by Al Gore
159 from 90 to 2 percent of the workforce
Ibid.; Claude Fischer, “Can You Compete with A.I. for the Next Job?,” Fiscal Times, April 14, 2011; Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy,” June 2005, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm; United Nations Social Policy and Development Division, Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative, 2007, http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2007/chapter1.pdf (“Agriculture still accounts for about 45 per cent of the world’s labour force, or about 1.3 billion people”).
160 less than half of all jobs worldwide are now on farms
United Nations Social Policy and Development Division, Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative.
161 the Industrial Revolution took only 150 years
Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory, p. v.
162 “indistinguishable from magic”
“Clarke’s Third Law,” in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff Prucher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 22.
163 different from that of our ancestors 200,000 years ago
“Human Brains Enjoy Ongoing Evolution,” New Scientist, September 9, 2005.
164 in the world thirty years ago, the Cray-2
John Markoff, “The iPad in Your Hand: As Fast as a Supercomputer of Yore,” New York Times, May 9, 2011.
165 jobs of weavers obsolete
Steven E. Jones, Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 54–55.
166 “Luddite fallacy”
Ford, Lights in the Tunnel, pp. 95–100.
167 technologies as “extensions” of basic human capacities
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
CHAPTER 2: THE GLOBAL MIND
1 to serve primarily as a distribution service for advertisements and junk mail
Steven Greenhouse, “Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount,” New York Times, September 5, 2011.
2 phenomena-driven by the connection of two billion people (thus far) to the Internet
International Telecommunication Union, “The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures,” 2011, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf.
3 with no human being involved—already exceeds the population of the Earth
Dave Evans, “The Internet of Things,” Cisco Blog, July 15, 2011, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-internet-of-things-infographic/.
4 connected to the Internet and exchanging information on a continuous basis
Jessi Hempel, “The Hot Tech Gig of 2022: Data Scientist,” Fortune, January 6, 2012; Evans, “The Internet of Things.”
5 the number of “connected things” is already much larger
Maisie Ramsay, “Cisco: 1 Trillion Connected Devices by 2013,” Wireless Week, March 25, 2010.
6 RFID tags in an effort to combat truancy
David Rosen, “Big Brother Invades Our Classrooms,” Salon, October 8, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/big_brother_invades_our_classrooms/.
7 “The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), p. 283.
8 “where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted”
H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Ayer, 1938).
9 World Wide Web on Google for some of the estimated one trillion web pages
Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, “We Knew the Web Was Big…,” Google Official Blog, July 25, 2008, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html.
10 network of human thoughts that he termed the “Global Mind”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (1964), chap. 7, “The Planetisation of Man.”
11 “We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us”
McLuhan, Understanding Media.
12 “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges”
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010).
13 we are spending more and more time “alone together”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?,” American Psychologist 53, no. 9 (September 1998): 1017–31; Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Atlantic, May 2012.
14 “Internet Use Disorder” in its appendix for the first time
Tony Dokupil, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?,” Daily Beast, July 8, 2012.
15 estimated 500 million people
Jane McGonigal, “Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life,” Huffington Post, February 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html.
16 as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms
Ibid.
17 the average online social games player
Mathew Ingram, “Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman,” GigaOM, February 17, 2010, http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/.
18 55 percent of those playing social games
Ibid.
19 generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook
Robert Lane Greene, “Facebook: Like?,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2012, http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/facebook?page=full.
20 to the amount of time we are spending online
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
21 control group not informed that the facts could be found online
John Bohannon, “Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory,” Science, July 15, 2011.
22 began to lose some of their innate sense of direction
Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems,” Walrus, November 2009.
23 studies indicate that it is a literal reallocation of mental energy
Carr, The Shallows.
24 “Never memorize what you can look up in books”
Library of Congress, World Treasures of the Library of Congress, July 29, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-record.html.
25 the disuse of neuron “trees” leads to their shrinkage
Walter J. Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 37–43, 81–82; Society for Neuroscience, “Brain Plasticity and Alzheimer’s Disease,” 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20101225174414/ http://sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=publications_rd_alzheimers.j.
26 connecting our brains seamlessly to the enhanced capacity
McLuhan, Understanding Media.
27 “calling things to remembrance”
Plato, Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 157.
28 TCP/IP protocol
Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” September 21, 2011, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/2011/09/imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970.html; Jim Horne, “What Hath God Wrought,” New York Times, Wordplay blog, September 8, 2009, http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wrought/; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 2,
219.
29 and the less one relies on memories stored in the brain itself
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 191–97.
30 life-forms on Earth is our capacity for complex and abstract thought
Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 199.
31 neocortex in roughly its modern form around 200,000 years ago
R.I.M. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 4 (1993): 681–735.
32 with a genetic mutation or whether it developed more gradually
Constance Holden, “The Origin of Speech,” Science 303, no. 5662 (February 27, 2004): 1316–19.
33 to communicate more intricate thoughts from one person to others
John Noble Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers,” New York Times, April 6, 1999.
