Superorganism

The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

Being fashion-conscious is not confined to humans, research has shown.

Animals copy one another when making choices about places to live, where to eat and acquiring a mate.

Such behaviour allows the rapid transmission of non-genetic traits, giving rise to a form of "cultural evolution".

Researchers reviewed the evidence for animal fashion in the edition of the journal Science that appears today.

The team, led by Etienne Danchin, from the CNRS research institution in Paris, wrote: "Psychologists, economists and advertising moguls have long known that human decision-making is strongly influenced by the behaviour of others.

"A rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that the same is true in animals ... Public information can lead to cultural evolution, which we suggest may then affect biological evolution."

A scheme for classifying advanced technological civilizations proposed by Nikolai Kardashev1 in 1964. He identified three high-level types and defined a logarithmic scale in terms of the power they could muster for the purpose of interstellar communications.

1. Able to harness all of the power available on a single planet. (Estimated 10^16 watts)
2. Able to harness all of the power available from a single star. (Estimated 10^26 watts)
3. Able to harness all of the power available from a single galaxy. (Estimated 10^36 watts)

There are living systems; there is no "living matter".
- Jacques Lucien Monod