There’re some words missing (where it’s marked with an ellipsis like “…”) because it’s not an official transcription, but simply someone copying down what they hear.
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The internet, the web, as we know, the kind of web thing we’re all talking about is only less than 5 thousand days old. Okay, so all the things we’ve seeing come about, starting, say with a satellite images of the whole earth which we couldn’t even imaging happening before. All these things rolling into our lives, this is abundance of things that are right before us sitting in front of our laptop or desktop, this kind of cornucopias stuff just coming…never ending. It’s amazing. And we’re not amazed. It’s really amazing that all the stuff is here. Okay, it’s in 5 thousand days. All the stuff that’s come. And I know that ten years ago, if I had told you that this was all coming, you would have said that’s impossible.There’s simply, there’s no economical model that would be possible. And if I told you all are coming for free, you would say, simply ‘you’re dreaming. You’re a California utopian. You’re wide-eyed optimist. And yet it’s here. The other thing we’ve known about it was that 10 years ago as I looked at what even Wired was talking about, we thought it’s gonna be TV be better. That was the model. That was what everybody was suggesting, was going to be coming. And it turns out that’s not what it was. First of all, it was impossible, and it’s not what it was. So one of the things, I think we’re learning, if you think about Wikpedia that is something simply impossible. It’s impossible in theory but possible in practice. And if you take all the things impossible, I think one of things we’re learning from this era, from this last decade, is that we have to get good at believing the impossible. Because we’re gonna prepare for it. So I’m curious what’s gonna happen in the next 5000 days. If that’s happened in the last 5000 days, what’s gonna happen in the next 5000 days. So I have a kind of simple story. And it suggests that what we wanna think about is that the things we’re making, the things that are happening in 5000 days, that’s all these computers, all these handhelds, and all these cell phones, all these laptops, all the servers, basically what we’re getting out of all these connections is that we’re getting one machine. If there is only one machine, our little handhelds or devices are actually just a little windows into those machines. But that we’re basically constructing a single global machine. So I began to think about that it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine we’ve ever made.It has not crushed, it has been running uninterrupted. And there almost no machine we’ve ever made that runs a number of hours, a number of days, 5000 days without interruption. That’s just unbelievable. Of course the internet is longer than 5000days. But the web’s only 5000 days. So I was trying to basically make measurements, what are the dimensions of this machine, and I started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are, all around the globe on all the computers and there’s a hundred billion clicks per day, and there’s 55 trillion links, between all the web pages of the world. So I began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions and I made a quick list in—it was Chris Jorden, the photographer talking about numbers being so large that are meaningless. Well, here’s the list of them. Kind of heard to tell, but there’s one billion PC chips on the internet, if you count all the chips and all the computers on the internet. There’s 2 million emails per second. So that’s a very big number. These is a huge machine. It uses 5 % of global electricity on the planet.
And this is, I think, where Ray Curswels and others get this little chart saying we’re gonna cross. So what about that? Well, here’s a couple of things. I think there are three, I have three kind of general things I’d like to say, three consequences of this. First, that the way this machine is doing is embodying, we’re giving it a body. That’s what we’re gonna do in the next 5000 days. We’re gonna give this machine a body. And the second thing, we’re gonna re-structure its architecture. And thirdly, we’re gonna become completely co-dependent upon it. So let me go through the three things. First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think we are all separate devices. But in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into the one machine.
The second thing is that some people call this a cloud, and you’re kind of touching the cloud with this. And so someway, what all you need is the cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn’t have any storage. It’s wireless. It’s always connected. There’s many things about, because they’re very simple. Basically what you’re doing is you’re just touching the machine, you’re touching the cloud and you’re going to compute that way. So the machine is computing. And this is in some way back to kind of the old idea centralizing computing. But everything, all the cameras and the microphones and the sensors and the cards, everything is connected to this machine. And everything will go through the web.
We’ve seen that already with, say, phones. Right now phones don’t go through the web. They are beginning to and they will. And if you imagine what, say, this has an example that Google Ap has, in terms of the experiments of Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet blah blah blah. All these things are gonna become web based. They’re going through the machine. And I’m suggesting that every bit will be owned by the web. Right now it’s not if you do spreadsheets and things at work and word document. They aren’t on the web but they are going to be, they are going to be a part of this machine. They’re gonna speak the web language, they’re gonna talk to the machine.
Now the second thing, they want to talk about is the idea of restructuring. What the web is doing is restructuring. And I have to warn you when we talk about is that I’m going to give my explanation of term of hearing which is semantic web. So first of all, the first stage we’ve seen in computer sys-in internet was that, there was gonna link computers, that’s what we call the net. That was the internet of the nets, and be so that when you have all computers of the world. If you remember it, it was kind of green screen with carsors, and there’s …now…if you want to connect it, you connect it from one computer to another computer. And what you had to do is, if you wanna participate in, you have to share packets of information. So you’re forwarding on, you didn’t have control. It wasn’t like a telephone system where you have control the line. It’s shared packets.
The second stage, where we’re in now is the idea of linking pages. So all..if i want to go on to an airline web page, I would go from my web page to FPT site, to another airline computer. Now we have pages, the unit has been resolved into pages, one page links to another page. If I wanna go into Book a Flight, i go into the airline’s flight page, the website of the airline, and I am linking to that page. And what we are sharing is links, so you have to be kind of open with the links. You couldn’t deny, if someone wants to link to you, you couldn’t stop them. You have to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody. So that’s what we’re doing.
