from the book: After the Internet: Alien Intelligence
Long, long ago, I was employed as a rocket scientist. A real rocket scientist. I did research on the rocket motors for the British Blue Streak missile. The attempt to create a rocket motor that was extremely powerful, but small, caused severe overheating problems that would sometimes melt the walls of the combustion chamber. Occasionally the motor would explode.
To try to understand what was happening, we built a laboratory device to simulate the heat transfer in the walls of the combustion chamber. The device consisted of a large vat of molten wax with electronic components set in it to simulate the heat flow. Readings from the test firings of the motor were manually fed to the heat-simulating gadget, and the rig was tinkered with endlessly in an attempt to make the motor run more smoothly.
One day it was announced that the Duke of Edinburgh was to visit the laboratory. Total panic ensued. The place was cleaned top to toe, and cynical bearded researchers were told to wear ties. To my horror I found that the bath of wax had been unplugged and the wax had solidified, so I plugged in its heater. It took hours to remelt the wax and only the bottom part of it was liquid when Rolls-Royces started to arrive. Unfortunately the wax expanded as it melted, putting steadily growing pressure on the still-solid wax at the top. Suddenly, as the royal party was approaching, molten wax burst through the top and shot up like the geysers in Yellowstone Park. The entire room with all its equipment and research assistants was left dripping with hot wax.
That was the end of an era. Simulations started to be done on computers not in physical analogs. I decided to learn all I could about computing and joined IBM.
It is sometimes difficult to anticipate the effects of a new technology. By 1957 I was involved in data processing, but that year the editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall wrote, “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” He was wrong. Data processing became the world’s most successful growth industry. I was destined to write many books on it for Prentice Hall.
Those early beginnings were the start of something that would change society across the planet. Today we stand at the threshold of one of the most sweeping changes in history, brought about by digital technology.
* * * * *
At the start of this new century two revolutions are in progress, both destined to change our lives in fundamental ways. The first is the Internet, which is bringing an age of social connectivity to the planet. It brought e-commerce and ushered in an era of business reinvention. The second is the growth of radically new forms of computer-generated “intelligence.” Many think that when computers are more advanced they will be able to replicate human intelligence. In fact we are discovering that the human mind is much more subtle and complex than we realized. Computers will not be like us. We are seeing the early stages of new forms of computer intelligence that are radically, totally, fundamentally different from human intelligence and, in narrowly focused areas, vastly more powerful.
Historians in the future may say that computing reached its infancy when, instead of merely following human logic in a sequence of basic steps, it began to exhibit an intelligence of its own, one very different from human intelligence. Software is already in use that can automatically evolve, “breed,” or “learn” valuable behavior of its own. This does not make computers intelligent in the way people are. Instead, an alien type of intelligence is developing.
It is time to give up the twentieth-century notion that artificial intelligence is like human intelligence.
Some of the mechanisms of this alien intelligence can run largely under their own steam. A computer can execute logic millions of times faster than humans can, so, when we initiate a self-perpetuating computer process, interesting things can happen. The computerized “thought” that results is utterly different from human thought and so complex that we cannot follow its logic. It will change the nature of science. The challenge to business leaders is to harness this new capability.
Revolutions can be scary. Sir Peter Bonfield, the head of British Telecom, commented about today’s business, “If you’re not scared, you don’t understand what’s happening.” The reinvention of business is radical. New companies with new thinking are racing ahead of blue-chip companies. Their stock market valuations often seem beyond reason. Electronic business is scary because it is a self-feeding chain reaction. The new computer intelligence will likewise become a self-feeding chain reaction-but it will ultimately become more scary because it will feed at electronic speed.
