A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...
Here's part 7 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.
The Internet has grown exponentially over the last couple over years, especially with the introduction of mobile devices. Mobile devices overtook computers as the medium of choice for accessing the Internet worldwide during 2013, and there is today more apparatuses connected to the Internet than there are people on this planet. The number surpassed 10 billion in 2012, outnumbering the current human population of about 7 billion.
... ends in Part VIII: Our Digital Mary Shelley
Here's part 7 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.
Every minute that passes on the Internet 2 million searches are performed on Google, 600 new homepages are published, 100 000 new tweets are sent, and more than 48 hours of new media is uploaded to YouTube. In fact, every day more than 11 000 years of video is watched on YouTube and that number is growing.
In 2013, every day 2.9 quintillion bytes of data (1 followed by 18 zeros) are created, with 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone. As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since the beginning of the earth. To put things in perspective, the entire works of William Shakespeare, as it would be written down in a text document; represent about 5 MB of data. So, you could store about 1 000 copies of Shakespeare on a single DVD. This vast amount data produced every day would create a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to moon - twice.
In 2013, every day 2.9 quintillion bytes of data (1 followed by 18 zeros) are created, with 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone. As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since the beginning of the earth. To put things in perspective, the entire works of William Shakespeare, as it would be written down in a text document; represent about 5 MB of data. So, you could store about 1 000 copies of Shakespeare on a single DVD. This vast amount data produced every day would create a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to moon - twice.
Obviously we are creating more data than is humanly possible to grasp, and as we are doing so the gap between creating data, and understanding that data, grows just as quickly. Creating content does not require any in depth programming knowledge no more, and the development in the field of interaction design is rather taking us in the opposite direction toward more intuitive and more easily understood interfaces.
This will in turn result in only a selected few possessing the front edge knowledge needed to understand the full entity that is the Internet, and sometimes not even these geniuses will full understand what is happening. In the end of the nineties a new looming menace threatened to strike at humanity; the Y2K bug.
This will in turn result in only a selected few possessing the front edge knowledge needed to understand the full entity that is the Internet, and sometimes not even these geniuses will full understand what is happening. In the end of the nineties a new looming menace threatened to strike at humanity; the Y2K bug.
Computer experts around the world collectively announced that due to a design faux pas in coding the internal motherboard clocks for the world’s computers, there would be a substantial risk all computers would malfunction at midnight of December 31 1999. When writing the code, programmers had only used two digits to store the yearly number instead of four (99 instead of 1999), which would result in all the worlds computers at strike of midnight hitting a full row of zeros for both date and time (00 00 00 – 00:00).
Coincidentally this is what the motherboard would show if the computer was blank, before it had been programmed to do anything, which is why the experts feared that resetting the clock may result in the same outcome; the computer could interpret this as a “kill switch” and automatically blank all its memory.
The public panic spread like wildfire. Elevators and airplanes where going to plummet to the ground. Ships would run ashore. The electrical grid would be shut down, and with it the pumps controlling the fresh water supply. People started stock-piling everything from water, kindle, and canned goods to gas-masks, guns, and diesel powered generators; anything you would possibly be need to survive the upcoming Armageddon.
The public panic spread like wildfire. Elevators and airplanes where going to plummet to the ground. Ships would run ashore. The electrical grid would be shut down, and with it the pumps controlling the fresh water supply. People started stock-piling everything from water, kindle, and canned goods to gas-masks, guns, and diesel powered generators; anything you would possibly be need to survive the upcoming Armageddon.
Others believed they could be spared through Y2K-insurances, and paid programming humbugs smaller fortunes to perform laptop-exorcism. But nothing was certain, and so, as the clock crept closer and closer to the fatal stroke of midnight the world held its collective breath. In retrospect, the ignorance displayed may have been amusing, but it proves a how little we really know about our own creations.
"Big data" is the word of the day now. I remember Y2K and there were some real nutjobs predicting doomsday, but it was the unknown that made it so scary. Can't wait for Frankenstein.
SvaraRaderaThe best thing that came from the Y2K as probably Office Space - I think that movie perfectly captures the confusion surrounding the 2000 shift!
Radera