Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  Consider this transition from the viewpoint of a single-celled organism. An amoeba is a self-sufficient entity, moving, sensing, feeding, and reproducing independent of other cells. For 3 billion years of evolution, our ancestors were all free-living cells like this, independently “doing it for themselves,” and they were honed by this long period into tiny organisms more versatile and competent than any cell in our multicellular bodies. Were it capable of scorn, an amoeba would surely scoff at a red blood cell as little more than a stupid bag of protoplasm, barely alive, overdomesticated by the tyranny of multicellular specialization.

  Nonetheless, being jacks of all trades, such cells were masters of none. Cooperative multicellularity allowed cells to specialize, mastering the individual tasks of support, feeding, and reproduction. Specialization and division of labor allowed teams of cells to vastly outclass their single-celled ancestors in terms of size, efficiency, and complexity, leading to a whole new class of organisms. But this new organization created its own problems of communication: how to ensure smooth, effective cooperation among all of these independent cells? This quandary directly parallels the origin of societies of specialized humans.

  Our bodies have essentially two ways of solving the organizational problems raised by coordinating billions of semi-independent cells. In hormonal systems, master control cells broadcast potent signals all other cells must obey. Steroid hormones such as estrogen or testosterone enter the body’s cells, penetrating their nuclei and directly controlling gene expression. The endocrine system is like an immensely powerful dictatorship, issuing sweeping edicts that all must obey.

  The other approach involves a novel cell type specialized for information processing: the neuron. While the endocrine approach works fine for plants and fungi, metazoans (multicellular animals) move, sense, and act, requiring a more subtle, neural form of control. From the beginning, neurons were organized into networks: They are team workers collaboratively processing information and reaching group decisions. Only neurons at the final output stage, such as motor neurons, retain direct power over the body. And even motor neurons must act together to produce coordinated movement rather than uncontrolled twitching.

  In humans, language provided the beginnings of a communicative organizational system, unifying individuals into larger, organized collectives. Although all animals communicate, their channels are typically narrow and do not support expression of any and all thoughts. Language enables humans to move arbitrary thoughts from one mind to another, creating a new, cultural level of group organization. For most of human evolution, this system was local, allowing small bands of people to form local clusters of organization. Spoken language allowed hunter-gatherers to organize their foraging efforts and small farming communities their harvest, but not much more.

  The origin of writing allowed the first large-scale societies, organized on hierarchical (often despotic) lines: A few powerful kings and scribes had control over the communication channels and issued edicts to all. This one-to-many topology is essentially endocrine. Despite their technological sophistication, radio and television share this topology. The proclamations and legal decisions of the ruler (or television producer) parallel the reproductive edicts carried by hormones within our bodies: commands issued to all, which all must obey.

  Since Gutenberg, human society has slowly groped its way toward a new organizational principle. Literacy, mail, the telegraph, and democracy were steps along the way to a new organizational metaphor, more like the nervous system than like the hormones. The Internet completes the process: Now arbitrarily far-flung individuals can link, share information, and base their decisions on this new shared source of meaning. Like individual neurons in our neocortex, each human can potentially influence and be influenced, rapidly, by information from anyone, anywhere. We, the metaphoric neurons of the global brain, are on the brink of a wholly new system of societal organization, one spanning the globe with the metaphoric axons of the Internet linking us together.

  The protocols are already essentially in place. TCP/IP and HTML are the global brain equivalents of cAMP and neurotransmitters: universal protocols for information transfer. Soon a few dominant languages—say, English, Chinese, and Spanish—will provide for universal information exchange. Well-connected collective entities such as Google and Wikipedia will play the role of brain stem nuclei to which all other information nexuses must adapt.

  Two main problems mar this “global brain” metaphor. First, the current global brain is only tenuously linked to the organs of international power. Political, economic, and military power remain insulated from the global brain, and powerful individuals can be expected to cling tightly to the endocrine model of control and information exchange. Second, our nervous systems evolved over 400 million years of natural selection, during which billions of competing false starts and miswired individuals were ruthlessly weeded out. But there is only one global brain today, and no trial-and-error process to extract a functional configuration from the trillions of possible configurations. This formidable design task is left up to us.

  Search and Emergence

  Rudy Rucker

  Mathematician; computer scientist; cyberpunk pioneer; novelist; author, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy

  Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times, we imagined that we’d need a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence to make the global mind work—we thought of it as resembling an extremely smart person. The conventional Hollywood image for the global mind’s interface was a talking head on a wall-sized screen.

  And now, in 2010, we have the global mind. Search engines, user-curated encyclopedias, images of everything under the sun, clever apps to carry out simple computations—it’s all happening. But old-school artificial intelligence is barely involved at all.