The revolutions of e-commerce and computer intelligence will support and amplify one another. Electronic commerce will become a fast-changing battlefield where great fortunes are made and lost, and computerized intelligence will become extremely important to this new commerce. The effectiveness of advertising, global marketing, learning about individual customers, and rapid adaptation to feedback will increasingly depend on the new forms of electronic intelligence. The new intelligence will affect investment, games, medicine, weapons and warfare, and science in general. It will change our lives.
| We are seeing the early stages of new forms of computer intelligence that are fundamentally different from human intelligence and vastly more powerful. |
The mechanisms of the Internet were created two decades before the Internet took off on a large scale. The nonhuman intelligence we describe in this book may take a similar time to mature (although change is faster now). Its evolution is tracking about two decades behind the Internet’s. However, some corporations are already using it, and some individuals are becoming masters of putting this new intelligence to work.
The marriage of the future Internet and the new automated intelligence will create a global chain reaction of immense consequences. With the possible exception of genetic engineering it is difficult to imagine a technology that will have a more profound effect on the human condition.
Technology once existed at the periphery of our culture. As alien intelligence spreads and feeds on itself, linked across the planet on a ubiquitous Internet, it will affect every aspect of our lives.
E-Business: A Revolution Begins
Today’s Internet is slow and crude. It is only beginning to have an effect on how most people live. But it has already caused a revolution in the way business is conducted. In 1995 business transactions on the Internet were almost zero. In 1999 most chief executives reacted to the Internet with great cynicism, saying, “Show me anyone who’s made a profit with the Internet.” In 2000 most chief executives were passing on a quote from Andy Grove, the head of Intel: “In a few years if you are not an Internet business you will not be in business.” By 2003, according to Forrester Research, business-to-consumer Internet sales will grow to more than $100 billion, and business-to-business revenues will reach more than $3 trillion.1 These figures represent a financial tsunami of a magnitude never before seen. By 2003 the rest of the world will be catching up and then fast surpassing the U.S. volume. Some individuals will make grand fortunes. Many traditional corporations will be swept away.
The Internet is not simply another distribution channel. It is not simply another way to get the same old marketing information to customers. To make good use of the Internet, companies must fundamentally reinvent how they do business-their culture, their processes, their business models. Pioneers such as Dell, Cisco, and dot-com companies are setting new standards, inventing new capabilities, and insisting that their suppliers do the same. Traditional businesses must change-quickly-to avoid being destroyed by newcomers.
Most corporations look as though they are designed for an age that is gone. They need radically to transform if they are to remain competitive in an age of mercurial change. Transforming an old arthritic enterprise into a nimble corporation designed to evolve constantly and rapidly is a traumatic and risky quantum leap. The Economist says: “Recent experience suggests it takes little more than two years for a start-up to formulate an innovative business idea, establish a Web presence and begin to dominate its chosen sector. By then it may be too late for slow-moving traditional businesses to respond.”
The Growth of Nonhuman Intelligence
The Internet’s quantum leap in computer connectivity coincides with the growth of new types of intelligence in computing.
For half a century computing has been growing furiously. Only now, as it is reaching its infancy, can we begin to perceive what a precocious child we have created. That infancy in computing is beginning, as computers-rather than following human logic in a sequence of basic steps-start to exhibit an intelligence of their own, fundamentally different from human intelligence. We are now seeing the first baby steps of this new intelligence.
That is what this book is about. It is a very important subject because we will use this nonhuman intelligence to help run our world. As computers acquire this very different capability, they will use it to become ever more intelligent, creating a chain reaction of nonhuman intelligence that is becoming rapidly more powerful. The infant will grow up. It will become vitally important to business and will change basic methods in science.
When computing matures, artificial intelligence will be nothing like human intelligence. The human mind is diabolically complex and subtle; we will not get close to imitating it with computers. Machine intelligence will be a new type of intelligence-crude, at first, compared with the subtleties of the human mind but capable of improving its own power until it becomes awesome.
The vast majority of computing today is used to emulate human thought processes. But in the future, the primary value of computers will perhaps be to “think” in ways that humans cannot.
Software is coming into use that can automatically evolve, “breed” solutions, or “learn” valuable behavior of its own. Sometimes its behavior is completely unpredictable. When software is designed to evolve, it can do so fast. We can’t follow its logic in detail, but we use it because it is very valuable. That is “alien intelligence.”
