Remember
that you are at an exceptional hour in a unique epoch, that you
have this great happiness, this invaluable privilege, of being present
at the birth of a new world.
- The Mother, Sri Aurobindo Ashram
To fully understand the significance
of today's developments in the area of communications, we need to
go back in time to consider the social changes that have occurred
over the last two hundred years. In this short period, the thrust
of human activity has altered significantly.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the
majority of the population (about 90 percent) was employed in the
production of foodÑagriculture and fishing, for instanceÑand
its distribution. This percentage had stayed constant for hundreds
of years, the actual number increasing at about the same rate as the
population itself. In the early 1800s its doubling time was around
45 years. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, however, the
increasing application of technology to farming led to a slowing in
the growth rate of agricultural employment, and the curve began to
bend over in the characteristic S-shape.
From the beginning of the nineteenth
century the more developed nations have shown a steady increase in
the number of people employed in industry and manufacturing: a shift
away from the processing of food towards the processing of minerals
and energy. Employment statistics for the U.S.A. show that the growth
of industrial employment was considerably faster than that of agricultural
employment, doubling about once every 16 years, and by 1900 equal
numbers of people (about 38 percent) were employed in each sector.
In terms of employment, therefore, this date could be taken to mark
the beginning of the Industrial Age in the U.S.A.
For the next seventy years, industry
was the dominant activity in the U.S.A. Over the last few decades,
however, the invention of computers and the consequent increase in
information processing capacities has brought about another shift.
The steady application of technology and automation to industry caused
the rate of growth of industrial employment to slow, giving rise once
again to an S-curve. At the same time the number of people employed
in information processing in its various forms: printing, publishing,
accounting, banking, journalism, TV, radio, telecommunications as
well as computing and its many ancillary occupationsÑhas been
growing at an exponential rate. Its doubling time may now be as short
as six years.
By the mid-1970s the number of people
in the U.S.A. engaged in the processing of information had caught
up with those engaged in industry: the processing of energy and matter.
From that time on, information processing has been our dominant activity.
We had entered the "Information Age."
Although these developments refer specifically
to the U.S.A., parallel changes can be found in most of the more developed
nations. The less developed nations show similar tendencies, but they
lag behind the more developed ones to varying degrees. These lags,
however, will almost certainly decrease as time goes on.
While a developing country may be fifty
years behind the West in reaching the stage at which industrial activity
becomes dominant, it may only be ten years behind when it makes the
transition to an information-dominant society. Japan is an example
of a country which, despite a late start, has quite definitely caught
up with the West. South Korea moved from Agricultural Age to Information
Age in only fourteen years. Many of the Middle East, oil-rich nations,
such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are also making rapid strides. China,
although still predominantly agricultural, may spend only a short
time in the Industrial Age before shifting to an information society.
And it may well be that other countries will skip the Industrial Age
entirelyÑat least as far as majority employment is concerned.
Language Links
As more and more nations of the world
move into the Information Age, the technology of communications and
information processing will dramatically affect the human race, as
we become increasingly integrated through the burgeoning network of
electronic synapses.
If we look back over human history,
we can see that this trend toward a progressive linking of humanity
seems to have been going on for millennia. The sudden surge of information
technology in the present day can be seen as the fruit of millions
of years of human effort.
The first major step toward interconnection
came with the development of verbal language. This led to a profound
and fundamental change in the way we gained knowledge about the world.
All other creatures (with the possible exception of whales and dolphins)
learn primarily from their own experience of life. A dog learns through
what happens to it in its own life, it does not benefit significantly
from the experiences of other dogs elsewhere in the world. But with
the advent of symbolic language human beings could begin to share
experiences and so learn not only from their own lives but also from
others'.
This was a major evolutionary leap,
as significant perhaps as the appearance of sexual reproduction 2
billion years ago. Two cells could come together and through the exchange
of genetic information share their hereditory data-banks - a breakthrough
which, as we have seen, allowed new species to emerge thousands of
times faster. Similarly, through language, human beings can exchange
their own experiences and learnings, and the result has been a similar
leap in the rate of evolution.
Language had allowed us to shift from
biological evolution to the much faster evolution of mind. Not only
did our ability to learn from each other enhance our individual lives,
it also led us into the whole new arena of group evolution. We had
become a collective learning system, building a collective body of
knowledge that far exceeded the experience of any individual, but
which any individual could, in principle access. Through language
we had made the step from isolated organisms to a collective organismÑmuch
as a billion years ago single cells came to together to make the first
multicellular creatures.
