Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

K. Kelly: the next 5000 days of the web {transcription}

octubre 21st, 2008 · No hay Comentarios

Source: This Japanese blog

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.

So here’s a specification. There’s a, if you make a spreadsheet for it, hundred and seventy quadzillion transistor 55 trillion links, emails running at 2 megahertz itself, so one kilohertz text messaging, 246 extra bite storage. That’s a big disk. That’s a lot of storage of memory. 9 extra bite RAM and, it’s the total traffic on … running at 7 terra bites per second, booster saying…about 20 terra bites so every second …. squishing around in this machine. It’s a big machine. So I did something else.
I figured out 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links. It’s almost the same as numbers of synapses in your brain. A quintillion transistors is almost the same as number of neurons in your brain. So to a first approximation, we have these things 20 petaherz synapse firings. Of course the memory is really huge. But to a first approximation the size of this machine is the size, in complexity, sort of, kind of, to your brain. ‘Cause, in fact that’s how your brain works. The kind of the same way the webs work. However, your brain isn’t doubling every 2 years. So if we say this machine right now we’ve made by one HB, one human brain, if we look at the rate, this is increasing, 30 years from now, there’ll be 6 billions HBs. So by the year 2040 their total processing of this machine will exceed total processing power of humanity in all bits and stuff.

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.

The web is in some sense a kind of like a black hole that’s sucking up everything into it. And so everything will be a part of the web. So every eye to every artifact we make will have imbedded in some little sliver of webness coneection, and it will be part of this machine so that our environment, a kind of ubiquitous computing sense, the environment becomes the web. Everything is connected. Now you know RSS feeds, other things whatever the technology is, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that everything will have embedded in it in some sense to a connected machine. So we have basically the internet of things. So if you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels and a car as a chip with wheels because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is in the embedded intelligence electronics, not the material.A lot of people think about the new economy is, something was going to be disembodied alternative virtual existence, and that they would have old economy of atoms, but in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two where we embed, the information and digital nature of things into the material world. That’s what we’re looking forward to. That is where we’re going. This union, this convergence of atomic in the digital.So one of the consequences of that is, I believe, is that what we have sort of the spectrum of media right now. TV, film, videos-basically becomes one media platform while there is many differences, in some sense, they’re sharing more and more common with each other. So that the laws of media, such as the fact that copies have no value, value is in the uncopyable things, immediacy, the authentication, the personalization.
The media wants to be liquid. That’s what you really want. The reason why things are free is so you can manipulate them enough so that they’re freeze in the beer, freeze in freedom. And network affects rule meaning that more you have more you get. The first fax machine, the person who bought the first fax machine was idiot because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became evangelist recruiting others to get a fax machine because that made their purchase more valuable. Those of the fax, we’re going to see, attention is currency. So those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media.
And the other thing about this embodiment is that there’s a kind we’d like to call ‘R… Reversal’. R… was saying machines are the extension of human senses, I’m saying, humans are not going to be the extending senses of the machine, in a certain sense. So we have trillion eyes, ears, touches through our digital photographs and cameras. We’ve seen the things like flicker where our Photo Synth, this program of Microsoft that allows you to assemble of you of a tourist place from the thousands of tourist snap shots of it. It is a certain sense this machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras.

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.

We’re now entering into the third stage, which is what I am talking about. That is where we link the data. So i don’t know the name of the thing I’m calling One Machine. But we’re making data. We’re going from machine to machine, the page to the page, and now data to data. So the difference is that rather than linking from page to page, we’re actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea, rather than to the other page. So every idea is basically being supported by every item. Every noun is being supported by the entire web, has been resolved at the level of items or ideas or words if you want. So they…physically coming out again into the ideas, it’s not just virtual, it’s actually going out to things. So something will resolve down to the information about a particular person. So every person will have unique ID. Every person, every item will have something, will be very specific that will link to the specific representation of that idea or item. So now in this new one, when I would link to, I would link to my particular flight, my particular seat, and so give me example of this thing. A little Pacifica rather than, right now, Pacifica just serves a name on the web somewhere. The web doesn’t know that that’s an actually a town, that’s a specific town that I live in. that’s what we’re gonna be talking about. It’s gonna link directly to, it will know. The web will be able to read it itself to know that that actually is a place. And whenever they see the word, Pacifica, it will know that it is actually a place%$#$% certain population.

      

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