We define alien intelligence as processes executed on a computer that are so complex that a human can neither follow the logic step-by-step nor come to the same result by other means. We couldn’t write a conventional program to obtain the same result.
“Alien intelligence” refers to a growing family of techniques in use today that enable computers to recognize patterns that humans cannot recognize, “learn” behavior that humans cannot learn, explore data too vast for human exploration, “breed” programs that humans cannot write, assemble logical reasoning too complex for humans, evolve “brain mechanisms” that humans cannot design, and exhibit emergent properties that humans cannot anticipate. These things happen at electronic speed. A computer can execute logic millions of times faster than humans can, so we initiate self-evolving computer processes that may become very complex.
Usually today we have to tell computers blow-by-blow what to do, so writing programs for them is a painfully slow process. Using alien-intelligence techniques we don’t give the computer blow-by-blow instructions. Instead we give it a narrowly focused initiative of its own, very limited in its functionality but capable of extreme speed. This is a fundamental break with the past-a quantum-leap change in capability.
When software can be set up so that it “breeds,” evolves, or in some way changes itself automatically, the changes take place fast. When the techniques become mature and widespread there will be a chain reaction of rapid iterations (even though most software will remain traditional for a long time to come). The change would be rapid even if the Internet didn’t exist, but when hundreds of millions of computers are interconnected the potential for change is awesome. This potential for such rapid evolution of software (and, as we shall see, hardware) will be the rocket fuel for the human chain reaction of ideas about how to use the Internet.
The future of computing depends on the extent to which we are prepared to give up blow-by-blow control and let the machines race into unknown territory.
Where we can create electronic “life,” it can mutate trillions of times faster than biological life. One might even wonder if it is part of nature’s grand design that eventually evolution should occur in billions of machines linked by speed-of-light telecommunications.
When software “breeds” or evolves today, it does so in order to meet goals that humans specify. In the future we will want to set it up so that it improves its own goals. As machines race into unknown territory the question is: Can we control them? Are they bound, ultimately, to get out of control?
The twenty-first century will be a century of alien intelligence. As the century progresses, computers will become immensely more powerful than today-eventually billions of times more powerful-and there will be billions of machines interconnected by worldwide networks that transmit at the speed of light. Both software and hardware will “breed,” “learn,” and evolve, eventually at devastating speed.
For the next ten years our goal will be to light the fires of alien intelligence because of its great value to science, health care, entertainment, corporate efficiency, and moneymaking in general. Eventually the fires will be self-feeding. They will become a roaring forest fire around the planet. When this happens, we will become concerned about how to control the fire. Already we have “firewalls” to protect corporate computers, but they are designed for an age when software was easy to control.
The main concern now is how we light the fires. How do we put today’s alien intelligence to work? That is what this book is mainly about. The last chapter discusses the future and its serious concerns. Is alien intelligence dangerous? Can we control the raging forest fires that we have started?
Alien Intelligence at Work
Alien intelligence is already in use today in diverse forms. Some organizations use it spectacularly; to others it sounds like science fiction. William Gibson, comments, “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” When I see what’s going on in some of the leading-edge laboratories and then go to traditional-minded organizations, it’s clear that it is very unevenly distributed.
Alien intelligence techniques can be powerful because they enable computers to “learn.” Some people object to the idea of computer learning because, they say, it is quite unlike the concept of human learning. When a computer “learns” it improves its knowledge, as a human does, but this is a mechanistic process. There is no cognizance involved; the computer merely becomes able to exploit better choices of action among an almost infinite number of possibilities. It can learn many thousands of times faster than a human learns but without the type of understanding that requires common sense.