34 hunter-gatherer period is associated with oral communication
Nicholas Wade, “Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
35 language is associated with the early stages of the Agricultural Revolution
Wilford, “Who Began Writing?”
36 Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, the Mediterranean, and Central America
William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 43.
37 the emergence of sophisticated concepts like democracy
Carr, The Shallows, pp. 50–57.
38 Their relative powerlessness was driven by their ignorance
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
39 written in a language that for the most part only the monks could understand
Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
40 eleven print editions of the account of his journey captivated Europe
“The Diffusion of Columbus’s Letter through Europe, 1493–1497,” University of Southern Maine, Osher Map Library, http://usm.maine.edu/maps/web-document/1/5/sub-/5-the-diffusion-of-columbuss-letter-through-europe-1493-1497.
41 bringing artifacts and knowledge
Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: William Morrow, 2004).
42 including the exciting new derivatives product: indulgences
Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. ix–xiii, 66–67.
43 but thousands of copies distributed to the public were printed in German
“How Luther Went Viral,” Economist, December 17, 2011.
44 more than a quarter of them written by Luther himself
Ibid.
45 beginning a wave of literacy that began in Northern Europe and moved southward
Tom Head, It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change (Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2010), p. 115.
46 the printing press was denounced as “the work of the Devil”
Charles Coffin, The Story of Liberty (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), p. 77.
47 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolution of the Spheres
William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (New York: Norton, 2006).
48 At the beginning of January 1776
“Jan 9, 1776: Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense,” History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-paine-publishes-common-sense.
49 ignite the American War of Independence that July
David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 112.
50 codified by Adam Smith in the same year
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776).
51 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also published in the same year
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776).
52 a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future
T. H. Breen, “Making History,” New York Times Book Review, May 7, 2000.
53 quantum computing
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Doubleday, 2011), Chapter 1.
54 digital data by companies and individuals
McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, May 2011.
55 grown by a factor of nine in just five years
“The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos,” IDC, June 2011, http://idcdocserv.com/1142.
56 telephone call grew shorter by almost half
Tom Vanderbilt, “The Call of the Future,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012.
57 double between 2005 and 2010
International Telecommunications Union, “The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures,” http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/FactsFigures2010.pdf.
58 in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally
Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update),” December 3, 2012, http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends-update.
59 as many mobile devices as there are people
Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, February 1, 2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/ekits/Cisco_VNI_Global_Mobile_Data_Traffic_Forecast_2010_2015.pdf.
60 Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years
Ibid.
61 smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period
Ibid.
62 half of the mobile phone market in the United States
Aaron Smith, Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Nearly Half of American Adults Are Smartphone Owners,” March 1, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012.aspx.
63 More than 5 billion of the 7 billion
International Telecommunications Union, “ICT Facts and Figures: The World in 2011.”
64 1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide
Meeker and Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update).”
65 3.2 billion people have their own devices
“SIM Earth,” Economist, October 19, 2012, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/10/global-mobile-usage.
66 low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous
Christina Bonnington, Wired Gadget Lab, “Global Smartphone Adoption Approaches 30 Percent,” November 28, 2011, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/smartphones-feature-phones/; Juro Osawa and Paul Mozur, “The Battle for China’s Low-End Smartphone Market,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2012.
67 Internet access as a new “human right” in a United Nations report
David Kravets, “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right,” Wired, June 3, 2011.
68 computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one
“Nicholas Negroponte and One Laptop Per Child,” Public Radio International, April 29, 2009, http://www.pri.org/stories/business/social-entrepreneurs/one-laptop-per-child.html.
69 subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet
Austan Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan, “World Wide Wonder?,” Education Next 6, no. 1 (Winter 2006).
70 immediately upon awakening—even before they get out of bed
Kevin J. O’Brien, “Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and
Gap Is Growing,” New York Times, January 5, 2012.
71 simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks
Matt Richtel, “U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers,” New York Times, December 13, 2011.
72 before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers
Micheline Maynard and Matthew L. Wald, “Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction,” New York Times, October 27, 2009.
73 “ ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect”
Jason Gilbert, “FaceTime Facelift: The Plastic Surgery Procedure for iPhone Users Who Don’t Like How They Look on FaceTime,” Huffington Post, February 27, 2012.
74 “Internet of Everything.”
Dave Evans, “How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World … for the Better,” Cisco Blog, November 7, 2012, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/how-the-internet-of-everything-will-change-the-worldfor-the-better-infographic/.
75 voluminous new quantities of data
McKinsey Institute, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” May 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation.
76 without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning
Al Gore, “The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 21st Century,” speech at the California Science Center, January 31, 1998, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=6210&version=1&format=doc.
77 actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected
Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2010.
78 promote efficiency in industry and business
McKinsey Institute, “Big data.”
79 information collected during the seconds prior to and during
“In-Car Camera Records Accidents,” BBC News, October 14, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4341342.stm.
80 airplanes and most security cameras in buildings
Kevin Bonsor, “How Black Boxes Work,” HowStuffWorks, http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box3.htm.
