{"id":1911,"date":"2010-01-09T22:01:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-10T06:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2010-01-09T22:02:43","modified_gmt":"2010-01-10T06:02:43","slug":"edge-question-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/09\/edge-question-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Edge Question 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year the literary agent John Brockman poses a question and gets people who have worked with him to supply answers. This year\u2019s question was:
\nHOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?<\/p>\n

All the answers can be found at the Edge site<\/a>. I\u2019ll reprint my answer below, along with some pictures I took in Vasona Park in Los Gatos today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Search and Emergence <\/em><\/p>\n

Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times, we imagined that we\u2019d need a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence to make the global mind work—we thought of it as resembling an extremely smart person. The conventional Hollywood image for the global mind\u2019s interface was a talking head on a wall-sized screen.<\/p>\n

And now, in 2010, we have the global mind. Search-engines, user-curated encyclopedias, images of everything under the sun, clever apps to carry out simple computations—it\u2019s all happening. But old-school artificial intelligence is barely involved at all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As it happens, data, and not algorithms, is where it\u2019s at. Put enough information into the planetary information cloud, crank up a search engine, and you\u2019ve got an all-knowing global mind. The answers emerge.<\/p>\n

Initially people resisted understanding this simple fact. Perhaps this was because the task of posting a planet\u2019s worth of data seemed so intractable. There were hopes that some magically simple AI program might be able to extrapolate a full set of information from a few well-chosen basic facts—just a person can figure out another person on the basis of a brief conversation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At this point, it looks like there aren\u2019t going to be any incredibly concise aha-type AI programs for emulating how we think. The good news is that this doesn\u2019t matter. Given enough data, a computer network can fake intelligence. And—radical notion—maybe that\u2019s what our wetware brains are doing, too. Faking it with search and emergence. Searching a huge data base for patterns.<\/p>\n

The seemingly insurmountable task of digitizing the world has been accomplished by ordinary people. This results from the happy miracle that the internet is that it\u2019s unmoderated and cheap to use. Practically anyone can post information onto the web, whether as comments, photos, or full-blown web pages. We\u2019re like worker ants in a global colony, dragging little chunks of data this way and that. We do it for free; it\u2019s something we like to do.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Note that the internet wouldn\u2019t work as a global mind if it were a completely flat and undistinguished sea of data. We need a way to locate the regions that are most desirable in terms of accuracy and elegance. An early, now-discarded, notion was that we would need some kind of information czar or committee to rank the data. But, here again, the anthill does the work for free.<\/p>\n

By now it seems obvious that the only feasible way to rank the internet\u2019s offerings is to track the online behaviors of individual users. By now it\u2019s hard to remember how radical and rickety such a dependence upon emergence used to seem. No control! What a crazy idea. But it works. No centralized system could ever keep pace.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An even more surprising success is found in user-curated encyclopedias. When I first heard of this notion, I was sure it wouldn\u2019t work. I assumed that trolls and zealots would infect all the posts. But the internet has a more powerful protection system than I\u2019d realized. Individual users are the primary defenders.<\/p>\n

We might compare the internet to a biological system in which new antibodies emerge to combat new pathogens. Malware is forever changing, but our defenses are forever evolving as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I am a novelist, and the task of creating a coherent and fresh novel always seems in some sense impossible. What I\u2019ve learned over the course of my career is that I need to trust in emergence—also known as the muse. I assemble a notes document filled with speculations, overheard conversations, story ideas, and flashy phrases. Day after day, I comb through my material, integrating it into my mental net, forging links and ranks. And, fairly reliably, the scenes and chapters of my novel emerge. It\u2019s how my creative process works.<\/p>\n

In our highest mental tasks, any dream of an orderly process is a will-o\u2019-the wisp. And there\u2019s no need to feel remorseful about this. Search and emergence are good enough for the global mind—and they\u2019re good enough for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year the literary agent John Brockman poses a question and gets people who have worked with him to supply answers. This year\u2019s question was: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? All the answers can be found at the Edge site. I\u2019ll reprint my answer below, along with some pictures I took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1913,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}