Along with the evanescent hive, we may gain a kind of solitary immortality, with all of our personal memories encoded and stored online forever, underscored with software that mimics our own consciousness.

Most likely, we will end up in some yet unimagined combination of the immortal self and the fleeting node. Like toddlers feeling love before they can talk about it, we have as yet no language to frame this. We have to stretch our minds to understand what technology will make us, much the way we struggle to imagine the state of mind in ancient Egypt. Perhaps, most chillingly, we will be oblivious to the larger mind, to a conscience. We’ll be just possessed and straining bees, or neurons.

In Cal class rooms, students stare at their wireless laptops during a lecture. But look closer: They have created a temporary community on an Internet chat channel, sharing websites that amplify the talk, or exchanging notes on their prof’s performance. On another side of some screens, browsers seek the latest hometown news from Tulsa or Shanghai. At such times it is hard to say where, exactly, the students’ minds are.

To hear its builders talk, technology will remake the human species, changing the ways we think, even what we desire. "There is a kind of beauty in having a surrogate memory. The fact is, I’ve delegated a lot of my remembering," says Gordon Bell, a distinguished senior research fellow at Microsoft and five-decade veteran of the industry. One of his projects today is "MyLifeBits," a collection of his lifetime’s letters, cards, photos (25,000 of those alone), phone calls, and anything else he can put online. Looking ahead, he sees a world where billions of sensors act as proxies for our own perceptions and "everything will be maintained... there will be intelligence everywhere." After all, each of those little electronic eyes, those minuscule ears, feeds back to a very big brain.

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.

One of the fine ironies of this future is that much of our new selves will be built on today’s desires. The quality of the results on search engines like Google or Yahoo, the core of competition among them, relies on such disciplines as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and parallel processing—problems whose resolution will empower the Web. Thanks to the surprising success of search-based advertising, those companies also have the revenues to develop technology like never before. Getting the best brains onto building better electronic brains is (forgive me) a no-brainer.

Google and Microsoft recently joined Sun Microsystems in funding a new center at Cal that aims to build computers smart enough to serve millions of Internet users at once. Computer science professor David Patterson, who earlier worked on the computer technology behind the Inktomi search engine, figures the center will start to crack the problem of creating true artificial intelligence, through software capable of optimizing the patterns of a million different clickstreams, or pathways users take as they navigate websites. This gathered intelligence, combined with pattern recognition, is the key to creating virtual intuitive intelligence, something that could revolutionize marketing as well as strategic business or international political negotiations.

But building out an eBay or bidding on a mansion, electro-fragging a boring professor while cruising Amazon.com, or even building monster computers with high-end machine learning in a nearby Cal lab are just the tiny tip of this big iceberg.

The last comparable revolution in communications— the creation of the printing press—quickly created an industry of classical translation into the peoples’ tongues, expanding the Renaissance and spurring the Reformation. Hearing people expound on today’s search revolution makes it feel like a time of that magnitude. "We want to organize all the world’s information, and make it universally accessible" says Eric Schmidt, the Berkeley Ph.D. in computer science who heads Google. The service also offers free instant messaging and e-mail and has released Internet telephone software, so the information can move around quickly. Even so, Schmidt figures organizing "all" the information, everything that can be known about the planet and about ourselves, could take 300 years. As always, success may be uncertain, but one thing is clear: According to Schmidt, "It is important that we not be stopped."

Schmidt is an engaging, circumspect billionaire, the kind of person you might want involved in a major change in human consciousness. He came to Google after running computer-networking company Novell, and before that he was chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. He moved to Google in 2001, when it was a reasonably profitable small company with 230 employees. Today, it has 5,000 employees and a stock price that valued the company at $140 billion this winter.

	page 2	|	5