12 BEGINNING
Thousands of years from now, when historians review the past, our ancient time here at the beginning of the third millennium will be seen as an amazing moment. This is the time when inhabitants of this planet first linked themselves together into one very large thing. Later the very large thing would become even larger, but you and I are alive at that moment when it first awoke. Future people will envy us, wishing they could have witnessed the birth we saw. It was in these years that humans began animating inert objects with tiny bits of intelligence, weaving them into a cloud of machine intelligences and then linking billions of their own minds into this single supermind. This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time. Braiding nerves out of glass, copper, and airy radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all people, all artifacts, all sensors, all facts and notions into a grand network of hitherto unimagined complexity. From this embryonic net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive apparatus with power that exceeded any previous invention. This megainvention, this organism, this machine—if we want to call it that—subsumes all the other machines made, so that in effect there is only one thing that permeates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity. This very large thing provides a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall, planetary scope) and a new mind for an old species. It is the Beginning.
The Beginning is a century-long process, and its muddling forward is mundane. Its big databases and extensive communications are boring. Aspects of this dawning real-time global mind are either dismissed as nonsense or feared. There is indeed a lot to be legitimately worried about because there is not a single aspect of human culture—or nature—that is left untouched by this syncopated pulse. Yet because we are the parts of something that has begun operating at a level above us, the outline of this emerging very large thing is obscured. All we know is that from its very beginning, it is upsetting the old order. Fierce pushback is to be expected.
What to call this very large masterpiece? Is it more alive than machine? At its core 7 billion humans, soon to be 9 billion, are quickly cloaking themselves with an always-on layer of connectivity that comes close to directly linking their brains to each other. A hundred years ago H. G. Wells imagined this large thing as the world brain. Teilhard de Chardin named it the noosphere, the sphere of thought. Some call it a global mind, others liken it to a global superorganism since it includes billions of manufactured silicon neurons. For simple convenience and to keep it short, I’m calling this planetary layer the holos. By holos I include the collective intelligence of all humans combined with the collective behavior of all machines, plus the intelligence of nature, plus whatever behavior emerges from this whole. This whole equals holos.
The scale of what we are becoming is simply hard to absorb. It is the largest thing we have made. Let’s take just the hardware, for example. Today there are 4 billion mobile phones and 2 billion computers linked together into a seamless cortex around the globe. Add to them all the billions of peripheral chips and affiliated devices from cameras to cars to satellites. Already in 2015 a grand total of 15 billion devices have been wired up into one large circuit. Each of these devices contains 1 billion to 4 billion transistors themselves, so in total the holos operates with a sextillion transistors (10 with 21 zeros). These transistors can be thought of as the neurons in a vast brain. The human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons, or a trillion times fewer than the holos. In terms of magnitude, the holos already significantly exceeds our brains in complexity. And our brains are not doubling in size every few years. The holos mind is.
Today, the hardware of the holos acts like a very large virtual computer made up of as many computer chips as there are transistors in a computer. This virtual computer’s top-level functions operate at approximately the speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, and 1 million messages per second, which essentially means the holos currently runs at 1 megahertz. Its total external storage is about 600 exabytes today. In any one second, 10 terabits course through its backbone nerves. It has a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines and rerouting around damage as a type of self-healing.
And who will write the code that makes this global system useful and productive? We will. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or post an item for our friends, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the holos mind, thereby programming it by using it. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page as a way of teaching the holos what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach this contraption an idea.
This is the new platform that our lives will run on. International in scope. Always on. At current rates of technological adoption I estimate that by the year 2025 every person alive—that is, 100 percent of the planet’s inhabitants—will have access to this platform via some almost-free device. Everyone will be on it. Or in it. Or, simply, everyone will be it.
This big global system will not be utopia. Even three decades from now, regional fences will remain in this cloud. Parts will be firewalled, censored, privatized. Corporate monopolies will control aspects of the infrastructure, though these internet monopolies are fragile and ephemeral, subject to sudden displacement by competitors. Although minimal access will be universal, higher bandwidth will be uneven and clumped around urban areas. The rich will get the premium access. In short, the distribution of resources will resemble the rest of life. But this is critical and transformative, and even the least of us will be part of it.
Right now, in this Beginning, this imperfect mesh spans 51 billion hectares, touches 15 billion machines, engages 4 billion human minds in real time, consumes 5 percent of the planet’s electricity, runs at inhuman speeds, tracks half our daytime hours, and is the conduit for the majority flow of our money. The level of organization is a step above the largest things we have made till now: cities. This jump in levels reminds some physicists of a phase transition, the discontinuous break between a molecule’s state—say, between ice and water, or water and steam. The difference in temperature or pressure separating two phases is almost trivial, but the fundamental reorganization across the threshold makes the material behave in a whole new manner. Water is definitely a different state than ice.
The large-scale, ubiquitous interconnection of this new platform at first seems like just the natural extension of our traditional society. It seems to just add digital relationships to our existing face-to-face relationships. We add a few more friends. We expand our network of acquaintances. Broaden our sources of news. Digitize our movements. But, in fact, as all these qualities keep steadily increasing, just as temperature and pressure slowly creep higher, we pass an inflection point, a complexity threshold, where the change is discontinuous—a phase transition—and suddenly we are in a new state: a different world with new normals.