Better late than never… It’s still worth highlighting a fascinating article from last August by “senior maverick” Kevin Kelly who opens with:

The Netscape IPO wasn’t really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, wikipedia, open source, peer to peer – behold the Power of the People.

Kevin predicts that within 10 years we will all be living inside the Machine – the Anticipation Machine, complete with its own immune system to fight off predators before they strike. We will never get the same answer to any given question any more. The Machine is always on. And by 2015 will make desktop operating systems irrelevant. The People will write the program. In fact, we are already doing it now.

Kevin says:

Of the 100 billion times per day humans clock on a webpage is a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea.

Just like brain cells that program themselves simply by being used, likewise our questions program the Machine to answer questions. What will surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. It will become our memory. Our identity. Like having a lobotomy.

For me this conjures up in my head scenes from the Revisions episode of Stargate SG-1, where the people on the planet all have a gadget on their temples that link their brains to a central computer. They rely on the computer for instant recall of just about everything, including their entire history, However, what these inhabitants — who all live under the forcefield dome which protects them from the toxic atmosphere — fail to realize is that the central computer is compensating for a failing power source by shrinking the dome to fit available resources. In other words, the computer is commanding people to leave the protection of the dome and thus sending them to their deaths, then revising everyone’s memories so that the recently departed aren’t even remembered, let alone missed. (I guess I’ve given myself away as a Stargate nerd with this post!)

The moral of the story is: If we give our power to remember and think on our own to the Machine, it could happen to us!

The full article from Wired here.