A computer can learn about you electronically and understand your needs in certain specific areas. Computers or electronic sensors can be relentless in monitoring and collecting information. Some people feel uncomfortable at the thought that computers can learn about them, but this will be part of the society we are creating. Machines can observe our behavior and update their knowledge about us. When I sign on to the Internet bookstore Amazon.com, the software greets me by saying, “Hello, James Martin. Here’s a list of items we think you’ll like.” It has noted the books that I buy or examine in detail, and learned about my taste in books. Recently I bought a book at a real (nonelectronic) bookstore, and although I thought that this book was different from the types of books I find at Amazon, to my amazement the next time I signed on to Amazon it was recommending the very same title to me.
Just as Amazon learns about its customers’ tastes in books and music, so all the processes of electronic commerce can be designed so that software can learn what customers are likely to buy, what changes they would like in the products, where to look for new customers, and so on. Clearly, having computers silently and relentlessly learning about customers has much commercial potential.
With alien intelligence techniques, computers can be trained to detect patterns that humans couldn’t possibly recognize. They can be put to work analyzing, trying to make sense of overwhelming quantities of data, and taking action on the basis of knowledge acquired from the process. They can forage through masses of data, learning about customers, sales patterns, fraud, the spread of epidemics, and numerous other subjects.
Perhaps somewhat more alarming, HNC Software, Inc., uses alien intelligence technology to predict when individuals or organizations might go bankrupt. Such a prediction is useful to banks that issue credit cards. The software often flags cardholders who eventually do go bankrupt months before it is clear to humans that bankruptcy is inevitable. HNC encourages credit card issuers to join its “bankruptcy consortium.” It is then able to collect an increasingly large body of historical data from many organizations about bankruptcies. The software makes itself able to detect the telltale patterns that may warn about bankruptcies.
John Deere improved its business by allowing farmers a great diversity of options in the products they order. Some farmers want four row planters, others want twenty-four row planters, and some want something in between. Planters can apply liquid fertilizer, dry fertilizer, or no fertilizer. John Deere offers over a million such permutations.
While such a rich set of choices is great for marketing, it can cause severe headaches in manufacturing. At John Deere, half-assembled machines were bunched up at one workstation while another workstation remained idle. It was difficult to control inventory.3 A solution was found that employed alien intelligence. Software learned to “breed” factory schedules, different each day, far better than humans could produce. Planters now flow smoothly through the production line, with monthly output up sharply. We will soon see diverse examples of “breeding” software or procedures that we wouldn’t ourselves be able to design.
Electronic devices have been built that can recognize people’s faces. One such product from the Miros Corporation is being used as a security measure in some ATMs. In another security application, a door may open only if it recognizes your face.
In some countries the police use automated cameras to record the license plates of cars exceeding the speed limit. It is equally possible to record your face. Suppose you have a number of unpaid parking tickets, enough so that the police would arrest you if they could. You go to an ATM to withdraw money. As usual the security cameras record you. But now alien intelligence can match the image of your face with the one on your driver’s license and transmit your location to the cops on patrol in your neighborhood.
Similarly, machines have been built that can recognize human emotions. A television set, or computer, will watch its viewers and detect their emotional response to advertisements. Marketers will use them to make multiple variants of advertisements, gauge the impact of each, and be able to display the ones that evoke the most positive responses from individual viewers. Computers have been designed that read human body language better than humans do.
Systems can be equipped with electronic senses that are constantly alert and intelligent. Embedded alien intelligence gives computers the ability continuously to analyze masses of data from sensors and act on the information when desirable. Sensors in your car, like sensors everywhere, will gather data continuously. Chips can analyze these data to prevent accidents. They can recognize if you are driving erratically. Insurance companies may lower your premium if your car sensors continually send a good report. A father may know if his teenage son is driving like a maniac.
Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The attraction and management of intellectual capital will determine which institutions and nations will survive and prosper, and which will not…. The rules, customs, skills and talents necessary to uncover, capture, produce, preserve and exploit information are now one of humankind’s most important assets.” The ability to extract actionable knowledge from a vast mass of data will become critical to the pursuit of wealth. This used to be done by humans scanning the data. Computers, sometimes using the Internet and sometimes using automated sensors, will create an overwhelming deluge of data. As this grows, computers will be needed automatically to spot patterns and search for insights. Long ago we needed a genius like Kepler to look at the volumes of data about planetary positions and derive Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. But that took Kepler most of his lifetime, and there are few Keplers around. Today, turning a deluge of data into actionable insight requires intricate computing. The key to unlocking valuable insights in science and business will be achieving the right combination of human intelligence and computer intelligence, and recognizing that these are fundamentally different.
Increasingly, corporations will confront one another with computerized systems. Electronic complexity is increasing and reaction times are decreasing as computerized systems become more advanced. The ultimate consequence of computerized competition is that the battle between the corporations becomes ever faster and more automated with deep alien intelligence. The methods that have served business well for many decades will be replaced with methods appropriate for real-time intelligent-Web interaction.
Chain Reactions
The Internet and alien intelligence both have immense potential power because, as noted, they become chain reactions. In a chain reaction one event causes other events; each of these, in turn, causes yet other events, and so on. Unless something slows down or interrupts a chain reaction, explosive growth occurs.
The Internet’s success is the reason success can continue. Each generation of new ideas provides better capability for designing the next generation. The high market cap of the Internet companies causes extreme aggression. Advances lead to further advances.
As computers become intelligent, this chain reaction computer intelligence can improve its own capability automatically, the potential is there for machines to become more intelligent at a geometrically increasing rate.
| Technology once existed at the periphery of our culture. As alien intelligence spreads on a ubiquitous Internet, it will affect every aspect of our lives |
The World Wide Web spread its capabilities worldwide almost immediately because it used the Internet. Web addresses now appear on television ads in most of the world. The applications of alien intelligence techniques will also spread worldwide. When alien intelligence and the Internet are teamed up, they reinforce one another. Machines will transmit their capabilities to other machines. With fiber optics, the circuits that connect computers will expand like floodgates opening. Computers will be able to exchange software, mine worldwide data warehouses, use intelligent search engines, and feed each other with fast-growing bodies of knowledge. New corporations, wanting to go public, will race to master the new methods. As the Internet becomes intelligent its new methods will spread like a brushfire.
The rate of change is likely to continue to increase geometrically, not linearly, because there is positive feedback in research and development. Good ideas feed on themselves, and the Internet makes the feedback worldwide.
As its chain reaction develops, the Net’s evolution will grow geometrically faster. However fast the Internet’s rate of change is today, the Web is still only at the beginning of its true potential. It will soon be accessible to the public everywhere via television sets and cellular phones. It will use software and agents designed to learn at a rapid pace. Data in vast data warehouses will be designed for use by computers, rather than by people, to produce automated results. Search mechanisms will become more capable. But perhaps most important, the Internet will harness the new capabilities of alien intelligence. The pace of change may seem fast today, but it will become much faster when self-evolving software adds fuel to the Internet.
Driving these linked chain reactions is likely to be a main occupation of commerce for many years ahead. When will it stop? Not before our individual lives and all of society have been changed in inexorable ways.
Stages of Growth
When an industry is radically transformed it usually happens in three stages.
First, frameworks used for new facilities tend to copy the old. Mankind always wants to augment the past rather than break free from it. Early movies often looked like stage plays that had been filmed. It took decades to invent the rapid editing, special effects, and visual storytelling of today’s films. Technology with radical potential for change has used words like “horseless carriage,” “wireless telegraphy,” and “paperless office.” Eventually it became clear that cars changed the world in a way that “carriages” did not, and broadcasting changed the world in ways that telegraphy could not. Similarly, an enterprise well designed for cyberspace has no resemblance to one with paper-based offices. It is time for computers to break free from automating the past just as “wireless” needed to break free from “telegraphy.”
Second, a new but fairly simple framework is developed. Instead of paper catalogues, corporations set up Web pages and use Web catalogues. Purchase orders and trading documents are sent electronically, computer-to-computer, instead of by snail-mail. Price auctions are used. Virtual operations are set up. This doesn’t require rocket science. Any company can do it.
Third, big winners emerge who have learned to play the new games with great skill. At first the main competitive advantage comes from being the first to market; later competitive advantage and survival come from playing the game more and more intelligently. The mechanisms of e-business will evolve from procedures that are simple to procedures that use intricate forms of computerized intelligence. In the world we will describe there will be spectacular winners; the also-ran corporations will be far less profitable than the winners. The phrase “winner-takes-most” describes it well. The winner will have better information and better ways of deriving insight from that information. In the third stage, the mighty tumble. New corporations master the new ideas, while traditional executives are left desperate.
A few new corporations try to go straight to stage three. Cisco perceived that the world’s telecommunications switching and routing equipment was obsolete, optimized for continuous voice channels. It needed to be replaced by a “new world” of high-speed computerized packet-switching. Knowing that such technology would change rapidly, Cisco decided to outsource all manufacturing so as never to be stuck with obsolete plants. If it didn’t manufacture anything, it could change as fast as the technology changed. Cisco grew fast by buying companies in this business. It used the Web to communicate with both its suppliers and its customers. Suppliers constantly do real-time bidding for contracts. At the time of this writing 80 percent of Cisco’s sales come from the Web. Fifty-five percent of orders are untouched by human hands. The savings from using the Web contribute $500 million to Cisco’s $1.5 billion in overall earnings-a third of its earnings.
The Electronic Jungle
The Internet has no master plan; it just grows like a jungle-constantly, amorphously, and unpredictably. Nobody is explicitly managing the Internet. Instead, millions of people contribute to its _content in creative and fundamentally different ways. Each does his or her own thing, steadily adding to a common electronic resource. Different communities in the jungle have radically different cultures, but they coexist, often stimulating one another. As the Internet becomes vigorous in China and the non-Western world, it will develop understanding and appreciation of other forms of culture (for example, Chinese medicine). The Net puts many cultures into close proximity, and so they learn from each other.
This electronic jungle is far more broad and grand in scope than anything created by IBM, ATT, or the International Standards Organization. No corporation could have invented New York or Shanghai or the Internet. Electronics has its own worldwide ecosystem with intricate relationships among its members.
The Internet jungle, like nature’s jungles, is a vast tangle of complex components interacting in unpredictable ways. It is becoming populated with an immense diversity of software creatures and intelligent systems. Alien intelligence technologies will enable these e-critters to “breed” and “evolve” and “learn.” This crucible of human intelligence and software intelligence will produce wonderfully unpredictable results.
The electronic jungle will grow very rapidly in transmission speed, computing power, knowledge storage capacity, and alien intelligence. As alien intelligence takes root in the Internet, it will spread, establishing its role in the jungle. The Net evolves and grows like society grows, but at a lightning pace. The technologies I describe in this book will push the evolution of the Net into hyperdrive.
Although the Internet has junglelike characteristics, it is different from nature’s jungles. A jungle has inertia because it is physical; the Net is a world of bits moving at the speed of electronics. The physical jungle is mature and stable in its overall behavior. The Net is not; it will change at great speed, twisting unpredictably.
Electronic Herds
Thomas Friedman, in his wonderful book about globalism, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, describes how the investors of the world have become linked in their knowledge and behavior into what he refers to as an “Electronic Herd.” The Electronic Herd consists of vast numbers of often-anonymous stock, bond, currency, and multinational investors connected by screens and networks. Nobody is in charge of the herd. It has its own behavior.
Friedman comments: “The basic truth about globalization is this: No one is in charge-not George Soros, not ‘Great Powers’.… I know that’s hard to accept. It’s like telling people there’s no God. We all want to believe that somebody is in charge and responsible.… Democracies vote about a government’s policies once every two or four years. But the Electronic Herd votes every minute of every hour of every day.”
Analysts track the herd’s movements all day on their Bloomberg screens. The herd analogy came from Merrill Lynch, which used to be the largest broker and advertised itself with spectacular images of a “Thundering Herd.” In the new world the herd doesn’t thunder but is far more devastating in its speed and magnitude.
Friedman’s Electronic Herd relates to investment, but the Net has numerous herds. It has manufacturers of car parts wanting to attract the attention of the giant car companies and linking to global car-industry “exchanges” to buy car parts. It has herds of people wanting to buy a used copy of John Grisham’s latest bestseller at a low price. When the Internet became popular with hackers, teenagers, and university students, it became a wild, uncontrolled resource, constantly evolving in new directions. Since it connected millions of creative and playful people across the planet, it became a live thing with new ideas raging across it.
Millions of people react to what the Internet can do. People’s choices have impact on the future behavior of systems. The software or its owners respond to the greed, obsessions, berserkness, and power-lusts of the Internet herds, and the Web becomes a wild evolving organism. Net users react to new fashions, marketing thrusts, and technologies, and can stampede on a grand scale. Gold rush fever can strike at a moment’s notice. One little company, EarthWeb, went public in 1998. Despite revenues in the first half of 1998 of less than a million dollars and a loss of three million dollars in that time period, the company quickly acquired a market capitalization of $400 million. The Internet company eToys.com went public in 1999, with tiny sales, but its market capitalization was greater than that of Toys “R” Us, which had sales over $7 billion. In the week of April 10, 2000, however, many such gold rush companies lost most of their value when their stock prices plummeted; the market in tech stocks has proved volatile.
Computerized marketing mechanisms identify the winners and amplify their success. Millions of individual decisions to buy or not to buy reinforce each other, creating a boom or collapse, which in turn feeds back to shape the buying conditions that produced it. Virtually everything and everybody is caught up in a vast, non-linear web of incentives, constraints, and connections.
Corporations, whether they like it or not, exist and compete in this fast-changing jungle. The total reinvention of the nature of work will require new organizational structures and new human-technology partnerships. The change in the nature of corporations will cause economic changes with wrenching political implications. The evolution of cyberspace has gone far enough for us to know that it will drastically change society around the planet. Some countries will want to resist it, but to do so is to wreck their economy. By 2005 hundreds of billions of dollars a day of consumers’ electronic cash will race across national frontiers, resulting in a growing separation of economy and state. The cyberspace economy will be worldwide.
Outsiders
Throughout the history of computing, evolving from the massive isolated machines to the wild world of cyberspace, some of the most critical developments have come entirely from outsiders. Kids in garages created the personal computer industry. A college dropout produced the operating system for the IBM personal computer. The chip industry was spawned by a gaggle of start-up companies. A scientist in Europe’s nuclear lab, CERN, invented the World Wide Web. Amazingly, no telecommunications company was involved in the birth or early growth of the Internet.
The future of knowledge technology will be dominated by global giants in the computer, software, and telecommunications industries, but, as in the past, many of the key new ideas will come from newcomers. The venture capital industry plays a critical role in trying to recognize these future winners and provide them with funding. This is one the world’s grandest crap games, where untold millions are lost and won. People who wouldn’t invest a dollar at Las Vegas, because the odds are against you, mortgage their house (as I did) and gamble the money on a start-up they believe in. The casino is spreading from Silicon Valley to cyberspace. Conversations of college kids around the world today are about how they might make a fortune with a high-tech start-up.
| As machines race into unknown territory, the question is: Can we control them? Are they bound, ultimately, to get out of control? |
This is an explosive mixture: cyberspace permeating our planet, electronic commerce becoming huge (soon trillions of dollars a year), entrepreneurs everywhere struggling to make the next fortune, an electronic jungle connecting the planet’s people and machines, and now, perhaps most potent of all, the chain reaction growth of a new type of intelligence.
