by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
One Machine to rule them alll
Another muse from Kevin Kelly...
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/st_infoporn_1607
"Never mind Web 3.0: The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer. Collectively, we are already assembling this megacomputer from our billions of Net-connected PCs, cell phones, PDAs, and the like. As an increasing number and variety of devices are lashed to one another via the Internet and other communication systems, they form the components of what we might call the One Machine.
Its circuit board encompasses the million copper wires and radio connections linking all the chips contained in the gadgets in your pocket, office, and car. Instead of being powered by a mere billion tiny transistors, as your typical personal desktop is, it runs on a billion PC chips, each with its own billion transistors. Its memory is the collective hard disks and flash drives of the world. Its RAM is the sum of all memory chips online. Every second, a Library of Congress worth of data flows through it. The program it runs — its initial OS — is the World Wide Web."
Have a read - don't know whether to be amazed or laugh..
Comments
Public Strategist said: Being lashed together is not the same as being One Machine. In a very Wired way, there's something very powerful lost in some oversimplification here. A simple example: my phone has 4Gb of storage. That's the best part of 4Gb more than my last phone had and has some very positive consequences, mainly to with the fact that I now generally don't bother to tote a separate MP3 player around with me. That's fine for me, but I am not sure that there is any meaningful sense is that the One Machine is any more powerful as a result.
Looking at the figures, a clear majority of each category of analysis is taken by personal computers and mobile phones - both of which are, in terms of the One Machine, dumb terminals rather than contributors to global device power.
Of course there is something big and powerful going on here. The fact that I just checked the numbers by looking at the Wired website rather than bothering going to the room where I put the magazine down yesterday is a trivial sign of just how the world has changed from the perspective of not very many years ago. Slightly less narcissistically, I wonder how many of those PCs and phones are primarily (or, in the case of the phones, even secondarily) used as network devices of any kind.
So I think the one-ness of the machine is to be seen in more granular - and so more interesting - ways. My home PCs now back themselves up (through a splendid and near-invisible service called Jungledisk) to Amazon S3 data storage. I am completely confident in the resilience of the data despite - or perhaps in part because - I have absolutely no idea where the backups are physically. Google's approach to spell checking is more interesting, if still not as useful, as its approach to search. Easy access to crowd-sourced stock photography means yet another industry is being disintermediated from a revenue stream based on scarcity of information. And so on.
One Machine doesn't quite capture all that. Perhaps we need another word. Network springs to mind. Or perhaps, since there are many networks, many of which are inter-connected, we should call it, I don't know, let's say, The Internet.
But that would make it harder to argue that all this is quite as new and surprising as Kevin Kelly would like us to think. And then what would poor Wired do?
posted over 3 years ago
Terry Ansari said: Well...my vote goes to "laugh", however, I might add the word "nervous" in front of it...there's no way that devices attached to The Machine are equivalent to dumb terminals. The fact that whatever you do on them (their underlying functions) can increasingly be controlled or modified by someone other than you, means they are far more than mere viewers into the Machine's world; the Machine then actually controls their function, purpose and evolution (not to mention what you might choose to share, for how long, for what purpose and with whom), effectively taking you and all of us along, perhaps and more likely, probably, without our express or full understanding...not meant to be as sinister as it might sound, but not something to blithely toss off and not for Kevin to wax romantically over...
posted over 3 years ago