  As it happens, data and not algorithms are where it’s at. Put enough information into the planetary information cloud, crank up a search engine, and you’ve got an all-knowing global mind. The answers emerge.

  Initially people resisted understanding this simple fact. Perhaps this was because the task of posting a planet’s worth of data seemed so intractable. There were hopes that some magically simple AI program might be able to extrapolate a full set of information from a few well-chosen basic facts—just as a person can figure out another person on the basis of a brief conversation.

  At this point, it looks like there aren’t going to be any incredibly concise aha!-type AI programs for emulating how we think. The good news is that this doesn’t matter. Given enough data, a computer network can fake intelligence. And—radical notion—maybe that’s what our wetware brains are doing, too. Faking it with search and emergence. Searching a huge database for patterns.

  The seemingly insurmountable task of digitizing the world has been accomplished by ordinary people. This results from the happy miracle that the Internet is unmoderated and cheap to use. Practically anyone can post information on the Web, whether as comments, photos, or full-blown Web pages. We’re like worker ants in a global colony, dragging little chunks of data this way and that. We do it for free; it’s something we like to do.

  Note that the Internet wouldn’t work as a global mind if it were a completely flat and undistinguished sea of data. We need a way to locate the regions most desirable in terms of accuracy and elegance. An early, now discarded notion was that we would need some kind of information czar or committee to rank the data. But, here again, the anthill does the work for free.

  By now it seems obvious that the only feasible way to rank the Internet’s offerings is to track the online behaviors of individual users. By now it’s hard to remember how radical and rickety such a dependence upon emergence used to seem. No control—what a crazy idea! But it works. No centralized system could ever keep pace.

  An even more surprising
success is found in user-curated encyclopedias. When I first heard of this notion, I was sure it wouldn’t work. I assumed that trolls and zealots would infect all the posts. But the Internet has a more powerful protection system than I’d realized. Individual users are the primary defenders.

  We might compare the Internet to a biological system in which new antibodies emerge to combat new pathogens. Malware is forever changing, but our defenses are forever evolving as well.

  I am a novelist, and the task of creating a coherent and fresh novel always seems in some sense impossible. What I’ve learned over the course of my career is that I need to trust in emergence, also known as the muse. I assemble a notes document filled with speculations, overheard conversations, story ideas, and flashy phrases. Day after day, I comb through my material, integrating it into my mental Net, forging links and ranks. And, fairly reliably, the scenes and chapters of my novel emerge. It’s how my creative process works.

  In our highest mental tasks, any dream of an orderly process is a will-o’-the wisp. And there’s no need to feel remorseful about this. Search and emergence are good enough for the global mind—and they’re good enough for us.

  My Fingers Have Become Part of My Brain

  James O’Donnell

  Classicist; provost, Georgetown University; author, The Ruin of the Roman Empire

  How is the Internet changing the way I think? My fingers have become part of my brain. What will come of this? It’s far too early to say.

  Once upon a time, knowledge consisted of what you knew yourself and what you heard—literally, with your ears—from others. If you were asked a question in those days, you thought of what you had seen and heard and done yourself and what others had said to you. I’m rereading Thucydides this winter and watching the way everything depended on whom you knew, where the messengers came, from and whether they were delayed en route, walking from one end of Greece to another. Thucydides was literate, but his world hadn’t absorbed that new technology yet.

  With the invention of writing, the eyes took on a new role. Knowledge wasn’t all in memory but was found in present, visual stimuli: the written word in one form or another. We have built a mighty culture based on all the things humankind can produce and the eye can study. What we could read in the traditional library of twenty-five years ago was orders of magnitude richer and more diverse than the most that any person could ever see, hear, or be told of in one lifetime. The modern correlative to Thucydides would be Churchill’s history of World War II and the abundance of written documents he shows himself dependent on at every stage of the war. But imagine Churchill or Hitler with Internet-like access to information!

  Now we change again. It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information cannot be said with confidence. In principle, it means a democratization of innovation and of debate. In practice, it also means a world in which many have already proved that they can ignore what they do not wish to think about, select what they wish to quote, and produce a public discourse demonstrably poorer than what we might have known in the past.

  But just for myself, just for now, it’s my fingers I notice. Ask me a good question today, and I find that I begin fiddling. If I am away from my desk, I pull out my BlackBerry so quickly and instinctively that you probably think I’m ignoring your question and starting to read my e-mail or play Brickbreaker—and sometimes I am. But when I’m not—that is, when you’ve asked a really interesting question—it’s a physical reaction, a gut feeling that I need to start manipulating (the Latin root for “hand,” manus, is in that word) the information at my fingertips to find the data that will support a good answer. At my desktop, it’s the same pattern: The sign of thinking is that I reach for the mouse and start “shaking it loose”—the circular pattern on the mouse pad that lets me see where the mouse arrow is, make sure the right browser is open, get a search window handy. My eyes and hands have already learned to work together in new ways with my brain—in a process of clicking, typing a couple of words, clicking, scanning, clicking again—which really is a new way of thinking for me.

