|
 After
the Internet: Alien Intelligence
by
Dr. James Martin
Click here
to return to book details
Chapter
1
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Long,
long ago, I was employed as a rocket scientist.
A real rocket scientist. I did research on the
rocket motors for the British Blue Streak missile.
The attempt to create a rocket motor that was
extremely powerful, but small, caused severe overheating
problems that would sometimes melt the walls of
the combustion chamber. Occasionally the motor
would explode.
To try to understand what was happening, we built
a laboratory device to simulate the heat transfer
in the walls of the combustion chamber. The device
consisted of a large vat of molten wax with electronic
components set in it to simulate the heat flow.
Readings from the test firings of the motor were
manually fed to the heat-simulating gadget, and
the rig was tinkered with endlessly in an attempt
to make the motor run more smoothly.
One day it was announced that the Duke of Edinburgh
was to visit the laboratory. Total panic ensued.
The place was cleaned top to toe, and cynical
bearded researchers were told to wear ties. To
my horror I found that the bath of wax had been
unplugged and the wax had solidified, so I plugged
in its heater. It took hours to remelt the wax
and only the bottom part of it was liquid when
Rolls-Royces started to arrive. Unfortunately
the wax expanded as it melted, putting steadily
growing pressure on the still-solid wax at the
top. Suddenly, as the royal party was approaching,
molten wax burst through the top and shot up like
the geysers in Yellowstone Park. The entire room
with all its equipment and research assistants
was left dripping with hot wax.
That was the end of an era. Simulations started
to be done on computers not in physical analogs.
I decided to learn all I could about computing
and joined IBM.
It is sometimes difficult to anticipate the effects
of a new technology. By 1957 I was involved in
data processing, but that year the editor in charge
of business books for Prentice Hall wrote, “I
have traveled the length and breadth of this country
and talked with the best people, and I can assure
you that data processing is a fad that won’t
last out the year.” He was wrong. Data processing
became the world’s most successful growth
industry. I was destined to write many books on
it for Prentice Hall.
Those early beginnings were the start of something
that would change society across the planet. Today
we stand at the threshold of one of the most sweeping
changes in history, brought about by digital technology.
*
* * * *
At
the start of this new century two revolutions
are in progress, both destined to change our lives
in fundamental ways. The first is the Internet,
which is bringing an age of social connectivity
to the planet. It brought e-commerce and ushered
in an era of business reinvention. The second
is the growth of radically new forms of computer-generated
“intelligence.” Many think that when
computers are more advanced they will be able
to replicate human intelligence. In fact we are
discovering that the human mind is much more subtle
and complex than we realized. Computers will not
be like us. We are seeing the early stages of
new forms of computer intelligence that are radically,
totally, fundamentally different from human intelligence
and, in narrowly focused areas, vastly more powerful.
Historians in the future may say that computing
reached its infancy when, instead of merely following
human logic in a sequence of basic steps, it began
to exhibit an intelligence of its own, one very
different from human intelligence. Software is
already in use that can automatically evolve,
“breed,” or “learn” valuable
behavior of its own. This does not make computers
intelligent in the way people are. Instead, an
alien type of intelligence is developing.
It is time to give up the twentieth-century notion
that artificial intelligence is like human intelligence.
Some of the mechanisms of this alien intelligence
can run largely under their own steam. A computer
can execute logic millions of times faster than
humans can, so, when we initiate a self-perpetuating
computer process, interesting things can happen.
The computerized “thought” that results
is utterly different from human thought and so
complex that we cannot follow its logic. It will
change the nature of science. The challenge to
business leaders is to harness this new capability.
Revolutions can be scary. Sir Peter Bonfield,
the head of British Telecom, commented about today’s
business, “If you’re not scared, you
don’t understand what’s happening.”
The reinvention of business is radical. New companies
with new thinking are racing ahead of blue-chip
companies. Their stock market valuations often
seem beyond reason. Electronic business is scary
because it is a self-feeding chain reaction. The
new computer intelligence will likewise become
a self-feeding chain reaction-but it will ultimately
become more scary because it will feed at electronic
speed.
