking us a little while to catch up since they frontiers are receeding so fast! I guess one definition of the Singularity is when the horizon exceeds the speed of light, and it becomes impossible for us to catch up.

Not all innovation is technological, of course. Kelly points out how sudden and pervasive the blogging explosion has been, and how completely it has changed our ideas about how public-consumed content can be produced.

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.

The principle of mediocrity says that we should not expect to be inherently special: we should expect to be average observers, somewhere near the middle-aged beer belly of the Bell Curve.

And that is a scary thought. Because one interpretation of mediocrity is — what one could take to be the completely opposite of Huebner’s conclusion — that a large chunk of the total amount of innovation in human history is happening right now. One interpretation of this has been given by SF writer and journalist Wil McCarthy, who argues that we are approaching an inflection point — that the apparently exponential growth we are experiencing is simply a power law. Eventually, we will reach a plateau, and Cool Stuff Will Stop Happening. It’s a depressing thought, but I find it more plausible than Huebner’s naive statistical analysis of patent applications.

Anthropic arguments like this have their problems, of course, one of them being the word “human”. If I assume that I am an average human observer, then I’m not saying anything about other possible points in the observer moduli space, only about the ones who view innovation in a roughly similar fashion as I do. And given that it doesn’t look like the Machine is stopping, new kinds of observers may soon emerge. Heck, the Machine can already beat me at 20 Questions! Ruminations about transhuman nature belong to an another post, but it’s fun to imagine that there’s more behind the horizon than just new kinds of haircuts.

Whether the future will be an uphill freefall of exponential growth, or a leisurely slide along an icy inflection slope, it sounds like an interesting place.