Navigating zillions of bits, in real time, will require entire new fields of mathematics, completely new categories of software algorithms, and radically innovative hardware. What wide-open opportunities!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling. The music industry was overturned by technological startups that enabled melodies to be unbundled from songs and songs unbundled from albums. Revolutionary iTunes sold single songs, not albums. Once distilled and extracted from their former mixture, musical elements could be reordered into new compounds, such as shareable playlists. Big general-interest newspapers were unbundled into classifieds (Craigslist), stock quotes (Yahoo!), gossip (BuzzFeed), restaurant reviews (Yelp), and stories (the web) that stood and grew on their own. These new elements can be rearranged\u2014remixed\u2014into new text compounds, such as news updates tweeted by your friend. The next step is to unbundle classifieds, stories, and updates into even more elemental particles that can be rearranged in unexpected and unimaginable ways. Sort of like smashing information into ever smaller subparticles that can be recombined into a new chemistry. Over the next 30 years, the great work will be parsing all the information we track and create\u2014all the information of business, education, entertainment, science, sport, and social relations\u2014into their most primeval elements. The scale of this undertaking requires massive cycles of cognition. Data scientists call this stage \u201cmachine readable\u201d information, because it is AIs and not humans who will do this work in the zillions. When you hear a term like \u201cbig data,\u201d this is what it is about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years. I think we\u2019ll be surprised by how many of the things we assumed were \u201cnatural\u201d for humans are not really natural at all. It might be fairer to say that what is natural for a tribe of mildly connected humans will not be natural for a planet of intensely connected humans. \u201cEveryone knows\u201d that humans are warlike, but I would guess organized war will become less attractive, or useful, over time as new means of social conflict resolution arise at a global level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Certainty itself is no longer as certain as it once was. When I am connected to the Screen of All Knowledge, to that billion-eyed hive of humanity woven together and mirrored on a billion pieces of glass, truth is harder to find. For every accepted piece of knowledge I come across, there is, within easy reach, a challenge to the fact. Every fact has its antifact. The internet\u2019s extreme hyperlinking will highlight those antifacts as brightly as the facts. Some antifacts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. This is the curse of the screen: You can\u2019t rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and opposite anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous antifactors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Knowledge, which is related, but not identical, to information, is exploding at the same rate as information, doubling every two years. The number of scientific articles published each year has been accelerating even faster than this for decades. Over the last century the annual number of patent applications worldwide has risen in an exponential curve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Previous discoveries helped us to recently realize that 96 percent of all matter and energy in our universe is outside of our vision. The universe is not made of the atoms and heat we discovered last century; instead it is primarily composed of two unknown entities we label \u201cdark\u201d: dark energy and dark matter. \u201cDark\u201d is a euphemism for ignorance. We really have no idea what the bulk of the universe is made of. We find a similar proportion of ignorance if we probe deeply into the cell, or the brain. We don\u2019t know nothin\u2019 relative to what could be known. Our inventions allow us to spy into our ignorance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
IBM\u2019s Watson proved that for most kinds of factual reference questions, an AI can find answers fast and accurately. Part of the increasing ease in providing answers lies in the fact that past questions answered correctly increase the likelihood of another question. At the same time, past correct answers increase the ease of creating the next answer, and increase the value of the corpus of answers as a whole. Each question we ask a search engine and each answer we accept as correct refines the intelligence of the process, increasing the engine\u2019s value for future questions. As we cognify more books and movies and the internet of things, answers become ubiquitous. We are headed to a future where we will ask several hundred questions per day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy\u2014\u201cWhat would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?\u201d That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy toward the fluidity of decentralization. It is moving from nouns to verbs, from tangible products to intangible becomings. From fixed media to messy remixed media. From stores to flows. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Thousands of years from now, when historians review the past, our ancient time here at the beginning of the third millennium will be seen as an amazing moment. This is the time when inhabitants of this planet first linked themselves together into one very large thing. Later the very large thing would become even larger, but you and I are alive at that moment when it first awoke. Future people will envy us, wishing they could have witnessed the birth we saw.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
What to call this very large masterpiece? Is it more alive than machine? At its core 7 billion humans, soon to be 9 billion, are quickly cloaking themselves with an always-on layer of connectivity that comes close to directly linking their brains to each other. A hundred years ago H. G. Wells imagined this large thing as the world brain. Teilhard de Chardin named it the noosphere, the sphere of thought. Some call it a global mind, others liken it to a global superorganism since it includes billions of manufactured silicon neurons. For simple convenience and to keep it short, I\u2019m calling this planetary layer the holos. By holos I include the collective intelligence of all humans combined with the collective behavior of all machines, plus the intelligence of nature, plus whatever behavior emerges from this whole. This whole equals holos. The scale of what we are becoming is simply hard to absorb. It is the largest thing we have made. Let\u2019s take just the hardware, for example. Today there are 4 billion mobile phones and 2 billion computers linked together into a seamless cortex around the globe. Add to them all the billions of peripheral chips and affiliated devices from cameras to cars to satellites. Already in 2015 a grand total of 15 billion devices have been wired up into one large circuit. Each of these devices contains 1 billion to 4 billion transistors themselves, so in total the holos operates with a sextillion transistors (10 with 21 zeros). These transistors can be thought of as the neurons in a vast brain. The human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons, or a trillion times fewer than the holos. In terms of magnitude, the holos already significantly exceeds our brains in complexity. And our brains are not doubling in size every few years. The holos mind is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Look at a satellite photograph of the earth at night to get a glimpse of this very large organism. Brilliant clusters of throbbing city lights trace out organic patterns on the dark land. The cities gradually dim at their edges to form thin long lighted highways connecting other distant city clusters. The routes of lights outward are dendritic, treelike patterns. The image is deeply familiar. The cities are ganglions of nerve cells; the lighted highways are the axons of nerves, reaching to a synaptic connection. Cities are the neurons of the holos. We live inside this thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A \u201csingularity\u201d is a term borrowed from physics to describe a frontier beyond which nothing can be known. There are two versions in pop culture: a hard singularity and a soft singularity. The hard version is a future brought about by the triumph of a superintelligence. When we create an AI that is capable of making an intelligence smarter than itself, it can in theory make generations of ever smarter AIs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A soft singularity is more likely. In this future scenario AIs don\u2019t get so smart that they enslave us (like evil versions of smart humans); rather AI and robots and filtering and tracking and all the technologies I outline in this book converge\u2014humans plus machines\u2014and together we move to a complex interdependence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These highlights are from the Kindle version of The Inevitable: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\n
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