A Billion Kids in Cyberspace
There will soon be almost two billion teenagers on the planet. About half of them will soon have access to television sets or inexpensive gadgets connected to the Internet. A billion kids in cyberspace constitute a youth culture that will develop furiously and surprise us in many ways. It is the planet’s first global culture-and a force to be reckoned with.
They are a huge market accessible in remarkably focused ways. The Internet is so popular that it has brought de facto standards to an industry that could never agree about standards. For similar reasons it will bring to mankind a common second language-an English of diverse dialects. Esperanto never caught on; the Internet did. Two to three billion people around the planet are now trying to learn or improve their English because it is the language of mass-delivered entertainment, most pop songs, global news, and most of the interesting stuff on the Internet. Having a common second language is an ever more vital factor in the growing unity of mankind.
In the 1990s the Internet spread at an astonishing rate from a U.S. academic community to ordinary people around the planet. While computer-phobic commentators in aging country clubs were resisting the changes, hordes of young tigers plunged into the excitement of the Web, generating sky-high stock prices. Teenagers in Delhi and Penang chatter on the Internet to virtual friends around the planet. The wild fantasies of multiuser games on the Net are preparing teenagers for the computerized work environment of the future. Third World students, to their amazement, discover that doing research on the Net is often better than doing it in the great libraries of the rich countries.
Internet television will become a major instrument of commerce, used for shopping, advertising, games, news, e-mail, education, and exploring the ever-richer diversity of the Web. In Beijing almost every teenager in McDonald’s has a cell phone; soon such devices will be linked to the Internet. Soon there will be hundreds of millions of pocket wireless devices in use. Except in deprived areas, children around the planet will grow up with the Internet, sending jokes to one another, making friends they will never meet, and playing the Web’s seductive games with the fickle energy of childhood.
Sorcerer’s Apprentices
The power of the microchip is doubling every eighteen months. The speed of fiber optics is doubling every year. It is like driving a car whose speed is increasing exponentially.
Rather than being firmly in control, we seem to be like the sorcerer’s apprentice, having started something on a grand scale that we can barely steer. We’re not able to pull the plug because our welfare, corporate profits, and defense are now too dependent on technology. A big question is: How can we drive the vehicle we are in as its velocity becomes exponentially faster?
As machines become ultraintelligent and “alien,” will we be swept away by a tide of cultural change? Or will we employ the machines to evolve and improve our own culture? Some people will go along with the ride and love it. Others will hang on by their fingernails. Many people will be out of their depth, looking for cover. To masses of underprivileged people it will be a time of opportunity when rules are rewritten. Society and its traditional institutions will be shaken to their core.
In the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice there was a sorcerer. Here we are all apprentices.
Riding the Tiger
We have started a fast-moving tiger, a process of inventing a global civilization. Some corporations will ride the beast, achieving spectacular results, fully realizing that they cannot get off lest they be eaten. Many will be eaten because they don’t know how to ride the tiger.
| As new corporations master the new ideas, traditional executives are left desperate. The mighty tumble. |
This book will show you the sort of tiger that’s about to be unleashed. It is an extraordinary story to tell. We’ll start by explaining what alien intelligence is and how it will change thinking processes. Next we’ll discuss how it fits in with the pervasive growth of the Internet. We can then talk about how it will change corporations and jobs, creating intense competition where the winner in each area tends to take most of the profits and everyone else struggles. To become a winner takes reinvention. A vital question for managers in traditional corporations will be: Can you change fast enough?
The first part of this book introduces alien intelligence. Part II describes how the masters of the new ideas will change our world. Part III explains alien-intelligence techniques in more detail, and the last chapter addresses the fascinating question of whether we can control machines that become highly intelligent in far different ways than ourselves.
The megarich of ten years from now will not be maharajas, great military conquerors, railroad robber barons, or oil sheiks. They will be gutsy, risk-taking iconoclasts who are masters of putting alien intelligence to work. They may be great adventurers, but not like Cecil Rhodes. Today’s college kids should reflect that great wealth will not be dug out of the ground or conquered with armies, as in the past; it will come from the mind.
