Ist0809/KevinKelly5000days
From EnWiki
Transcription of Kevin Kelly's talk about the next 5000 days of the web:
The internet, the web, as we know, the kind of web thing we’re all talking about is only less than 5 thousand days old. Okay, so all the things we’ve seeing come about, starting, say, with a satellite images of the whole Earth which we couldn’t even imagine happening before. All these things rolling into our lives, this abundance of things that are right before us sitting in front of our laptop or desktop, this kind of cornucopias stuff just coming, never ending. It’s amazing. And we’re not amazed. It’s really amazing that all the stuff is here. Okay, it’s in 5 thousand days. All the stuff that’s come.
And I know that ten years ago, if I had told you that this was all coming, you would have said that that’s impossible. There’s simply, there’s no economic model that that would be possible. And if I told you it’d all be coming for free, you would say this is simply, you’re dreaming, you’re a Californian utopian, you’re a wide-eyed optimist. And yet it’s here. The other thing that we’ve known about it was that 10 years ago as I looked at what even Wired was talking about, we thought it was gonna be TV but better. That was the model. That was what everybody was suggesting was going to be coming. And it turns out that that’s not what it was. First of all, it wasn’t possible, and it’s not what it was.
So one of the things I think we’re learning, if you think about Wikipedia it´s something that was simply impossible. It’s impossible in theory but possible in practice. And if you take all the things impossible, I think one of things we’re learning from this era, from this last decade, is that we have to get good at believing in the impossible. Because we aren't prepared for it.
So I’m curious about what’s gonna happen in the next 5000 days. If that’s happened in the last 5000 days, what’s gonna happen in the next 5000 days. So I have this kind of simple story. And it suggests that what we wanna think about is that the things we’re making, the things that are happening in 5000 days, that’s all these computers, all these handhelds, and all these cellphones, all these laptops, all the servers, basically what we’re getting out of all these connections is that we’re getting one machine. If there is only one machine, and our little handhelds or devices are actually just little windows into those machines... But that we’re basically constructing a single global machine.
And so I began to think about that it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine we’ve ever made. I mean it has not crushed, it has been running uninterrupted. And there´s almost no other machine that we’ve ever made that runs a number of hours, a number of days, 5000 days without interruption. That’s just unbelievable. Of course the internet is longer than these 5000 days; the web’s only 5000 days. So, I was trying to basically make measurements, what are the dimensions of this machine? And I started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are all around the globe on all the computers and there’s a hundred billion clicks per day, and there’s 55 trillion links, between all the web pages of the world. And so I began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions and I made a quick list in—was it Chris Jorden, the photographer talking about numbers being so large that they’re meaningless. Well, here’s a list of them. Kind of hard to tell, but there’s one billion PC chips on the internet, if you count all the chips and all the computers on the internet. There’s 2 million emails per second. So that’s a very big number. This is a huge machine. It uses 5% of the global electricity on the planet.
So here’s a specification. There’s a, if you’re making spreadsheet for it, a hundred and seventy quadzillion transistor 55 trillion links, emails running at 2 megahertz itself, so one kilohertz text messaging, 246 extra bite storage. That’s a big disk. That’s a lot of storage of memory. 9 extra bite RAM and, it’s the total traffic on, this, it’s running at 7 terra bites per second, booster saying (...) is about 20 terra bites. So every second (…) squishing around in this machine. It’s a big machine.
So I did something else. I figured out 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links. It’s almost the same as the numbers of synapses in your brain. A quintillion transistors is almost the same as the number of neurons in your brain. So to a first approximation, we have these things 20 petaherz synapse firings. Of course the memory is really huge. But to a first approximation the size of this machine is the size, in this complexity, sort of, kind of, to your brain. ‘Cause, in fact that’s how your brain works. The kind of the same way the webs work. However, your brain isn’t doubling every 2 years. So if we say this machine right now we’ve made is about one HB, one human brain, if we look at the rate, this is increasing, and 30 years from now, there’ll be 6 billions HBs. So by the year 2040 the total processing of this machine will exceed the total processing power of humanity in all bits and stuff.
And this is, I think, where Ray Curswels and others get this little chart saying we’re gonna cross. So what about that? Well, here’s a couple things. I think there are three, I have three little kind of general things I would like to say, three consequences of this. First, that basically what this machine is doing is embodying, well we’re giving it a body. And that’s what we’re gonna do in the next 5000 days. We’re gonna give this machine a body. And the second thing is we’re gonna re-structure its architecture. And thirdly, we’re gonna become completely co-dependent upon it.