The rate of growth of this collective
learning system was greatly enhanced by a series of breakthroughs
in information technology. Today we tend to think of information technology
in terms of computers and telecommunications, but these are themselves
the consequence of a whole series of breakthroughs in information
technologies dating back to the dawn of civilization.
The first great breakthrough was the
invention of writing, some ten thousand years ago. Before writing,
knowledge was handed down primarily by word of mouth, a process that
was very open to distortions, omissions and misunderstandings. Writing
made it possible to record our personal and cultural histories in
a more reliable form and hand them down to future generations. The
technological breakthrough of paper made records much easier to transport.
We could share our knowledge with people in distant lands, linking
human communities together.
The advent of the printing press in
the fifteenth century further increased humanity's ability to disseminate
written information. No longer did each copy of a manuscript have
to be reproduced by handÑa process that was both slow and prone
to error - thousands could be manufactured from the same original,
and virtually simultaneously. In the first fifty years after the invention
of printing, around 80 million books were produced. The philosophies
of the Greeks and Romans were distributed, the Bible became widely
accessible, and through various "how to" books the skills
of many crafts were made more widely available, paving the way for
the Renaissance.
The next major breakthrough occurred
in the mid-nineteenth century. This was the development of electrical
communication in the form of telegraph, and later the telephone. The
time taken to transmit a message across the world suddenly dropped
from days or weeks to minutes and then fractions of a second.
Fifty years later another breakthrough
occurred through the use of radio waves as the transmission medium.
This freed people from the need to be physically linked by cable and
simultaneously made it possible to transmit a message to large numbers
of people, that is, to broadcast information. Since then, radio and
its offshoot, television, which literally gave us the ability to "see
at a distance", have expanded rapidly, enabling the individual
to be an eyewitness to events happening around the world. At the same
time that radio and television were spreading across the planet, another
equally important development in information technology was occurring:
electronic computers.
The Digital Revolution
The first computer was built during
World War II, to help the intelligence services in the complex task
of breaking sophisticated codes. At the same time there arose an increasing
need to be able to perform the complex calculations associated with
technical design much more rapidly than could be done by paper, pencil
and adding machine. To fulfill these needs technicians designed electronic
calculators - often the size of a room - and these gave birth to early
electric computers in the 1950s. Although cumbersome and slow by today's
standards, these devices nevertheless represented a huge leap forward
in terms of information processing power. During the 1960s and 1970s,
dramatic strides were made in the computerÕs processing capacity
and speed. Simultaneously the physical size of computers shrank remarkably.
The microprocessor, or "chip"
as it is commonly called, represented a major revolution in computing
technology. Less than a quarter of an inch in size, the average chip
of 1990 contained more computing power than all the computers of 1950
put together, and this capacity has been doubling every year. In addition
to the many advantages of its minute size, the chip's energy consumption
is astoundingly low. The average computer of 1970 used more energy
than 5000 pocket calculators of similar computing capacity a mere
ten years later. The information/energy ratio has been steadily increasing
and is now rocketing. We are able to do more and more with less and
less.
At the same time the cost of information
processing has been falling dramatically. Computing power is often
measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS). The first
transistorized computers of the 1950s (IBM's 7090, for example) managed
to reach about 1 MIP, and cost a million dollars. When the early integrated
circuit computers of the late sixties, such as DEC's PDP 10, reached
10 MIPS, the price per MIP had fallen to $100,000. The Apple II, which
heralded the personal computer revolution in the mid-1970s, brought
the cost down to below ten thousand dollars per MIP. By 1990 the average
PC cost around $1000 per MIP, while supercomputers like the Cray 3,
operating at 100,000 MIPS cost about $10 million, or $100 per MIP.
In 1994 personal computing power was also approaching $100 per MIP.
And it will continue falling in the future. By the year 2000 you will
probably be able to buy the equivalent computing power of a million
dollar IBM 7090 for ten dollars or less.
Whereas in 1970 computers were used
almost solely by large institutions such as governments and corporations,
the microprocessor - a microchip that is a computer in itself - has
made it possible for the technology of computers and data processing
to be available, potentially, to anyone on the planet without draining
the planet of its vital energy resources. If comparable changes had
been made in various aspects of the automobile over the last twenty
years, a Rolls Royce would now cost fifty cents. It would be less
than a tenth of an inch long, have a gasoline consumption of tens
of million miles per gallon, cruise at a hundred thousand miles per
hour, and never need servicing! These tiny chariots would also be
so commonplace as to be unremarkable. By the early 1990s there were
more than 100 million personal computers in the world, and they were
rolling off production lines at the rate of more than 100,000 per
day.
