“Amish websites?” I asked.
“For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our shop.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Oh, we use the internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!”
I knew then the takeover was complete. We are all becoming something new.
• • •
As we try to imagine this exuberant web three decades from now, our first impulse is to imagine it as Web 2.0—a better web. But the web in 2050 won’t be a better web, just as the first version of the web was not better TV with more channels. It will have become something new, as different from the web today as the first web was from TV.
In a strict technical sense, the web today can be defined as the sum of all the things that you can google—that is, all files reachable with a hyperlink. Presently major portions of the digital world can’t be googled. A lot of what happens in Facebook, or on a phone app, or inside a game world, or even inside a video can’t be searched right now. In 30 years it will be. The tendrils of hyperlinks will keep expanding to connect all the bits. The events that take place in a console game will be as searchable as the news. You’ll be able to look for things that occur inside a YouTube video. Say you want to find the exact moment on your phone when your sister received her acceptance to college. The web will reach this. It will also extend to physical objects, both manufactured and natural. A tiny, almost free chip embedded into products will connect them to the web and integrate their data. Most objects in your room will be connected, enabling you to google your room. Or google your house. We already have a hint of that. I can operate my thermostat and my music system from my phone. In three more decades, the rest of the world will overlap my devices. Unsurprisingly, the web will expand to the dimensions of the physical planet.
It will also expand in time. Today’s web is remarkably ignorant of the past. It may supply you with a live webcam stream of Tahrir Square in Egypt, but accessing that square a year ago is nearly impossible. Viewing an earlier version of a typical website is not easy, but in 30 years we’ll have time sliders enabling us to see any past version. Just as your phone’s navigation directions through a city are improved by including previous days, weeks, and months of traffic patterns, so the web of 2050 will be informed by the context of the past. And the web will slide into the future as well.
From the moment you wake up, the web is trying to anticipate your intentions. Since your routines are noted, the web is attempting to get ahead of your actions, to deliver an answer almost before you ask a question. It is built to provide the files you need before the meeting, to suggest the perfect place to eat lunch with your friend, based on the weather, your location, what you ate this week, what you had the last time you met with your friend, and as many other factors as you might consider. You’ll converse with the web. Rather than flick through stacks of friends’ snapshots on your phone, you ask it about a friend. The web anticipates which photos you’d like to see and, depending on your reaction to those, may show you more or something from a different friend—or, if your next meeting is starting, the two emails you need to see. The web will more and more resemble a presence that you relate to rather than a place—the famous cyberspace of the 1980s—that you journey to. It will be a low-level constant presence like electricity: always around us, always on, and subterranean. By 2050 we’ll come to think of the web as an ever-present type of conversation.
This enhanced conversation will unleash many new possibilities. Yet the digital world already feels bloated with too many choices and possibilities. There seem to be no slots for anything genuinely new in the next few years.
Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an ambitious entrepreneur back in 1985 at the dawn of the internet? At that time almost any dot-com name you desired was available. All you had to do was simply ask for the one you wanted. One-word domains, common names—they were all available. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer noticed that mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed, so with my encouragement he registered it. He then tried unsuccessfully to give it to McDonald’s, but the company’s cluelessness about the internet was so hilarious (“dot what?”) that this tale became a famous story we published in Wired.
The internet was a wide-open frontier then. It was easy to be the first in any category you chose. Consumers had few expectations and the barriers were extremely low. Start a search engine! Be the first to open an online store! Serve up amateur videos! Of course, that was then. Looking back now, it seems as if waves of settlers have since bulldozed and developed every possible venue, leaving only the most difficult and gnarly specks for today’s newcomers. Thirty years later the internet feels saturated with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it among our miraculous abundance?
But, but . . . here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. It is only becoming. If we could climb into a time machine, journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2050 were not invented until after 2016. People in the future will look at their holodecks and wearable virtual reality contact lenses and downloadable avatars and AI interfaces and say, “Oh, you didn’t really have the internet”—or whatever they’ll call it—“back then.”
And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit—the equivalent of the dot-com names of 1984.
Because here is the other thing the graybeards in 2050 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an innovator in 2016? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh. “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2016 is the best time to start up. There has never been a better day in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. Right now, this minute. This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh, to have been alive and well back then!”
The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. But what’s coming will be different, beyond, and other. The things we will make will be constantly, relentlessly becoming something else. And the coolest stuff of all has not been invented yet.
Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin.
You are not late.
2 COGNIFYING
It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence. To begin with, there’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter. Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level. The advantages gained from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization.