TED Talk: At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?
Kevin Kelly has been publisher of the Whole Earth Review, exec editor at WIRED, founder of visionary nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and “cool tools.” He’s admired for his new perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and religion. Read more.
Kevin Kelly blogs at The Technium.
Librarian Jan Dawson posted this summary of Kelly’s talk:
- 10 years ago, we thought the web was going to be TV or better
- First lesson we’ve learned: believe in the impossible
- We’re creating ONE MACHINE
- 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links between webpages in the world.
- The web is a black hole, sucking everything into it
- The new economy is the marriage of embedding the digital into the material world
- All media becomes one media platform
- Attention is a currency
- McLuhan reversal: humans are extended senses of the machine! (McLuhan said machines are the extensions of the human senses)
- We’re in the third stage of linking data (see Tim Burners-Lee TED talk on “The next web of open/linked data”) Linking ideas to ideas: a level beyond pages and into items.
- You should be able to carry all your relationships around via social networking sites. This is where we’re heading. You have to be OPEN to having your data shared which is a bigger step than sharing your webpage.
- We’re heading toward the internet of things. Total personalization requires total transparency.
- Our dependency is nothing to be afraid of. Look at our dependency on the alphabet and writing—a technology that changed our lives
- WE are the web and it’s getting smarter, more personalized, ubiquitous
- This machine/large organism is more reliable than its parts
- One machine. The web is its OS. All screens look inside the ONE. Let the one read it. The one is us. We are in the one.
on Aug 5th, 2009 at 1:11 am
When Kelly mentions Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the speech synthesis technology that I use to read this computer screen, he is referring to futurists who anticipate The Singularity, when AI will outpace human intelligence.