So let me go through this three things. First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think they´are all separate devices. But in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into the one machine. The second thing is that some people call this a cloud, and you’re kind of touching the cloud with this. And so in some ways, what all you need is the cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn’t have any storage. It’s wireless. It’s always connected. There’s many things about, because they’re very simple. And basically what you’re doing is you’re just touching the machine, you’re touching the cloud and you’re going to compute that way. So the machine is computing. And this is in some ways back to kind of the old idea of centralized computing. But everything, all the cameras and the microphones and the sensors and cards, and everything is connected to this machine. And everything will go through the web. And we’ve seen that already with, say, phones. Right now phones don’t go through the web but they are beginning to and they will. And if you imagine what, say, this has an example that Google Ap has, in terms of the experiments of Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet blah blah blah... All these things are gonna become web based. They’re going through the machine. And I’m suggesting that every bit will be owned by the web. Right now it’s not if you do spreadsheets and things at work... a word document, they aren’t on the web but they are going to be, they are going to be a part of this machine. They’re gonna speak the web language, they’re gonna talk to the machine.
The web is in some sense a kind of like a black hole that’s sucking up everything into it. And so everything will be a part of the web. So every eye, every artifact we make will have embedded in some little sliver of webness in connection, and it will be part of this machine so that our environment, in a kind of ubiquitous computing sense, the environment becomes the web. Everything is connected. Now you know RSS feeds, other things, whatever the technology is, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that everything will have embedded in it in some sense to a connected machine. So we have basically the internet of things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels and a car as a chip with wheels because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is in the embedded intelligence electronics, not the materials. A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was gonna be a disembodied alternative virtual existence, and that they would have old economy of atoms, but in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two where we embed, the information and digital nature of things into the material world. That’s what we’re looking forward to. That is where we’re going. This union, this convergence of the atomic in the digital.
And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that what we have sort of the spectrum of media right now. TV, film, video-basically becomes one media platform while there is many differences, in some sense, they’re sharing more and more in common with each other. So that the laws of media, such as the fact that copies have no value, value is in the uncopyable things, immediacy, the authentication, the personalization. The media wants to be liquid. That’s what you really want. The reason why things are free is so you can manipulate them up so that they’re freeze in the beer, freeze in freedom. And the network affects rule meaning that the more you have the more you get. The first fax machine, the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist recruiting others to get a fax machine because that made their purchase more valuable. Those of the fax, we’re going to see, attention is currency. So those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media.
And the other thing about this embodiment is that there’s a kind we’d like to call ‘(…) Reversal’. The (...) was saying machines are the extension of the human senses, and I’m saying, humans are not going to be the extending senses of the machine, in a certain sense. So we have a trillion eyes, and ears, and touches through our digital photographs and cameras. We’ve seen the things like flicker where our Photo Synth, this program of Microsoft that allows you to assemble of you of a touristic place from the thousands of tourist snap shots of it. It is a certain sense this machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras.
Now the second thing, that I want to talk about was this idea of restructuring. What the web is doing is restructuring. And I have to warn you that what I’m talking about is that I’m going to give my explanation of a term you’re hearing which is semantic web. So first of all, the first stage we’ve seen in computer sys-in the internet was that, it was gonna link computers, that’s what we call the net. That was the internet of nets, and we saw that when you have all computers of the world then... If you remember it, it was kind of green screen with cursors, and there was really …now what you should do if you want to connect it, you connect it from one computer to another computer. And what you had to do is, if you wanna participate in, you have to share packets of information. So you’re forwarding on, you didn’t have control. It wasn’t like a telephone system where you have control of the line. It’s shared packets. The second stage, where we’re in now is the idea of linking pages. So all, well if I want to go on to an airline web page, I would go from my web page to FPT site, to another airline computer. Now we have pages, the unit has been resolved into pages, one page links to another page. If I wanna go into Book a Flight, I go into the airline’s flight page, the website of the airline, and I am linking to that page. And what we are sharing is links, so you have to be kind of open with the links. You couldn’t deny, if someone wants to link to you, you couldn’t stop them. You have to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody. So that’s what we’re doing.
