5,000 Days of the WWW: A Reflection 2,897 Days Later

"5,000 Days of the WWW” is a video of a talk given by Kevin Kelly, Chief Editor of Wired Magazine, it showcases his reflection on the first 5,000 days in the life of the internet and his predictions for the next 5,000 days (watch the video below).

I was astounded at some of the information he presented, mostly with the sheer power of the internet. The release of the internet was a paradigm shift for humanity; in a mere 5,000 days the internet changed the way the world operates, had the complexity of one human brain, and had become the most reliable machine that was ever made. At one point in the video Kelly calculated that in 30 years the internet will have the complexity of 6 billion human brains and that by 2040 have a greater processing power than humanity! He talks about how every screen (cell phones, television, media outlets) will become a portal or window into one machine, that the internet is the machine.  Kelly labels this a McLuhan reversal, that humans will be an extension of the machine. Essentially we will become the web, and the web will have extended beyond a machine, it will be an organism that we interact with.

The web is 7,897 days old today. A little more than half way through the next 5,000 days many of Kelly's predictions have already come into effect (the use of social networks like Facebook, smart phones, internet recognition software, RSS feeds). The power of the internet is incomparable, humans are already an extension of this machine. The majority of world citizens use the web as a portal into the global world on a daily basis. The web contains all this information, information we access and propagate to others and to ourselves. Humans are internalizing the web, in an odd way this mechanical organism of data has influenced the way in which the human race is evolving on an intellectual level. It is hard to distinguish the machine from the populous already. The continued growth of the web is inevitable, unpredictable and seemingly endless. As Kelly stated, "the web will be something different" and we must "get good at believing in the impossible".