The web thing that we’re all talking about, is less than 5,000 days old. If 10 years ago I told you everything was coming, and that it all was coming for free, you wouldn’t have believed. We thought the internet was going to be TV but better. Wikipedia is impossible in theory, but possible in practice. We have to get better in believing the impossible.
What about the next 5,000 days? What we’re getting out of all these connections — laptops, cell phones, etc — is we’re getting one machin. It’s the most reliable michine ever made: zero downtime. The internet is longer than 5,000 days, I’m just talking about the web. 100 billion clicks per day on all the computers around the globe. 55 trillion links. 1 billion PC chips on teh internet, 2 million emails per second, 8 terabytes per second of traffic, 65 bilion phone calls per year. It uses 5% of global electricit on the planet. The number of of links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain, to a first approximation, the size of this machine is close to your brain.
But your brain isn’t doubling in power every 2 years.
If the size today is 1 HB, 1 human brain, in 30 years it will be 6 billion HBs, and in 2040 the processing power will surpass the processing power of humanity. In the next 5,000 days we’re going to embody it, give it structure, and become co-dependent. Every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. The web will own every bit.
Everything will be connected, there’ll be an internet of things. The cost of manufacturing will be its embedded electronics, not its materials. TV, film, video, phone, podcasts, newspapers, etc become one media platform, and follow the same laws of media. Copies have no value. Value is in the uncopyable. Media wants to be liquid. Network effects rule.
First stage was exchanging packets. Second step is linking pages, the unit has been reduced to pages. You can’t stop someone from linking to you. The third stage is linking the data. We’re going from machine-to-machine, page-to-page, now data-to-data. All the data about you should be carried around, all your relationships. Semantic web, web 3.0, global graph. You have to be open to having your data shared.
After that is the internet of things, the physical thing become part of the web.
Co-dependency, always on. Total personalization requires total transparency. We are the web. We’re going to be the machine. Next 5,000 days isn’t going to be the web, only better. It’s going to be something different, it’ll be smarter, more personalized, more ubiquitous. We have to begin to htink about this as the web only better but a new stage, that’s more global, it’s a big machine, more reliable than its parts.
There is only one machine. The web is its OS. All screens look into the one. No bits will live outside the web. To share is to gain. Let the one read it. The one is us.
