The Future of the Internet

There is only one machine.
The web is its OS.
All screens will look into the One.
No bits will live outside the One.
To share is to gain.
Let the One read it.
The One is us.

This is Kevin Kelly's vision of the Internet in a not so distant future--the next 5,000 days. I know what you are thinking: he's some techno-cult leader promising us all lower mortgages, better sex lives and digital salvation. I thought so too, but no--Kelly is the Executive Editor at Wired, and is known for his deep and accurate insights into the future of technology, specifically our favorite network: the Web. At the 2007 TED conference Kelly gave a presentation at called "Predicting the Next 5,000 Days of the Web" where gave his vision for the future of the Internet which is exciting, powerful and scary (all at once). What is interesting from the point of network studies is his view that everything will be part of the Web--EVERYTHING--all machines, all data, all systems. It will be single global machine that is smarter, more personalized and more ubiquitous, were a sense of unity will emerge, a sense of consciousness. As Kelly says, "we all thought the Internet was going to be TV but better." Perhaps the next 5,000 days of the Web will be much more than the "Web but better." Perhaps one day there will no longer be networks but only The Network, or as Kelly calls it, "The One."

Click here to watch his presentation, it is about 20 minutes long. It is also worth checking out the TED website, they have a huge collection of amazing thinkers giving short presentation on all sorts of really cool stuff.

Kelly first gives some really interesting statistics that help us get a sense of the size of the Internet. These are some informal metrics similar to the metrics we have been talking about in class. Internet=100 billion clicks/day, 55 trillion links (edges), 2 billion chips, 2 million emails/sec, 8 TB/sec, 65 billion phone calls/day, 600 billion RFID tags. He is giving data on both the physical network (the Internet) and the data that is on it (www, voip, etc.). In addition consuming 5% of the worlds electricity.

He then goes on to make some (fairly controversial) comparisons between the complexity of the Internet and the human mind. Though the numbers of nodes and edges in the brain (neurons) and on the Internet (wires and switches) may be the same, I personnly consider the current emergent properties of the two networks to be very dissimilar, though I suppose it depends on how one defines "intelligence". By 2040 the power of the Internet will equal the processing power of humanity which he supports by positing that unlike computers, our brains aren't doubling in power every two years. Perhaps by 2040 complexity will be indeed prooved to be the cause of life.

From his point of view, this "new" Web will be different in three ways:

1. Embodiment
   
2. Restructuring
   
3. Codependency

Embodiment means that the web will really start to have a physical form. It will be a collection of all the machines (computers, cell phones, cameras, microphones, GPS, cars, etc.) that can speak to the network, or what Kelly calls the Cloud. Think of the cloud this way: when you check your email, where is it sitting waiting for you to eagerly log on and read it? The Cloud. The beauty of the could is that it really doesn't matter where it is, what matters is that you can access it from any where, and with an ever growing list of devices, especially wireless ones. Devices that communicate with the Cloud serve two functions: they act as windows into into the Web, as well as acting as the eyes (cameras) and ears (microphones) of the web. In Kelly's view the web will no longer just be a set of web sites and links between them, but all things will be synchronized with the web so that everything "lives" on the web as well as in physical reality. It will become an "Internet of things." The web will branch out and include all things in its network, nothing will be offline. The network will become a network of networks. From the network's point of of view, we humans will just be "extended sensing tools". As much as the Internet will serve us, we will serve it.

Restructuring is a process where the nodes of the Internet gain an ever increasing level of granularity. The early Internet was computers linking to computer. Now we have the WWW, which are pages linking to pages. The Internet of the future will be data linking to data, ideas will link with ideas. Everything will be linked to, and in turn be defined by links to other things. The fourth stage will be an Internet of things, were physical things become linked to the web.

The last change the Internet will see will be Codependency. This means that we rely on the Internet for our very survival as much as the Internet relies on us for its existence. Kelly posits that using the Internet as a tool is no different than using written language as a tool. The codependency process has just one catch: you have to be willing to have your data shared. To really have the Internet become a tool humanity relies on in a dependent way we can have no secrets. "Total personalization will require total transparency." Having information shared in such an open way could lead to abuses and privacy issues. I think as we become more codependent, Internet privacy issues will become a much debated issue. We already have seen abuses with telecom companies allowing the US government secretly monitoring international calls of US citizens. With Codependency, the line between the virtual and real world will be very fuzzy, "we will become the web." The moral ramifications of this synergy will be huge, and needs to be scrutinized very careful to insure responsible access and usage of information.

I don't think we can fully anticipate what the Web will look like in the future--I don't think any body really knows. What this article does show us however is that at one point there was no Internet, and then it emerged, and began evolving to become the Web that we all know and love. From Kelly's perspecive Internet seems to be evolving and becoming more complex, as if it were an organism. The power of the Internet is greater than the sum of its parts, as is any organism were life is the emergent property. Emergent properties emerge (for lack of a better word) from the interactions of all of the nodes. There seem to be three properties of network evolution: more nodes, and more edges, and the emergent properties that come from the interaction between nodes.

If you subscribe to evolution (design without a designer) then the web looks very much like a life form. It began as very simple networks and has grown into something that is evolving and growing on its own. This raises an interesting questions regarding networks: is there a point where a network become sufficiently complex and large where where really unexpected and amazing things start to happen? Like life, or the Web.

Though Kelly not positing that the Web is an organism in the traditional sense. I think he is positing that it is an organism in the non-traditional sense, which started like all network do, biological or technological: a random linking of two nodes. He is making us think about what it means to be intelligent, what it means to be conscious and ultimately what it means to be One.

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