The revolutions of e-commerce and computer intelligence
will support and amplify one another. Electronic
commerce will become a fast-changing battlefield
where great fortunes are made and lost, and computerized
intelligence will become extremely important to
this new commerce. The effectiveness of advertising,
global marketing, learning about individual customers,
and rapid adaptation to feedback will increasingly
depend on the new forms of electronic intelligence.
The new intelligence will affect investment, games,
medicine, weapons and warfare, and science in
general. It will change our lives.
| We
are seeing the early stages of new forms of
computer intelligence that are fundamentally
different from human intelligence and vastly
more powerful. |
The
mechanisms of the Internet were created two decades
before the Internet took off on a large scale.
The nonhuman intelligence we describe in this
book may take a similar time to mature (although
change is faster now). Its evolution is tracking
about two decades behind the Internet’s.
However, some corporations are already using it,
and some individuals are becoming masters of putting
this new intelligence to work.
The marriage of the future Internet and the new
automated intelligence will create a global chain
reaction of immense consequences. With the possible
exception of genetic engineering it is difficult
to imagine a technology that will have a more
profound effect on the human condition.
Technology once existed at the periphery of our
culture. As alien intelligence spreads and feeds
on itself, linked across the planet on a ubiquitous
Internet, it will affect every aspect of our lives.
E-Business: A Revolution Begins
Today’s Internet is slow and crude. It is
only beginning to have an effect on how most people
live. But it has already caused a revolution in
the way business is conducted. In 1995 business
transactions on the Internet were almost zero.
In 1999 most chief executives reacted to the Internet
with great cynicism, saying, “Show me anyone
who’s made a profit with the Internet.”
In 2000 most chief executives were passing on
a quote from Andy Grove, the head of Intel: “In
a few years if you are not an Internet business
you will not be in business.” By 2003, according
to Forrester Research, business-to-consumer Internet
sales will grow to more than $100 billion, and
business-to-business revenues will reach more
than $3 trillion.1 These figures represent a financial
tsunami of a magnitude never before seen. By 2003
the rest of the world will be catching up and
then fast surpassing the U.S. volume. Some individuals
will make grand fortunes. Many traditional corporations
will be swept away.
The Internet is not simply another distribution
channel. It is not simply another way to get the
same old marketing information to customers.
To make good use of the Internet, companies must
fundamentally reinvent how they do business-their
culture, their processes, their business models.
Pioneers such as Dell, Cisco, and dot-com companies
are setting new standards, inventing new capabilities,
and insisting that their suppliers do the same.
Traditional businesses must change-quickly-to
avoid being destroyed by newcomers.
Most corporations look as though they are designed
for an age that is gone. They need radically to
transform if they are to remain competitive in
an age of mercurial change. Transforming an old
arthritic enterprise into a nimble corporation
designed to evolve constantly and rapidly is a
traumatic and risky quantum leap. The Economist
says: “Recent experience suggests it takes
little more than two years for a start-up to formulate
an innovative business idea, establish a Web presence
and begin to dominate its chosen sector. By then
it may be too late for slow-moving traditional
businesses to respond.”
The
Growth of Nonhuman Intelligence
The Internet’s quantum leap in computer connectivity
coincides with the growth of new types of intelligence
in computing.
For half a century computing has been growing
furiously. Only now, as it is reaching its infancy,
can we begin to perceive what a precocious child
we have created. That infancy in computing is
beginning, as computers-rather than following
human logic in a sequence of basic steps-start
to exhibit an intelligence of their own, fundamentally
different from human intelligence. We are now
seeing the first baby steps of this new intelligence.
That is what this book is about. It is a very
important subject because we will use this nonhuman
intelligence to help run our world. As computers
acquire this very different capability, they will
use it to become ever more intelligent, creating
a chain reaction of nonhuman intelligence that
is becoming rapidly more powerful. The infant
will grow up. It will become vitally important
to business and will change basic methods in science.
When computing matures, artificial intelligence
will be nothing like human intelligence. The human
mind is diabolically complex and subtle; we will
not get close to imitating it with computers.
Machine intelligence will be a new type of intelligence-crude,
at first, compared with the subtleties of the
human mind but capable of improving its own power
until it becomes awesome.
The vast majority of computing today is used to
emulate human thought processes. But in the future,
the primary value of computers will perhaps be
to “think” in ways that humans cannot.
Software is coming into use that can automatically
evolve, “breed” solutions, or “learn”
valuable behavior of its own. Sometimes its behavior
is completely unpredictable. When software is
designed to evolve, it can do so fast. We can’t
follow its logic in detail, but we use it because
it is very valuable. That is “alien intelligence.”
We define alien intelligence as processes executed
on a computer that are so complex that a human
can neither follow the logic step-by-step nor
come to the same result by other means. We couldn’t
write a conventional program to obtain the same
result.
“Alien intelligence” refers to a growing
family of techniques in use today that enable
computers to recognize patterns that humans cannot
recognize, “learn” behavior that humans
cannot learn, explore data too vast for human
exploration, “breed” programs that humans
cannot write, assemble logical reasoning too complex
for humans, evolve “brain mechanisms”
that humans cannot design, and exhibit emergent
properties that humans cannot anticipate. These
things happen at electronic speed.
A computer can execute logic millions of times
faster than humans can, so we initiate self-evolving
computer processes that may become very complex.
Usually today we have to tell computers blow-by-blow
what to do, so writing programs for them is a
painfully slow process. Using alien-intelligence
techniques we don’t give the computer blow-by-blow
instructions. Instead we give it a narrowly focused
initiative of its own, very limited in its functionality
but capable of extreme speed. This is a fundamental
break with the past-a quantum-leap change in capability.
When software can be set up so that it “breeds,”
evolves, or in some way changes itself automatically,
the changes take place fast. When the techniques
become mature and widespread there will be a chain
reaction of rapid iterations (even though most
software will remain traditional for a long time
to come). The change would be rapid even if the
Internet didn’t exist, but when hundreds
of millions of computers are interconnected the
potential for change is awesome. This potential
for such rapid evolution of software (and, as
we shall see, hardware) will be the rocket fuel
for the human chain reaction of ideas about how
to use the Internet.
The future of computing depends on the extent
to which we are prepared to give up blow-by-blow
control and let the machines race into unknown
territory.
Where we can create electronic “life,”
it can mutate trillions of times faster than biological
life. One might even wonder if it is part of nature’s
grand design that eventually evolution should
occur in billions of machines linked by speed-of-light
telecommunications.
When software “breeds” or evolves today,
it does so in order to meet goals that humans
specify. In the future we will want to set it
up so that it improves its own goals. As machines
race into unknown territory the question is: Can
we control them? Are they bound, ultimately, to
get out of control?
The twenty-first century will be a century of
alien intelligence. As the century progresses,
computers will become immensely more powerful
than today-eventually billions of times more powerful-and
there will be billions of machines interconnected
by worldwide networks that transmit at the speed
of light. Both software and hardware will “breed,”
“learn,” and evolve, eventually at devastating
speed.
For the next ten years our goal will be to light
the fires of alien intelligence because of its
great value to science, health care, entertainment,
corporate efficiency, and moneymaking in general.
Eventually the fires will be self-feeding. They
will become a roaring forest fire around the planet.
When this happens, we will become concerned about
how to control the fire. Already we have “firewalls”
to protect corporate computers, but they are designed
for an age when software was easy to control.
The main concern now is how we light the fires.
How do we put today’s alien intelligence
to work? That is what this book is mainly about.
The last chapter discusses the future and its
serious concerns. Is alien intelligence dangerous?
Can we control the raging forest fires that we
have started?
Alien Intelligence at Work
Alien intelligence is already in use today in
diverse forms. Some organizations use it spectacularly;
to others it sounds like science fiction. William
Gibson, comments, “The future is already
here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
When I see what’s going on in some of the
leading-edge laboratories and then go to traditional-minded
organizations, it’s clear that it is very
unevenly distributed.
Alien intelligence techniques can be powerful
because they enable computers to “learn.”
Some people object to the idea of computer learning
because, they say, it is quite unlike the concept
of human learning. When a computer “learns”
it improves its knowledge, as a human does, but
this is a mechanistic process. There is no cognizance
involved; the computer merely becomes able to
exploit better choices of action among an almost
infinite number of possibilities. It can learn
many thousands of times faster than a human learns
but without the type of understanding that requires
common sense.
A computer can learn about you electronically
and understand your needs in certain specific
areas. Computers or electronic sensors can be
relentless in monitoring and collecting information.
Some people feel uncomfortable at the thought
that computers can learn about them, but this
will be part of the society we are creating. Machines
can observe our behavior and update their knowledge
about us. When I sign on to the Internet bookstore
Amazon.com, the software greets me by saying,
“Hello, James Martin. Here’s a list
of items we think you’ll like.” It has
noted the books that I buy or examine in detail,
and learned about my taste in books. Recently
I bought a book at a real (nonelectronic) bookstore,
and although I thought that this book was different
from the types of books I find at Amazon, to my
amazement the next time I signed on to Amazon
it was recommending the very same title to me.
Just as Amazon learns about its customers’
tastes in books and music, so all the processes
of electronic commerce can be designed so that
software can learn what customers are likely to
buy, what changes they would like in the products,
where to look for new customers, and so on. Clearly,
having computers silently and relentlessly learning
about customers has much commercial potential.
With alien intelligence techniques, computers
can be trained to detect patterns that humans
couldn’t possibly recognize. They can be
put to work analyzing, trying to make sense of
overwhelming quantities of data, and taking action
on the basis of knowledge acquired from the process.
They can forage through masses of data, learning
about customers, sales patterns, fraud, the spread
of epidemics, and numerous other subjects.
Perhaps somewhat more alarming, HNC Software,
Inc., uses alien intelligence technology to predict
when individuals or organizations might go bankrupt.
Such a prediction is useful to banks that issue
credit cards. The software often flags cardholders
who eventually do go bankrupt months before it
is clear to humans that bankruptcy is inevitable.
HNC encourages credit card issuers to join its
“bankruptcy consortium.” It is then
able to collect an increasingly large body of
historical data from many organizations about
bankruptcies. The software makes itself able to
detect the telltale patterns that may warn about
bankruptcies.
John Deere improved its business by allowing farmers
a great diversity of options in the products they
order. Some farmers want four row planters, others
want twenty-four row planters, and some want something
in between. Planters can apply liquid fertilizer,
dry fertilizer, or no fertilizer. John Deere offers
over a million such permutations.
While such a rich set of choices is great for
marketing, it can cause severe headaches in manufacturing.
At John Deere, half-assembled machines were bunched
up at one workstation while another workstation
remained idle. It was difficult to control inventory.3
A solution was found that employed alien intelligence.
Software learned to “breed” factory
schedules, different each day, far better than
humans could produce. Planters now flow smoothly
through the production line, with monthly output
up sharply. We will soon see diverse examples
of “breeding” software or procedures
that we wouldn’t ourselves be able to design.
Electronic devices have been built that can recognize
people’s faces. One such product from the
Miros Corporation is being used as a security
measure in some ATMs. In another security application,
a door may open only if it recognizes your face.
In some countries the police use automated cameras
to record the license plates of cars exceeding
the speed limit. It is equally possible to record
your face. Suppose you have a number of unpaid
parking tickets, enough so that the police would
arrest you if they could. You go to an ATM to
withdraw money. As usual the security cameras
record you. But now alien intelligence can match
the image of your face with the one on your driver’s
license and transmit your location to the cops
on patrol in your neighborhood.
Similarly, machines have been built that can recognize
human emotions. A television set, or computer,
will watch its viewers and detect their emotional
response to advertisements. Marketers will use
them to make multiple variants of advertisements,
gauge the impact of each, and be able to display
the ones that evoke the most positive responses
from individual viewers. Computers have been designed
that read human body language better than humans
do.
Systems can be equipped with electronic senses
that are constantly alert and intelligent. Embedded
alien intelligence gives computers the ability
continuously to analyze masses of data from sensors
and act on the information when desirable. Sensors
in your car, like sensors everywhere, will gather
data continuously. Chips can analyze these data
to prevent accidents. They can recognize if you
are driving erratically. Insurance companies may
lower your premium if your car sensors continually
send a good report. A father may know if his teenage
son is driving like a maniac.
Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank,
wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The attraction
and management of intellectual capital will determine
which institutions and nations will survive and
prosper, and which will not…. The rules,
customs, skills and talents necessary to uncover,
capture, produce, preserve and exploit information
are now one of humankind’s most important
assets.” The ability to extract actionable
knowledge from a vast mass of data will become
critical to the pursuit of wealth. This used to
be done by humans scanning the data. Computers,
sometimes using the Internet and sometimes using
automated sensors, will create an overwhelming
deluge of data. As this grows, computers will
be needed automatically to spot patterns and search
for insights. Long ago we needed a genius like
Kepler to look at the volumes of data about planetary
positions and derive Kepler’s laws of planetary
motion. But that took Kepler most of his lifetime,
and there are few Keplers around. Today, turning
a deluge of data into actionable insight requires
intricate computing. The key to unlocking valuable
insights in science and business will be achieving
the right combination of human intelligence and
computer intelligence, and recognizing that these
are fundamentally different.
Increasingly, corporations will confront one another
with computerized systems. Electronic complexity
is increasing and reaction times are decreasing
as computerized systems become more advanced.
The ultimate consequence of computerized competition
is that the battle between the corporations becomes
ever faster and more automated with deep alien
intelligence. The methods that have served business
well for many decades will be replaced with methods
appropriate for real-time intelligent-Web interaction.
Chain
Reactions
The Internet and alien intelligence both have
immense potential power because, as noted, they
become chain reactions. In a chain reaction one
event causes other events; each of these, in turn,
causes yet other events, and so on. Unless something
slows down or interrupts a chain reaction, explosive
growth occurs.
The Internet’s success is the reason success
can continue. Each generation of new ideas provides
better capability for designing the next generation.
The high market cap of the Internet companies
causes extreme aggression. Advances lead to further
advances.
As computers become intelligent, this chain reaction
computer intelligence can improve its own capability
automatically, the potential is there for machines
to become more intelligent at a geometrically
increasing rate.
| Technology
once existed at the periphery of our culture.
As alien intelligence spreads on a ubiquitous
Internet, it will affect every aspect of our
lives |
The
World Wide Web spread its capabilities worldwide
almost immediately because it used the Internet.
Web addresses now appear on television ads in
most of the world. The applications of alien intelligence
techniques will also spread worldwide. When alien
intelligence and the Internet are teamed up, they
reinforce one another. Machines will transmit
their capabilities to other machines. With fiber
optics, the circuits that connect computers will
expand like floodgates opening. Computers will
be able to exchange software, mine worldwide data
warehouses, use intelligent search engines, and
feed each other with fast-growing bodies of knowledge.
New corporations, wanting to go public, will race
to master the new methods. As the Internet becomes
intelligent its new methods will spread like a
brushfire.
The rate of change is likely to continue to increase
geometrically, not linearly, because there is
positive feedback in research and development.
Good ideas feed on themselves, and the Internet
makes the feedback worldwide.
As
its chain reaction develops, the Net’s evolution
will grow geometrically faster. However fast the
Internet’s rate of change is today, the Web
is still only at the beginning of its true potential.
It will soon be accessible to the public everywhere
via television sets and cellular phones. It will
use software and agents designed to learn at a
rapid pace. Data in vast data warehouses will
be designed for use by computers, rather than
by people, to produce automated results. Search
mechanisms will become more capable. But perhaps
most important, the Internet will harness the
new capabilities of alien intelligence. The pace
of change may seem fast today, but it will become
much faster when self-evolving software adds fuel
to the Internet.
Driving these linked chain reactions is likely
to be a main occupation of commerce for many years
ahead. When will it stop? Not before our individual
lives and all of society have been changed in
inexorable ways.
Stages of Growth
When an industry is radically transformed it usually
happens in three stages.
First, frameworks used for new facilities tend
to copy the old. Mankind always wants to augment
the past rather than break free from it. Early
movies often looked like stage plays that had
been filmed. It took decades to invent the rapid
editing, special effects, and visual storytelling
of today’s films. Technology with radical
potential for change has used words like “horseless
carriage,” “wireless telegraphy,”
and “paperless office.” Eventually it
became clear that cars changed the world in a
way that “carriages” did not, and broadcasting
changed the world in ways that telegraphy could
not. Similarly, an enterprise well designed for
cyberspace has no resemblance to one with paper-based
offices. It is time for computers to break free
from automating the past just as “wireless”
needed to break free from “telegraphy.”
Second, a new but fairly simple framework is developed.
Instead of paper catalogues, corporations set
up Web pages and use Web catalogues. Purchase
orders and trading documents are sent electronically,
computer-to-computer, instead of by snail-mail.
Price auctions are used. Virtual operations are
set up. This doesn’t require rocket science.
Any company can do it.
Third, big winners emerge who have learned to
play the new games with great skill. At first
the main competitive advantage comes from being
the first to market; later competitive advantage
and survival come from playing the game more and
more intelligently. The mechanisms of e-business
will evolve from procedures that are simple to
procedures that use intricate forms of computerized
intelligence. In the world we will describe there
will be spectacular winners; the also-ran corporations
will be far less profitable than the winners.
The phrase “winner-takes-most” describes
it well. The winner will have better information
and better ways of deriving insight from that
information. In the third stage, the mighty tumble.
New corporations master the new ideas, while traditional
executives are left desperate.
A few new corporations try to go straight to stage
three. Cisco perceived that the world’s telecommunications
switching and routing equipment was obsolete,
optimized for continuous voice channels. It needed
to be replaced by a “new world” of high-speed
computerized packet-switching. Knowing that such
technology would change rapidly, Cisco decided
to outsource all manufacturing so as never to
be stuck with obsolete plants. If it didn’t
manufacture anything, it could change as fast
as the technology changed. Cisco grew fast by
buying companies in this business. It used the
Web to communicate with both its suppliers and
its customers. Suppliers constantly do real-time
bidding for contracts. At the time of this writing
80 percent of Cisco’s sales come from the
Web. Fifty-five percent of orders are untouched
by human hands. The savings from using the Web
contribute $500 million to Cisco’s $1.5 billion
in overall earnings-a third of its earnings.
The Electronic Jungle
The Internet has no master plan; it just grows
like a jungle-constantly, amorphously, and unpredictably.
Nobody is explicitly managing the Internet. Instead,
millions of people contribute to its _content
in creative and fundamentally different ways.
Each does his or her own thing, steadily adding
to a common electronic resource. Different communities
in the jungle have radically different cultures,
but they coexist, often stimulating one another.
As the Internet becomes vigorous in China and
the non-Western world, it will develop understanding
and appreciation of other forms of culture (for
example, Chinese medicine). The Net puts many
cultures into close proximity, and so they learn
from each other.
This electronic jungle is far more broad and grand
in scope than anything created by IBM, ATT, or
the International Standards Organization. No corporation
could have invented New York or Shanghai or the
Internet. Electronics has its own worldwide ecosystem
with intricate relationships among its members.
The Internet jungle, like nature’s jungles,
is a vast tangle of complex components interacting
in unpredictable ways. It is becoming populated
with an immense diversity of software creatures
and intelligent systems. Alien intelligence technologies
will enable these e-critters to “breed”
and “evolve” and “learn.”
This crucible of human intelligence and software
intelligence will produce wonderfully unpredictable
results.
The electronic jungle will grow very rapidly in
transmission speed, computing power, knowledge
storage capacity, and alien intelligence. As alien
intelligence takes root in the Internet, it will
spread, establishing its role in the jungle. The
Net evolves and grows like society grows, but
at a lightning pace. The technologies I describe
in this book will push the evolution of the Net
into hyperdrive.
Although the Internet has junglelike characteristics,
it is different from nature’s jungles. A
jungle has inertia because it is physical; the
Net is a world of bits moving at the speed of
electronics. The physical jungle is mature and
stable in its overall behavior. The Net is not;
it will change at great speed, twisting unpredictably.
Electronic Herds
Thomas Friedman, in his wonderful book about globalism,
The Lexus and the Olive Tree, describes
how the investors of the world have become linked
in their knowledge and behavior into what he refers
to as an “Electronic Herd.” The Electronic
Herd consists of vast numbers of often-anonymous
stock, bond, currency, and multinational investors
connected by screens and networks. Nobody is in
charge of the herd. It has its own behavior.
Friedman comments: “The basic truth about
globalization is this: No one is in charge-not
George Soros, not ‘Great Powers’.…
I know that’s hard to accept. It’s like
telling people there’s no God. We all want
to believe that somebody is in charge and responsible.…
Democracies vote about a government’s policies
once every two or four years. But the Electronic
Herd votes every minute of every hour of every
day.”
Analysts track the herd’s movements all day
on their Bloomberg screens. The herd analogy came
from Merrill Lynch, which used to be the largest
broker and advertised itself with spectacular
images of a “Thundering Herd.” In the
new world the herd doesn’t thunder but is
far more devastating in its speed and magnitude.
Friedman’s Electronic Herd relates to investment,
but the Net has numerous herds. It has manufacturers
of car parts wanting to attract the attention
of the giant car companies and linking to global
car-industry “exchanges” to buy car
parts. It has herds of people wanting to buy a
used copy of John Grisham’s latest bestseller
at a low price. When the Internet became popular
with hackers, teenagers, and university students,
it became a wild, uncontrolled resource, constantly
evolving in new directions. Since it connected
millions of creative and playful people across
the planet, it became a live thing with new ideas
raging across it.
Millions of people react to what the Internet
can do. People’s choices have impact on the
future behavior of systems. The software or its
owners respond to the greed, obsessions, berserkness,
and power-lusts of the Internet herds, and the
Web becomes a wild evolving organism.
Net users react to new fashions, marketing thrusts,
and technologies, and can stampede on a grand
scale. Gold rush fever can strike at a moment’s
notice. One little company, EarthWeb, went public
in 1998. Despite revenues in the first half of
1998 of less than a million dollars and a loss
of three million dollars in that time period,
the company quickly acquired a market capitalization
of $400 million. The Internet company eToys.com
went public in 1999, with tiny sales, but its
market capitalization was greater than that of
Toys “R” Us, which had sales over $7
billion. In the week of April 10, 2000, however,
many such gold rush companies lost most of their
value when their stock prices plummeted; the market
in tech stocks has proved volatile.
Computerized marketing mechanisms identify the
winners and amplify their success. Millions of
individual decisions to buy or not to buy reinforce
each other, creating a boom or collapse, which
in turn feeds back to shape the buying conditions
that produced it. Virtually everything and everybody
is caught up in a vast, non-linear web of incentives,
constraints, and connections.
Corporations, whether they like it or not, exist
and compete in this fast-changing jungle. The
total reinvention of the nature of work will require
new organizational structures and new human-technology
partnerships. The change in the nature of corporations
will cause economic changes with wrenching political
implications. The evolution of cyberspace has
gone far enough for us to know that it will drastically
change society around the planet. Some countries
will want to resist it, but to do so is to wreck
their economy. By 2005 hundreds of billions of
dollars a day of consumers’ electronic cash
will race across national frontiers, resulting
in a growing separation of economy and state.
The cyberspace economy will be worldwide.
Outsiders
Throughout the history of computing, evolving
from the massive isolated machines to the wild
world of cyberspace, some of the most critical
developments have come entirely from outsiders.
Kids in garages created the personal computer
industry. A college dropout produced the operating
system for the IBM personal computer. The chip
industry was spawned by a gaggle of start-up companies.
A scientist in Europe’s nuclear lab, CERN,
invented the World Wide Web. Amazingly, no telecommunications
company was involved in the birth or early growth
of the Internet.
The future of knowledge technology will be dominated
by global giants in the computer, software, and
telecommunications industries, but, as in the
past, many of the key new ideas will come from
newcomers. The venture capital industry plays
a critical role in trying to recognize these future
winners and provide them with funding. This is
one the world’s grandest crap games, where
untold millions are lost and won. People who wouldn’t
invest a dollar at Las Vegas, because the odds
are against you, mortgage their house (as I did)
and gamble the money on a start-up they believe
in. The casino is spreading from Silicon Valley
to cyberspace. Conversations of college kids around
the world today are about how they might make
a fortune with a high-tech start-up.
| As
machines race into unknown territory, the
question is: Can we control them? Are they
bound, ultimately, to get out of control? |
This
is an explosive mixture: cyberspace permeating
our planet, electronic commerce becoming huge
(soon trillions of dollars a year), entrepreneurs
everywhere struggling to make the next fortune,
an electronic jungle connecting the planet’s
people and machines, and now, perhaps most potent
of all, the chain reaction growth of a new type
of intelligence.
A Billion Kids in Cyberspace
There will soon be almost two billion teenagers
on the planet. About half of them will soon have
access to television sets or inexpensive gadgets
connected to the Internet. A billion kids in cyberspace
constitute a youth culture that will develop furiously
and surprise us in many ways. It is the planet’s
first global culture-and a force to be reckoned
with.
