My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

Introduction

Sorry, but the big news at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year was not about the international sales of your new book. It was about the activities of a new (second year) exhibitor: Google.

What is Google doing at the Frankfurt Book Fair? And why has a consortium of publishers filed a lawsuit against them? On the other hand, why do the "digerati" love Google Print and Google Print Library? How does Google's definition of "fair use" as it pertains to the digital domain, square with the notion that as a writer, own my own words? Clearly, we need to redefine "fair use" in the digital age as a "different use" with its own new set of benchmarks.

Whether we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share" or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are. And like nearly all science-driven, technological developments, governments can only play catch-up as no one is going to get to vote for Google's changes, and the current laws, written in a pre-digital age, don't address the new situation.

Some sincerely believe we are entering a golden age of wonder and Google is leading the way. And I am pleased to add from personal experience that the leading players, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are fine individuals: very serious, highly intelligent, principled. They don't come any better. Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem.

George Dyson visited Google last week at the invitation of some Google engineers. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, Dyson recalled H.G. Wells' prophecy, written in 1938:

"The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual," wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. "This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba." Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. "In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas... in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain... in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs... We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself."

—JB

Introduction
By John Brockman

Part of Danny Hillis's charm is his childlike curiosity and demeanor. The first time we talked was on the telephone one Sunday morning in 1988 when he was at his home in Cambridge. We got into a serious discussion about the relationship of physics to computation. "This is interesting," he said. "I'd like to come to New York and continue the conversation face-to-face." Three hours later, my doorbell rang, and there stood a young man, looking like a clean-cut hippie. He had long hair, wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans, and carried nothing. He lived up to his reputation as the "boy wonder". We talked for hours.

Danny's energies at that time were concentrated on getting processors to work together so that computation takes place with communicating processors, as happens with the Internet. The Net's potential to become an organism of intelligent agents interacting with each other, with an intelligence of its own that goes beyond the intelligence of the individual agents fired Danny up. "In a sense," he said, "the Net can become smarter than any of the individual people on the Net or sites on the Net. Parallel processing is the way that kind of emergent phenomenon can happen. The Net right now is only a glimmer of that."

Danny described the Internet of that time simply as a huge document that is stored in a lot of different places and that can be modified by many people at once, but essentially a document in the old sense of the word. In principle, the Internet could be done on paper, but the logistics are much better handled with the computer. "I am interested in the step beyond that," he says, "where what is going on is not just a passive document, but an active computation, where people are using the Net to think of new things that they couldn't think of as individuals, where the Net thinks of new things that the individuals on the Net couldn't think of."

"In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds. You can imagine something happening on the Internet along evolutionary lines, as in the simulations I run on my parallel computers. It already happens in trivial ways, with viruses, but that's just the beginning. I can imagine nontrivial forms of organization evolving on the Internet. Ideas could evolve on the Internet that are much too complicated to hold in any human mind."

The passages quoted above are from my book Digerati, published in 1995, a time when the ideas set forth by Danny were technologically implausible.

In 2000, still on the same track, Danny wrote the prescient paper Aristotle, in which he proposes "The Knowledge Web", again at a time when the technological possibilities did not equal the vision.

But now in 2004, Danny is a grown-up wonder, and we are in the age of Google, of boy wonders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and the rapidly expanding potential of the Internet as a knowledge web.

In this regard, thanks to funding from the Markle Foundation, Danny been able to assemble a group of people to begin to discuss of the implementation of a medical application based on his ideas. Other possibilities for applications are open-ended. What has changed in the past nine years is that implementation of his ideas are now technologically feasible.

Rather than limit exploration of this set of ideas to a small group of thinkers, Danny has issued an invitation to the participants of Edge—itself an example of a knowledge web, and a very sophisticated one at that—to enter into a discussion on Aristotle.

—JB

W. DANIEL (Danny) HILLIS is currently Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc., is best known for his innovative work in the design and implementation of the massively parallel supercomputer. Applied Minds is a research and development company creating a range of new products and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology and mechanical design. He is the author of The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.

Danny Hillis's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Responses by Douglas Rushkoff, Marc D. Hauser, Stewart Brand, Jim O'Donnell, Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Seymour Papert, Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Kai Krause, Pamela McCorduck

I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. 

