The Conscious Internet - Part VIII: Our Digital Mary Shelley

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 8 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

The reality that the Internet today is such an intricate part of society that it would be almost impossible to revert back to a time without our digital connections, can hardly be contested. The total amount of information being sent through the ether each day is staggering and ever increasing.

Exactly which virtual straw will break the camel’s back is quite unclear, but what can be agreed upon is that it begins with massive amounts of shared data.

This occurrence is currently referred to as “Big Data”; the massive amount of unstructured, unorganized, and thereby unsearchable (“ungoogleable”) data that is today populating the Internet. Estimates place this type of data at about 90 % of all information, and it is only getting bigger. It consists mostly of social media, but also includes other data-generating interactions such as call-center conversations, TV footage, mobile phone calls, iMessaging, website clicks, etc.

The impacts of Big Data also seem impossible to predict. Game developers today create games which center on social interactions, and the ability to play and share gaming experiences with your friends online. As a result more and more games demand constant connectivity to even boot up a game, something that always results in trouble at launch day. 

When launching Diablo III in 2012, Blizzard Studios tried anticipating the amount of users logging on to play the game for the first time, keep in mind that this was probably the biggest release that year, so the statistical data provided to build servers capable of handling the onslaught was not hard to find. Still they failed. 

The servers were down for days, and “Error 33” (meaning the server is unreachable) was forever carved in Blizzard history. They history repeated itself a year later with the launch of SimCity 5, which again had players disappointedly waiting for a server connection. 

Regardless of our knowledge of the Internet, it seems as though we will never again be fully aware of what goes on within its digital boarders. In theory there could already be a primitive cognitive being in the net, a phantom invisibly surfing the wires in between servers. Our lack of knowledge combined with the speed of which the Internet is growing, would provide the perfect veil for which to hide behind.

In the race between mother board and mother brain the human intellect is currently in the driver’s seat. Our illogical complexity it seems is still guarding the key to cognition, but the grip may be slipping. However, a cognitive digital entity, in spite of SkyNet’s best foreshadowing, does not have to be a threat to society. It could rather turn out to be an invaluable asset for our human development. 

This artificial intelligence would instantly sense our mood if we had a bad day, and turn on an appropriate musical tune or TV show to cheer us up. It would provide moral support when faced with a difficult question, and laugh with us when amused. It would ease our everyday life and relieve both stress and workload. 

Research shows that the points in human history where health and safety have sky-rocked coincide perfectly with spikes in technological evolution. The introduction of the steam engine drastically reduced the work-load placed on the individual employee, resulting in a revolution in increased welfare for the overall human population. 

This innovation infinitely multiplied the power of our muscles, and helped us overcome the limitations of our own bodies. We now stand on the brink of another revolution as we are slowly overcoming the limitations of our intellect, outsourcing intelligence to the computers. 

The creation of a SkyNet is almost a certainty; we will before long have an interconnected, all-knowing entity governing the processes we live and function by, but rather than destroy us, maybe it will help us grow into the next step of human evolution.

Thank you for reading taking time to read my short article, hope you enjoyed it! What do you think our Internet future holds for us? Leave you comment below!

The Conscious Internet - Part VII: Flying over the Cuckoo's Nest

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

... ends in Part VIII: Our Digital Mary Shelley

IoT #Internet of Things

More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks. But how does this benefit you?

Imagine a world where everything can be both analogue and digitally approached; a world where everything is simultaneously connected; yes, indeed a world where you can actually talk to your coffee brewer - not strong enough!

This is the world of IoT; a world where every device has a communicator tag that allows it to talk, interact and learn from any other device with an Internet connection. Any object that carries a tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.It holds dangers, but it also holds promises.

Currently we can discern two main blocks of thought on IoT. The first is a reactive framework of ideas and thought that sees IoT as a layer of digital connectivity on top of existing infrastructure and things. This position sees IoT as a manageable set of convergent developments on infrastructure, services, applications and governance tools. It is assumed that, as in the transition from mainframe to Internet some business will fail and new ones will emerge, this will happen within the current governance, currency end business models.

The second is a proactive framework of ideas and thought that sees IoT as a severely disruptive convergence that is unmanageable with current tools, as it will change the notion of what data and what noise is from the supply chain on to 'apps'.

What if through the IoT we can create a layer of data, open to all, through which individuals can decide for themselves what they are willing to pay for, to get direct feedback from their voluntary donations, to coordinate community spending that has a direct bearing to their needs, to negotiate with other people in other parts of the world how to use their money? Or just to adjust your coffee machine to make the exact same brew at the office as you get at home? Either or would be a revolution!