Predicting the Next 5,000 Days of the Web
Kevin Kelly, executive director of Wired, gave a great presentation at the TED Ideas worth spreading conference about predicting the next 5,000 days of the Web - as it’s less than 5,000 days old. He poses a view of the Web as One Machine that we peer into, a remarkably fault tolerant machine that’s now at the point of resembling the statistics of our own brain - 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links (equivalent to synapses) and 1 quintillion transistors (equivalent to the number of neurons in your brain). So the Web is equivalent now to 1 brain - it’s doubling in size every 2 years. So in 30 years from now there will be 6 billion human brains, and in 2040 the total processing power of the Web will exceed our processing power as a species. OK that’s all lifted straight from the first few minutes of Kevin’s presentation.
So what are we going to do with this One Machine in the next 5,000 days? This is where I see so many web developers falling short in their imagination - or maybe I’ve been in too many computer science lectures with inspirational speakers. What about ubiquitous computing research into applications using embedded computers (Toyota Dream House PAPI comes to mind from Dr Ken Sakamura - I saw him lecture several years ago)? What about embedded computers in our own biology? And what about artificial intelligence research like natural language understanding, machine learning and intelligent agents? And, for that matter, what about the Semantic Web? I’ve been known to bring this line of thought into conversations about context, to the chagrin and forehead slapping of other developers.
Even as recently as early this month, Paul Boag simply deleted my comment as unworthy - thank’s mate it must be a shit being famous - but I’d argue he was short sighted (and bloody rude). Because these sciences aren’t 20 years away. They aren’t even as far away as HTML 5 - Toyota Dream House PAPI uses technologies available for intelligent home construction in the year 2010. Our environment is going to be meeting the Web a little more and quite invisibly every year.
Because wherever the direction of the Web is headed this will all become about context, about silos within the web that protect us from the gazillion information bits we don’t want to touch us. Intelligent agents are going to start sorting things for us, we’ll move away from the desktop and keyboard / mouse paradigm to more natural interaction models. Our life then extends to become the interface, and the context of who we are governs the nature of our experience with the Web. This is not just a better web page - this is not just a better form of television. The Web has much more potential than being a storm of simple websites in isolated smattering across the Internet.
Now don’t you think that’s just mind-blowing? I mean, if you sit there for a minute and stretch your imagination you might get a feel for where we’re headed. Co-dependence. Total personalisation at the cost of total transparency. Kevin points out that our reliance (or co-dependence) on the alphabet grew to a point where we just can’t imagine ourselves as a species without the written word. Language would be a similar socio-technological shift. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without Organizations pointed this out, too. The application that runs on the Internet called the Web, and the Internet itself, is not just a technological advancement - it changed society and who we are. At a fundamental level.
A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn’t, just as a society that had a printing press was a different kind of a society than a society that didn’t.Clay Shirky
So 5,000 days has brought us from packets being switched through to very basic interfaces and then into applications and interactive multimedia that we now see as the Web of 2008 - 2009. It’s not going to be the Web only better - it will be something we really can’t imagine. Let me ask you this: have you sat in your car(s) over this last 5,000 days and noticed those computers multiplying in the background. The average car has something like 40 invisible ubiquitous computers. The big trick is in making them invisible. They become the environment. Seriously - this is where the conversation about context comes into it’s own.
That is why the vision of the Semantic Web is so important and exciting. This isn’t all about Hypertext Markup Language and making better web pages in 5,000 days, it’s about other computer sciences that are bearing research fruit. It’s about humans changing in the way we relate to things and how things relate to us. It’s not just about web pages. Step back and take a look at the brilliant historic machine we’ve developed. It’s pretty awesome. The One Machine.