Introduction

In September, 2000, Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, musician, and the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, weighed forth on Edge against "cybernetic totalism"."For the last twenty years," he wrote, in his "Half a Manifesto" (Edge #74), "I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before." In his manifesto, he took on those "who seem to not have been educated in the tradition of scientific skepticism. I understand why they are intoxicated. There is a compelling simple logic behind their thinking and elegance in thought is infectious."

"There is a real chance," he continued, "that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people." "Half a Manifesto" caused a stir, was one of Edge's most popular features, and has been widely reprinted.

Lately, Lanier has been looking at trends in software, and he doesn't like what he sees, namely "a macabre parody of Moore's Law". In this feature, which began as a discussion at a downtown New York restaurant last year, he continues his challenge to the ideas of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and raises the ante by taking issue with the seminal work in information theory and computer science of Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener.

—JB

JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL. He is currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, and visiting scientist, SGI.

Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page

Edge can be an interesting venue for mounting a serious conversation about the blackout of August 14th. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the "Edgies" can bring to the subjects. I am asking for "hard-edge" comments, derived from empirical results or experience specific to the expertise of the participant.....

We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing, logic, actuation, and displays.

[11 minutes]

Introduction

Neil Gershenfeld teaches a class at MIT called "How To Make (almost) Anything," where the students have access to high-level tools on which the university spends millions of dollars. He expected his course to be a lab for the top engineering students to master the machines. Instead, he is finding that non technical students are showing up and and bringing varied backgrounds to bear on exploiting the possibilities and capabilities of the newest technology available.

"One student, a sculptor with no engineering background," he reports, "made a portable personal space for screaming that saves up your screams and plays them back later. Another made a Web browser that lets parrots navigate the Net."

"From this combination of passion and inventiveness", he goes on, "I began to get a sense that what these students are really doing is reinventing literacy. Literacy in the modern sense emerged in the Renaissance as mastery of the liberal arts. This is liberal in the sense of liberation, not politically liberal."

—JB

NEIL GERSHENFELD directs MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His unique research group investigates the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation, from molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his laboratory has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House/Smithsonian Millennium celebration and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami reindeer herds.

He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, CNN, and the PBS.

Neil Gershenfeld's Edge Bio Page 

Until the '60s, governments were not really involved in car design. Then people like Ralph Nader started noticing that a lot of people were being killed in cars and made it clear why this was happening. We have spent the last 35 years or so designing safety into cars, and it's had a pretty dramatic effect. . . We're in that same era now with security on computer systems. We know we have a problem and now we need to focus on design.

Introduction

Richard Smith is one of the nation's most outspoken privacy mavens, with a difference. Smith is a veteran software hacker who who has a deep understanding of both computers and the Internet. He uses his expertise in Sherlock Holmes fashion to ferret out privacy and security flaws and abuses. Smith is a personal computer industry veteran. He recalls meeting Bill Gates in the 1970s when the two men attended a meeting in Kansas City to establish a standard for PC data storage on tape recorders.

— John Markoff, Technology Correspondent, The New York Times

RICHARD M. SMITH has been described by The New York Times as "perhaps the nation's most vocal authority on data privacy." Smith has been in the computer business since the early 70s, and has been involved in microprocessors from day one. He began his career as a programmer, co-founded a software company, and became the head of the nonprofit Privacy Foundation, where he served until November, 2001. Since September 11, he has changed his focus from privacy to security. He is now focuses on technology related to security issues and he operates a web site that reports "computer bites man" stories, named ComputerBytesMan.com. He lives and works in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Richard Smith 's Edge Bio Page

In 1999 and 2000, Howard Rheingold started noticing people using mobile media in novel ways. In Tokyo, he accompanied flocks of teenagers as they converged on public places, coordinated by text messages. In Helsinki, he joined like-minded Finns who share the same downtown physical clubhouse, virtual community, and mobile-messaging media. He learned that the demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle," and that a million Filipino citizens toppled President Estrada in 2000 through public demonstrations organized by salvos of text messages. Drivers in the UK used mobile communications to spontaneously self organize demonstrations against rising petrol prices. He began to see how these events were connected. He calls these new uses of mobile media "smart mobs." For nearly two years, Rheingold visited hotspots around the world where smart mob technologies and societies were erupting. He had some idea of how to look for early signs of momentous changes, having chronicled and forecast the PC revolution in 1985 and the Internet explosion in 1993. He is now sees a third wave of change underway in the first decade of the 21st century, as the combination of mobile communication and the Internet makes it possible for people to cooperate in ways never before possible.