  That finger work is unconscious. It just starts to happen. But it’s how I can now tell thinking has begun, as I begin working my way through an information world more tactile than ever before. Will we next have three-dimensional virtual spaces in which I gesture, touch, and run my fingers over the data? I don’t know; nobody can know. But we’re off on a new and great adventure whose costs and benefits we will only slowly come to appreciate.

  What all this means is that we are in a different space now, one that is largely unfamiliar to us even when we think we’re using familiar tools (like a “newspaper” that has never been printed or an “encyclopedia” vastly larger than any shelf of buckram volumes), and one that has begun life by going through rapid changes that only hint at what is to come. I’m not going to prophesy where that goes, but I’ll sit here a while longer, watching the ways I’ve come to “let my fingers do the walking,” wondering where they will lead.

  A Mirror for the World’s Foibles

  John Markoff

  Journalist; covers Silicon Valley for the New York Times; author, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

  It’s been three decades since Les Earnest, then assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, introduced me to the ARPANET. It was 1979, and from his home in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley he was connected via a terminal and a 2,400-baud modem to Human Nets, a lively virtual community that explored the impact of technology on society.

  It opened a window for me into an unruly cyberworld that at first seemed to be, to quote computer music researcher and composer John Chowning, a Socratean abode. Over the next decade and a half, I joined the camp of what I have since come to think of as Internet utopians. The Net seemed to offer this shining city on a hill, free from the grit and foulness of the meat world. Ideologically, this was a torch carried by Wired magazine, and the ideal probably reached its zenith in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

  Silly me. I should have known better. It would all be spelled out clearly in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and even less-well-read classics such as John Barnes’s The Mother of Storms. Science fiction writers were always the best social scientists, and in describing the dystopian nature of the Net they were again right on target.

  There would be nothing even vaguely utopian about the reality of the Internet, despite preachy “The Road Ahead” vision statements by (late to the Web) luminaries like Bill Gates. This gradually dawned on me during the 1990s, driven home with particular force by the Kevin Mitnick affair. By putting every human on the planet directly in contact with every other, the Net opened a Pandora’s box of nastiness.

  Indeed, while it was true that the Net skipped lightly across national boundaries, the demise of localism didn’t automatically herald the arrival of a superior cyberworld. It simply accentuated and accelerated both the good and the bad, in effect becoming a mirror for all the world’s fantasies and foibles.

  Welcome to a bleak Blade Runner–esque world dominated by Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, and American cybermobsters, in which our every motion and movement is surveilled by a chorus of Big and Little Brothers.

  Not only have I been transformed into an Internet pessimist, but recently the Net has begun to feel downright spooky. Not to be anthropomorphic, but doesn’t the Net seem to have a mind of its own? We’ve moved deeply into a world where it is leaching value from virtually every traditional institution in the name of some Borg-like future. Will we all be assimilated, or have we been already? Wait! Stop me! That was The Matrix, wasn’t it?

  a completely n
ew form of sense

  Terence Koh

  Artist

  i am very interested in the Internet, especially right now.

  the Internet is a completely new form of sense.

  as a human, i have experienced reality, as have the rest of my species since we had the ability to self-realize, as a combination of what we see, smell, feel, hear, and taste.

  but the Internet—and this is a term i think that is beyond the idea of just the Web on a computer (Websites, e-mails, blogs, Twitter, Google, etc.) that is become “something” that i cannot myself really define yet—the Internet is really growing beyond this “something,” so that even if someone does not have a computer, the Internet still affects them.

  so this is very interesting, because the Internet is becoming a new form of sense that has not existed since we began to self-realize as humans.

  and because this affects everybody, i feel that thinking about what the Internet is now must always come back to myself as an individual. because it is becoming more and more important to see how our individual thoughts and actions affect everything else around us. it all still starts with the “i,” with me.

  a new collective sense of “i” is the Internet . . .

  so that there is a new form of “i” that is also “we” at the same time, because we are all involved with it.

  i am not sure if i am answering your question, as it is a question that i do think about consciously every day now but can’t quite figure out.

  and forgive me if i sound like a bad science fiction writer, but if i may give any direction to your question, i think that the Internet is probably going to evolve by itself very very soon to give you better answers than i can ever give.