The Net
Another significant development has
been the direct linking of computers. The first computers were independent
units, interacting only with their human operators (there were no
operating systems in those days). By the late 1960s, however, computers
were able to communicate directly with each other. In 1969 the U.S.
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) began an experiment to link
computers across long distances so that they could exchange files
and run programs on each other. The network grew slowly at first,
but then more rapidly. Over the next decade a new computer was added
to ARPAnet once every 20 days on average.
By the mid-1970s other networks had
emerged, and began to interlink with ARPAnet. This new network of
networks became known as the "internetwork" - and soon just
"Internet". The net, as it is also sometimes called, continued
to expand rapidly as many other host computers from around the world
connected into it. By 1994 Internet had grown into a massive web of
networks with more than two million host computers and an estimated
forty million users - and its size was doubling every year.
The number of bulletin boards, "places"
on the network where people can access data on specialized subjects,
have discussions, and meet others of like interests has likewise exploded.
In 1987 there were 6,000 bulletin boards (or BBSs). By 1994 there
were close to 60,000, and the number was doubling every eighteen months.
Over the same period commercial services such as Compuserve, America
Online, and Prodigy have also grown rapidly, bringing thousands of
databases, computer shopping, newspapers, magazines, educational courses,
airline schedules and e-mail directly into millions of homes.
Such prodigous rates of growth cannot
continue far into the future. If internet were to continue doubling
every year, it would reach more than a billion people by 1999 - which
is more than the probable number of people able to afford the luxury
of a personal computer and an Internet account. Well before then the
growth curve will begin turning into an S-curve. The further growth
of the net will not then be in the number of connections, but in the
versatility and richness of the connections.
As this global network continues to
grow and evolve it will undoubtedly change in many ways. As I write
there is much talk of the various crises and challenges facing Internet.
There is growing congestion, it is running our of address space, multimedia
is taxing its resources, it is still far from user-friendly, there
are serious issues concerning privacy and security of data, and it
will inevitably become increasingly commercialized. But a system in
crisis is not necessarily a dying system. Crises can be important
evolutionary drivers pushing the system into new levels of organization,
and triggering the emergence of new forms and processes. Already the
Internet has proved capable of evolving into a much more complex and
diverse structure than that contemplated by its original creators,
and, since nobody can turn it off, it will continue to evolve. New
technologies, new communication protocols, new software and other
developments will make the net of ten years time as hard to imagine
today as laptop computers talking to each other across the globe were
twenty years ago.
Merging Technologies
At the heart of this proliferation of
networks and services is the integration of computer technology and
telecommunications. The telephone's global network of cables, fibers
and radio links has laid the infrastructure for a new revolution.
A telephone socket anywhere in the world - Sweden, Mexico, China,
the South Pole - is no longer just a point to attach a device for
"hearing at a distance". It is now a node of the network,
and can just as easily sport a telex, a fax machine, a pager, a terminal,
a computer, a network of computers, or a combination of any of these.
Add to this the ability to send video images as easily as text and
you have the seeds for the biggest media revolution ever - the synthesis
of television, computer and telephone.
In the years to come it is not only
MIPS that will be important but bandwidth: how fast data can be transmitted
through the network. One optic fiber has the potential for 25 gigahertz
- which is about the volume of information that flows over the telephone
lines in the U.S.A. during the peak moment on Mother's Day, or about
1,000 times more information than all the radio frequencies combined.
All that on one thread of glass the width of a human hair.
Just as the price of MIPS has fallen
dramatically over the last few decades, so too will the price of bandwidth.
George Gilder, author of LIfe after Television and Telecosm, has pointed
out that every major revolution has seen the cost of some commodity
fall markedly and eventually become virtually free. With the Industrial
Revolution physical force became virtually free compared with its
cost when derived from animal or human muscle. Suddenly a factory
could work 24 hours a day churning out products in a way that was
incomprehensible before. Physical force became so cheap that rather
than having to economize on its use, we could afford to "waste"
it in moving walkways, electric toothbrushes and leaf blowers. Over
the last 30 years we have seen the price of a transistor drop from
one dollar to one four-thousandth of a cent. We no longer have to
economize on the use of transistors, but can "waste" them
to correct our spelling, play solitaire, or create fancy backgrounds
on our computer screen. As the telecommunications revolution begins
to bite we will see a similar drop in the cost of bandwidth. When
that is virtually free, we will be able to afford to "waste"
that too. We will be able to broadcast information through the net
much as we now broadcast radio and television through the air.
