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October 19, 2006
"Technology's Embrace" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine is speaking about technology and its consequences. He describes that the processing power, the interconnections (synapses/links), the actions/clicks, and the memory of the collective (global) web, resembles the profile of the human brain.
I am reminded of the parallels and the way they’re described in Gaia Theory and the concept of the Global Brain. (Some of my favorite ideas on this subject are wonderfully expressed by the futurist Peter Russell.)
Kelly is also talking about technology by asking us the question, “What is it that technology itself wants?” He describes that it wants to copy, to replicate, and to increase its power density and efficiency. That it wants to be copied without restraint, and that it does not want to be prohibited.
I can hear echoes of “meme theory” which was presented last year at POPTech by Dr. Susan Blackmore in her book, “The Meme Machine.” It was a talk that I don’t think many folks fully realized in its implications. For more on memes, look into the book, "The Selfish Gene", where Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of the meme as a unit of culture, spread by imitation.
In the context posed by Kelly, technology has a mind of its own. I imagine the ego-centric human-centric view of consciousness would take this to be a rather scary concept. Who didn’t shiver when the HAL 2000 came to life in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or when you recall the swarms of sentient machines trying to wipe out Zion, the last human city. But Kelly doesn’t pain a good/evil agenda of technology; that there are no “bad” technologies – they are simply what they are. And that technology is marching on, to the point that by 2020 to 2040, the processing power of the collective earth/Web will exceed the computing power of all the humans on planet.
I wonder what it will think?
P.S. Some interesting factoids from Kelly. At present, there are:
1 billion PC chips on the internet
1 million emails per second
1 million IM messages per second
8 terabytes per second of traffic
65 billion phone calls per year
20 exabytes of magnetic storage
1 million voice queries per hour
2 billion location nodes activated
600 billion RFID tags in use
Posted by Mike at October 19, 2006 4:58 PM
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