Tangled in the Threads

Before Moore's law runs out of gas, Kurzweil thinks, we'll have the storage to represent all the states of the brain, and the cycles to emulate all of its state transitions. If we can't figure out what all those states and transitions are, then we'll brute-force the problem with "brain scanners." One way or another, the brain's slow but richly parallel processing power will be matched, then exceeded, by alternative mechanisms.

If the network is the computer, what is the Web?

We humans have another trick up our sleeves, of course. It's not only our individual brains that exploit parallelism. It's our culture, too. Although the Internet is in principle a massively parallel network computer, projects like Seti@Home and distributed.net haven't yet begun to transform computing in anything like the way the Web has begun to transform human culture. The dynamics of this transformation are explored in another recent book, Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. Blackmore is a disciple of Richard Dawkins, who in his book The Selfish Gene argued that the true engine of evolution isn't the reproductive behavior of species, but the replicative behavior of genes. These replicators drove biological evolution for millions of years but -- Dawkins noted in passing -- DNA is not the only possible substrate for replication. With the advent of human culture there appeared a new medium for replication -- not of genes, but of ideas, or images, or tunes, or techniques. Dawkins suggested that competition among these "memes" kicked evolution into a higher gear. Blackmore elaborates on this idea: memetic replication drives cultural evolution far more efficiently than genetic replication drives biological evolution.

From this perspective it's the Internet's ability to link minds, not merely computers, that emerges as its most important innovation. Computers may be marching relentlessly up the curve defined by Moore's law but we, as a species, aren't standing still either. We're augmenting the massive parallelism within our own brains with a new kind of massive parallelism that can link many minds into collaborative relationships.

Of course it's true that science, literature, art, music, and all other cultural activities have always been processes of meme replication. The printing press was a major catalyst enabling these processes to run faster. The Web is an even more powerful enzyme, whose effects we have not yet begun to fully appreciate.

Big ideas, modest goals

I'll come right out and say it: I think that the Web, or more precisely the human collaboration that emerges through the medium of the Web, is a new phase in the evolution of our species. That's the big idea that prompted me to write a book about Internet groupware. (If you're going to spend a year writing a book, you might as well pick a big idea to write about!)

Now, with the exception of millenial columns like this one, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about brain transplants and meme replication. But I do marvel, every day, at the ways in which the Web enables groups of people to form, exchange ideas, and work together to solve problems. I'm amazed that we can not only read but also write hypertextual documents, and that we can find these documents when we search for them. And I'm privileged to have been able to explore this new culture of online community with those of you who have, for many years, congregated in BYTE's comfortable and ever-enlightening corner of cyberspace.

So where do we go from here? Well, for starters, I can hardly wait for the broadband revolution to make telepresence as routine as email. As I write this words, I'm descending into Pittsburgh on the next-to-last leg of a grueling 28-hour business trip wrapped around one meeting: three delays, two cancelled flights, one huge headache, and a crater in my work schedule. Will I be able to upload my mind to new hardware in 2020 and write another millenial column in 3000? At the moment, I couldn't care less. My goals are a lot more modest than that. I'd settle for being able to project myself across the country in 2001 without having to suffer the slings and arrows of US Airways!