Developments such as these seem to be
taking us ever-more rapidly towards what William Gibson in his award-winning
novel Neuromancer called cyberspace:
A graphic representation
of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space
of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.
- William Gibson
In Gibson's world, people enter cyberspace
by feeding computer-generated virtual reality displays of information
directly into their brains. Science fiction? Yes. But so was a trip
to the moon fifty years ago.
The Emerging Global Brain
The interlinking of humanity that began
with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where
information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of
light. Billions of messages continually shuttling back and forth,
in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds
of humanity together into a single system. Is this Gaia growing herself
a nervous system?
The parallels are certainly worthy of
consideration. We have already noted that there are, very approximately,
the same number of nerve cells in a human brain as there are human
minds on the planet. And there are also some interesting similarities
between the way the human brain grows and the way in which humanity
is evolving.
The embryonic human brain passes through
two major phases of development. The first is a massive explosion
in the number of nerve cells. Starting eight weeks after conception,
the number of neurons explodes, increasing by many millions each hour.
After five weeks, however, the process slows down, almost as rapidly
as it started. The first stage of brain development, the proliferation
of cells, is now complete. At this stage the fetus has most of the
nerve cells it will have for the rest of its life.
The brain then proceeds to the second
phase of its development, as billions of isolated nerve cells begin
making connections with each other, sometimes growing out fibers to
connect with cells on the other side of the brain. By the time of
birth, a typical nerve cell may communicate directly with several
thousand other cells. The growth of the brain after birth consists
of the further proliferation of connections. By the time of adulthood
many nerve cells are making direct connections with as many as a quarter
of a million other cells.
Similar trends can be observed in human
society. For the last few centuries the number of ÒcellsÓ
in the embryonic global brain has been proliferating. But today population
growth is slowing, and at the same time we are moving into the next
phaseÑthe linking of the billions of human minds into a single
integrated network. The more complex our global telecommunication
capabilities become the more human society is beginning to look like
a planetary nervous system. The global brain is beginning to function.
This awakening is not only apparent
to us, it can even be detected millions of miles out in space. Before
1900, any being curious enough to take a "planetary EEG"
(i.e., to measure the electromagnetic activity of the planet) would
have observed only random, naturally occurring activity, such as that
produced by lightning. Today, however, the space around the planet
is teeming with millions of different signals, some of them broadcasts
to large numbers of people, some of them personal communications,
and some of them the chatter of computers exchanging information.
As the usable radio bands fill up, we find new ways of cramming information
into them, and new spectra of energy, such as light, are being utilized,
with the potential of further expanding our communication capacities.
With near-instant linkage of humanity
through this communications technology, and the rapid and wholesale
dissemination of information, Marshall McLuhan's vision of the world
as a global village is fast becoming a reality. From an isolated cottage
in a forest in England, I can dial a number in Fiji, and it takes
the same amount of time for my voice to reach down the telephone line
to Fiji as it does for my brain to tell my finger to touch the dial.
As far as time to communicate is concerned, the planet has shrunk
so much that the other cells of the global brain are no further away
from our brains than are the extremities of our own bodies.
At the same time as the speed of global
interaction is increasing, so is the complexity. In 1994 the worldwide
telecommunications network had a billion telephones. Yet this network,
intricate as it might seem, represents only a minute fraction of the
communication terminals in the brain, the trillions of synapses through
which nerve cells interact. According to John McNulty, a British computer
consultant, the global telecommunications network of 1975 was no more
complex than a region of the brain the size of a pea. But overall
data-processing capacity is doubling every two and a half years, and
if this rate of increase is sustained, the global telecommunications
network could equal the brain in complexity by the year 2000. If this
seems to be an incredibly rapid development, it is probably because
few of us can fully grasp just how fast things are evolving.
The changes that this will bring will
be so great that their full impact may well be beyond our imagination.
No longer will we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals; we will
know ourselves to be a part of a rapidly integrating global network,
the nerve cells of an awakened global brain.
"Towards a Global
Brain" is a chapter of Peter Russel's book The Global
Brain Awakens.