They are a huge market accessible in remarkably
focused ways. The Internet is so popular that
it has brought de facto standards to an industry
that could never agree about standards. For similar
reasons it will bring to mankind a common second
language-an English of diverse dialects. Esperanto
never caught on; the Internet did. Two to three
billion people around the planet are now trying
to learn or improve their English because it is
the language of mass-delivered entertainment,
most pop songs, global news, and most of the interesting
stuff on the Internet. Having a common second
language is an ever more vital factor in the growing
unity of mankind.
In the 1990s the Internet spread at an astonishing
rate from a U.S. academic community to ordinary
people around the planet. While computer-phobic
commentators in aging country clubs were resisting
the changes, hordes of young tigers plunged into
the excitement of the Web, generating sky-high
stock prices. Teenagers in Delhi and Penang chatter
on the Internet to virtual friends around the
planet. The wild fantasies of multiuser games
on the Net are preparing teenagers for the computerized
work environment of the future. Third World students,
to their amazement, discover that doing research
on the Net is often better than doing it in the
great libraries of the rich countries.
Internet television will become a major instrument
of commerce, used for shopping, advertising, games,
news, e-mail, education, and exploring the ever-richer
diversity of the Web. In Beijing almost every
teenager in McDonald’s has a cell phone;
soon such devices will be linked to the Internet.
Soon there will be hundreds of millions of pocket
wireless devices in use. Except in deprived areas,
children around the planet will grow up with the
Internet, sending jokes to one another, making
friends they will never meet, and playing the
Web’s seductive games with the fickle energy
of childhood.
Sorcerer’s Apprentices
The power of the microchip is doubling every eighteen
months. The speed of fiber optics is doubling
every year. It is like driving a car whose speed
is increasing exponentially.
Rather than being firmly in control, we seem to
be like the sorcerer’s apprentice, having
started something on a grand scale that we can
barely steer. We’re not able to pull the
plug because our welfare, corporate profits, and
defense are now too dependent on technology. A
big question is: How can we drive the vehicle
we are in as its velocity becomes exponentially
faster?
As machines become ultraintelligent and “alien,”
will we be swept away by a tide of cultural change?
Or will we employ the machines to evolve and improve
our own culture? Some people will go along with
the ride and love it. Others will hang on by their
fingernails. Many people will be out of their
depth, looking for cover. To masses of underprivileged
people it will be a time of opportunity when rules
are rewritten. Society and its traditional institutions
will be shaken to their core.
In the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice
there was a sorcerer. Here we are all apprentices.
Riding the Tiger
We have started a fast-moving tiger, a process
of inventing a global civilization. Some corporations
will ride the beast, achieving spectacular results,
fully realizing that they cannot get off lest
they be eaten. Many will be eaten because they
don’t know how to ride the tiger.
| As
new corporations master the new ideas, traditional
executives are left desperate. The mighty
tumble. |
This
book will show you the sort of tiger that’s
about to be unleashed. It is an extraordinary
story to tell. We’ll start by explaining
what alien intelligence is and how it will change
thinking processes. Next we’ll discuss how
it fits in with the pervasive growth of the Internet.
We can then talk about how it will change corporations
and jobs, creating intense competition where the
winner in each area tends to take most of the
profits and everyone else struggles. To become
a winner takes reinvention. A vital question for
managers in traditional corporations will be:
Can you change fast enough?
The first part of this book introduces alien intelligence.
Part II describes how the masters of the new ideas
will change our world. Part III explains alien-intelligence
techniques in more detail, and the last chapter
addresses the fascinating question of whether
we can control machines that become highly intelligent
in far different ways than ourselves.
The megarich of ten years from now will not be
maharajas, great military conquerors, railroad
robber barons, or oil sheiks. They will be gutsy,
risk-taking iconoclasts who are masters of putting
alien intelligence to work. They may be great
adventurers, but not like Cecil Rhodes. Today’s
college kids should reflect that great wealth
will not be dug out of the ground or conquered
with armies, as in the past; it will come from
the mind.
Price:
$22.36 - Click
here to order from Amazon: 
Click here
to return to book details
|
