Book Stacks in a Very Large Space #1, 2001

Those feelings enlarged his world, but they shook him. He stood transfixed on the kitchen floor, newly arrived in something that he would eventually call love, perhaps, or anguish. Each irrevocable change was jarring, though, as it might be if at once our eyes commanded the ultraviolet spectrum, or if we heard with the clarity of owls.

We envy children the intensity of feeling things like pure joy, or even raw sorrow. They are untempered by history or boredom: Everything is new. If we could recall that dismaying onrush of new feelings, we would better grasp what technology is doing now. Soon enough, thanks to an ever-denser Internet and increasingly effective search technologies, we should possess enormously augmented brains, relentlessly searching new landscapes for knowledge and connection.

The neurons may be electronic, but that may not matter much. Our two primal urges—to know the world and have the world know us—will flower as never before, encoding us in a continual, global bazaar of talk, products, and sensation. We will have virtual selves on the Internet at all hours. They may earn us real money, or involve us with real friends and political movements, or help us find parts of ourselves we now see only dimly, if at all.

We want to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible. —Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

For certain, we will access and filter an unimaginable amount of information. According to Hal Varian of the School of Information Management and Systems, in 2002 we filmed, wrote down, or otherwise encoded some five exabytes of information. That is roughly the same amount of data contained in all preceding human conversations—ever. In 2005, Varian figures, we made twice as much. And he sees that three-year doubling cycle continuing for the foreseeable future.

Ninety-five percent of this material is in digital form and is easily uploaded to private or public networks, in particular the all-encompassing Internet, where it is filtered, snipped, remixed, and otherwise given new life. Above all, it is searched for meaning and links to other information, then served to our hungry minds.

If our minds were not so hardened in their habits, we might tremble like my toddler at the ways computing and communications, guided by search, now urge us toward an enormous collective awareness. The booming, buzzing mass of networked computers want data, from hard facts to family photos. The more data there is on the Internet, the better chance search engines have of finding what we want, and the more possibilities of what we want are created. The more people contribute, the more people there are to contact, to see what they have to offer.

Many of us already seem to be in constant contact—bees in a massive intelligence hive—with social-networking software for pheromones, and weblogs for bee dances in which we come and go with a single click. Soon, however, today’s 1 billion Internet users will be able to meet the planet’s 5 billion other people, connected by cheap cell phones and $100 laptops. Watch the bees dance then. Amplify that mix with 10 times more sensors than people on the Internet. The sensors will aggregate data and, aided by pattern-searching software, will see now-unobserved movements in nature and society. That search may create cures for the common cold by watching the flow of air through a city, or change agriculture by watching the jungle grow at night. It may create new commerce or communities by watching the time it takes me to trust someone with whom I’ve just connected online.

	page 1	|	5