What makes the Web so powerful?

 

Evidence of a Global Super Organism

By Kevin Kelly

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/evidence_of_a_g.php

 

What makes the web so powerful? The answer to this question lies in the nature of the global super organism that humankind is currently building. Kevin Kelly, a pioneer in describing where humans and technology are headed, gives us a glimpse of what he calls the One Machine in the following excerpt from his blog post, “Evidence of a Super Organism.”

“In recent years, we've created supercomputers composed of loosely integrated individual computers not centralized in one building, but geographically distributed over continents and designed to be versatile and general purpose. This later supercomputer is called grid computing because the computation is served up as a utility to be delivered anywhere on the grid, like electricity. It is also called cloud computing because the tally of the exact component machines is dynamic and amorphous - like a cloud. The actual contours of the grid or cloud can change by the minute as machines come on or off line.

Google probably has the largest cloud computer in operation. According to Jeff Dean one of their infrastructure engineers, Google is hoping to scale up their cloud computer to encompass 10 million processors in 1,000 locations.

Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer.

 

I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of a quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet's electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment.

 The phrase a "global superorganism” suggests the sustained integrity of a living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.

The One Machine consumes electricity to produce structured information. Like other organisms, it is growing. Its size is increasing rapidly, close to 66% per year, which is basically the rate of Moore's Law. Every year it consumes more power, more material, more money, more information, and more of our attention. And each year it produces more structured information, more wealth, and more interest.

Cloud computers such as Google and Amazon form the learning center for the smart superorganism. Let's call this organ el Googazon, or el Goog for short. El Goog encompasses more than the functions of the company Google and includes all the functions provided by Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft online and other cloud-based services.

El Goog is sucking in the smartest humans on earth to work for it, to help make it smarter. The smarter it gets, the more smart people, and smarter people, want to work for it. El Goog ropes in money. Money is its higher metabolism. It takes the money of investors to create technology that attracts human attention (ads), which in turns creates more money (profits), which attracts more investments.  The smarter it makes itself, the more attention and money will flow to it.

El Goog and the One Machine offer intelligence without human troubles. In the beginning this intelligence is transhuman rather than non-human intelligence. It is the smartness derived from the wisdom of human crowds, but as it continues to develop this smartness transcends a human type of thinking.

While El Goog is constantly seeking chips to occupy, energy to burn, wires to fill, radio waves to ride, what it wants and needs most is money. So one test of its success is when El Goog becomes our bank. Not only will all data flow through it, but all money as well.”

There are several headlines that one can take from this blog. The one I like best is: “The One Machine is increasing in size at a rate of 66% a year. Every year it consumes more power, more material, more money, more information, and more of our attention. And each year it produces more structured information, more wealth, and more interest.” The One machine is simply the biggest example of Scenius ever. Scenius is a term coined by Brian Eno meaning: “…the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius." Simply put, the web is an exponential explosion of the extreme creativity that people working in groups or scenes can generate.

 

 

Copyright laws

Do we as a global society need to rethink copyright laws?

As teachers, when we observe the tech habits of our students we often find exactly the behavior that Kevin Kelly so aptly describes in his blog post, “Technology Wants to be Free.” www.kk.org/thetechnium/

 “The “free” in digital music meant the audience could unbundle it from albums, sample it, create their own playlists, embed it, share it with love, bend it, graph it in colors, twist it, mash it, carry it, squeeze it, and enliven it with new ideas. The free-ization made it liquid and ‘free” to interact with other media. In the context of this freedom, the questionable legality of its free-ness was secondary. It didn’t really matter because music had been liberated by the free, almost made into a new media.”

 The apparent joy and ease with which young people transform music and other digital content is a hallmark of their generation. This generation will never be content to simply listen to and view digital content without the urge to transform it into something even more unique and personal. However, the real transformation is not of the digital content itself, but rather of this young generation who have become intrepid creators of new ideas and new media.

 Kelly writes that freedom is the key element in unleashing human creativity: “Technology wants to be free, as in free beer, because as it becomes free it also increases freedom. The inherent talents, capabilities and benefits of a technology cannot be released until it is almost free. The drive toward the free unleashes the constraints on each species in the technium, allowing it to interact with as many other species of technology as is possible, engendering new hybrids and deeper ecologies of tools, and permitting human users more choices and freedoms of use. As a technology grows in abundance and cheapness, it is more likely to find its appropriate niche in which it can sustain itself and support other technologies in commodity mode. As technology heads toward the free it unleashes the only lasting thing it can: options and possibilities.”

 As I read this paragraph on free technology I was reminded of Ray Kurzweil’s book, the Singularity is Near. One of the headlines that I took from this startling book is Kurzweil’s belief about the “options and possibilities” of humans. Namely, that the purpose of humans is to infuse the universe with intelligence and order. I like to think of this purpose as the evolutionary imperative of Homo sapiens.

 So, what does Kurzweil mean by “infusing the universe with intelligence and order?” He means that if we look at the exponential growth curve of computational power (artificial intelligence) we understand that very soon most of the matter and energy on our planet will be devoted to computers (artificial intelligence) and eventually this process will expand to include most of the matter in our solar system and then most of the matter in the universe. As the technology of artificial intelligence “grows in abundance and cheapness it allows its human users even more choices and freedoms of use,” as Kelly reminds us.

 When we think of technology within this exponentially expansive Kurzweilian cosmological framework, doesn’t it seem absolutely reptilian to believe that we can confine content, media and technology into little boxes labeled with the name of the original creator along with a caveat telling users not to think of other choices and freedoms of use? As for our students -- let’s make them aware of our evolutionary imperative and its cosmological implications. We must encourage our students to hitch a ride on Halley’s Comet and in Stanley Kunitz’ words, “go roaring down the storm tracks of the Milky Way.”