We’re now entering into the third stage, which is what I am talking about. That is where we link the data. So I don’t know the name of this thing I’m calling One Machine. But we’re making data. So we’re going from machine to machine, the page to the page, and from data to data. So the difference is that rather than linking from page to page, we’re actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea, rather than to the other page. So every idea is basically being supported by every item. Every noun is being supported by the entire web, has been resolved at the level of items or ideas or words if you want. So this, they’re physically coming out again into the ideas, it’s not just virtual, it’s actually going out to things. So something will resolve down to the information about a particular person. So every person will have unique ID. Every person, every item will have a something, will be very specific that will link to the specific representation of that idea or item. So now in this new one, when I would link, I would link to my particular flight, my particular seat, and so give me example of this thing. A little Pacifica rather than, right now, Pacifica just serves a name on the web somewhere. The web doesn’t know that that is actually a town, and that’s a specific town that I live in. But that’s what we’re gonna be talking about. It’s gonna link directly to, it will know. The web will be able to read itself and know that that actually is a place. And whenever it sees the word, Pacifica, it will know that it actually has a place of one hundred to one hundred to... certain population.
So here are some technical terms, all three letter things. You will see lot more of, all these things are about enabling this ideas of linking to the data. So I give one kind of an example. There’s a billion social sites on the web. Each time you go to the, you can tell, … who you are, all your friends are, why she will be doing that? You should do that once, at least you should know who all your friends are. So that’s what you want. All your friends are identified as carrying these relationships around. All these data about you should just be conveyed, you should do it once, and that’s all. That should happen. And you should have all these networks all the relationships, speaking of these pieces of data. That’s where we are moving into where it sort of knows these things down to that level. Semantic Web, Web 3.0, Giant Global Graph. We’re kind of trying out what we wanna call these things. But what it’s doing it´s just sharing the data. So you have to be opened to having the data shared, which is a much bigger step than just sharing the web page or computer.
And all these things are gonna be beyond this, not just pages. They are things, everything we describe, every artifact or place will be a specific representation. We have a specific character that can be linked to directly. So we have this database of things. So there is actually fourth thing, we have not yet to get to, we won’t see the next ten years or 5 thousand days, but I think that’s where we’re going to, and as the internet of things where I am linking directly to the particular things of my seat on the plane, that physical thing becomes a part of the web. And so we’re in the middle of this things in a complete lengh…down to every object of little sliver connection that it has.
So last thing we’re gonna talk about this society is that we will be co-dependent. It’s always gonna be there, and the closer is the better. If you allow Google Tool, it will tell you your search history. I found out that by looking at it that I search most 11 O’clock in the morning. So I’m open and being transparent to that. And I think, total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is gonna be the price, if you wanna have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent. Google…I can’t remember my phone number, I’ll just ask Google. We kind of are so dependent on this that I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t need to try to remember anything, I will just Google it. It’s easier to do that.
And we´re kind of objective for saying, ‘oh, it’s awful’. But if we think about the dependency we have on this other technology, called the alphabet in writing, we totally depend on, it’s transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet in writing. And so in the same way, we’re not gonna imagine ourselves without the other machine being there. And what is happening with this is it is some kind of AI; it’s not AI of conscious AI, AI as being expert, Larry Page told me that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s what they are trying to do. But when 6 billion humans are googling, who’s searching who? It goes both ways.
So we are the web, that’s what this thing is. We are gonna be the machine. So the next 5000 days, is not gonna be the web only better, just like it wasn’t TV and only better. The next 5000 days, it’s not gonna be the web but only better, it’s gonna be something different. And I think it’s gonna be smarter, have an intelligence in there, that´s not again conscious but it will anticipate what we’re doing in a good sense. Secondly it’ll become much more personalized. It will know us, last good. Again, the price for that will be transparency. And thirdly it’s gonna become more ubiquitous in terms of filling the entire environment we will be in the middle of it. And all these devices will be portals into that.
So the single idea, that I want to leave with you is that we have to begin to think about this is not just web only better, but a new kind of stage in its development. It looks more global. If you take the whole thing, it is a very big machine, very reliable machine, more reliable than its parts. But we can also think about it as a kind of large organism. And so we might respond to it, more as if it was a whole system, more as if it was a large organism we’re going to be interacting with. It’s a One. And I don’t know what else to call it than the One. We’ll have a better word for it but there’s a unity of some sort that´s starting to emerge. And again, I don’t wanna talk about consciousness. I just wanna talk about, just a little bacteria or blob box which is what the organism is. So to do our action, take-away.
So here is what I will say; there is only One machine, and the web is its OS, all screens looking into the One. No bits will live outside the web; to share is to gain; let the One read it. There’s gonna be a Machine, you wanna make something that the Machine can read. And the One is us. We are in the One. I appreciate your time.
Transcription taken from The Road to the Mastery of English.
