Everything electronic is trying to add dimensionality to itself. So the computer that was text-based tends to want to speak, the image that was two-dimensional wants to be three-dimensional, the three-dimensional image wants to move.
The very enterprise of communication among human beings is transforming in some way. We’ve been at this for a while. The first telegraph lines were strung around 1819. The telephone became a common object of the upper class around 1900. But the rate of acceleration, and the dimensionality, and definition, and fidelity of these processes all has increased exponentially. So really, the task of communication—instead of saying you acquire 90% of your language skills by age five, we’re just going to have to say you acquire 90% of your language skills by age thirty. And by then you can model, animate, code, all this sort of thing. I mean, human–machine interfacing as a prerequisite to the creation of art has been going on for a long time. It’s just going to affect more and more people. Like, you know how the creation of a movie is such a massive thing in terms of manpower, capital, and technology—before you ever get to the story, the actors, and the art of it. Essentially, everybody is going to become their own director.
As biological beings, we are essentially three-dimensional computers, you know? The DNA codes into RNA, which is read through a ribosome—that’s like a head reader: it executes a program which makes proteins. And these proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes. And then, lo and behold, all these three-dimensional shapes fit together in such a way that you emerge out of the atomic murk of this process.
What money is, is a symbolic commodification of value. Information is somehow the cousin of money.
We’re actually building some kind of a superorganism. And we do not know where we fit into things if this Promethean force that we’re playing with should actually come to life. Because it’s a globally distributed intelligence. I mean, we can have paranoid fantasies about it, but I think, after a few minutes of thinking about it, you realize you really don’t know what to think about it. The fantasy that it would herd us all into dumpsters seems unlikely. It’s actually like an impossible intellectual problem, because the question you’re asking yourself is: what would a superintelligence be like? And the reason that’s hard to answer is because you ain’t one. And so you’re like looking up into the light and saying, “Is it god or demon?” “Is it salvation or extinction?” And the answer is: if you knew that, you would be it. And yet, what it took us to achieve in 100,000 years of evolution, this thing could probably achieve in a long morning on the net. And so it would be like a cascade, a chain reaction: from the child’s first cry to the complete coordination of world electrical grids and air traffic control systems and everything else could be a matter of hours.
We’re essentially incubating an alien intelligence on the Internet, and things we want from the net bring this thing ever closer.
For the past ten years, while we’ve been cheerfully waging the ’90s in our various ways, an enormous change has taken place in the machine environment—which we’re not even aware of or have the dimmest understanding of—which is: all the high-IQ machines in the world have become telepathic. They now all talk to each other. They’re now all interconnected.
What used to be a paperweight sitting on your desk is now a node in a global machine intelligence that never sleeps, that is constantly taking in and processing data, self-regulating itself, controlling power grids, inventory control, programs deciding how much petroleum should be extracted in Abu Dhabi, at what speed the tankers should move in order to keep the price of the French Franc within a certain range, in order to keep the fabrication of steel and aluminum within certain parameters, in order to keep the Yen steady, in order—and this vast system of homeostatic controls that regulates industry, finance, research funding, even how many students are entering universities in certain engineering specialties. And this is all done by computer projection. And we love it.
Weird things do happen when systems complexify beyond a certain level, and emergent behaviors seem extremely organized and intelligent and goal-seeking.
Imagine a planet-wide community of seamless intelligence where you could log on to the mind of a coral reef as easily as you could log on to the Internet.