schneiderism

Last year, at the 2007 EG Conference, author and visionary Kevin Kelly gave an incredibly compelling and thoughtful talk where he points out that the web as we know it, depicted as a graphical representation above, is only about 5,000 days old (the internet is actually much older than that), and that in this time we have seen unprecedented change. He proceeds to then explore what the next 5,000 days might bring, with much thought put to the notion of “the cloud”, networks, and ubiquitous computing… themes that I am increasingly exploring myself, and have written about on occasion. The talk is worth taking 20 minutes to watch, and below are my 10 Things from Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web:

1.  Ten years ago we thought the web was going to be “TV, only better.” Obviously, that was just a touch limiting.

2.  The first lesson we have learned from the last 5,000 days is that we have to get better at believing in the impossible. Many things that are/were inconceivable to us previously are happening regularly.

3. Think about all of the handhelds, laptops, mobiles, and servers in the world and how they are networked. They are giving us one thing, what Kelly refers to as “The One Machine,” or “The One.” All of these devices are windows into this single, global, exponential machine.

4.  This machine, The One, is the most reliable machine ever made with zero down time running uninterrupted.

5.  On the web there are over 100 billion clicks per day on the computers of the world with over 55 trillion links between the pages on the web made per day.

6.  The internet uses about 5% of global electricity.

7.  The internet uses about 246 exabytes of storage (an exabyte being equivalent to 1 quintillion bytes).

8.  Total traffic on the internet is around 7 terabytes per second. The Library of Congress is 20 terabytes. Every second about half the Library of Congress is moving around the web.

9.  At this point, the internet is roughly comparable to the human brain in terms of connections, processing power, and capacity. The rate of increase will put the One Machine equivalent with about 6 billion human brains 30 years from now. By 2040 the web will exceed humanity in processing power in raw bits.

10.  Humans are becoming the extended senses of this machine. We are the web. We are the machine. The next 5,000 days are about intelligence, anticipation, personalization, and ubiquitousness… a new kind of stage in the development of the web. The web is becoming an organism, and a unity is beginning to emerge:

• There is only One Machine (the network is the computer)
• The web is its operating system
• All screens look into The One
• No bits will live outside the web (the internet of things)
• To share is to gain (participation requires transparency)
• Let The One read it
• The One is us