Breakpoint_Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain

by Jeff Stibel

  Ant colonies, various other animal species, brains, and internets are all networks, and as such they follow the same pattern of growth, breakpoint, and equilibrium. They start out small and grow explosively to the point where they overshoot and collapse. A successful network has only a small collapse, out of which a stronger network emerges wherein it reaches equilibrium, oscillating around an ideal size.

  At the phase of equilibrium, networks continue to grow, but in terms of quality instead of quantity. When the size of a network slows, other things speed up—like communication, intelligence, and consciousness. At this point, the real magic begins.

  This last network phase is poorly understood, even by biologists. We are just beginning to learn about equilibriums in biological systems, let alone in technology. When Deborah Gordon first discovered these properties in ant colonies, she learned that the size of a colony remains stable, that it has no central leadership, and that it becomes intelligent at equilibrium. But no one yet knows why or how this happens.

  Part of the reason is that people dismiss the notion that intelligence can come from a network. When we talk about ourselves, it is easy to call us intelligent beings. It comes naturally, even if it’s anthropocentric. But when we talk about our neurons in our brains, the discussion starts to get a bit dicey. It is hard for us to believe that the human mind could emerge out of something as simple as neuronal firings. For many people, the brain seems beyond a scientific explanation. While some may find it hard to believe, the evidence supporting the science of neurons is now irrefutable.

  The science of neurons brings into question the most fundamental beliefs about intelligence. The reality is that if we are willing to accept that neurons are what make us smart, then all entities with sufficient neurons must be capable of intelligence, rationality, and even consciousness. Of course, the term “sufficient” is up for debate, as always. We don’t attribute intelligence to a sea slug with its measly 18,000 neurons or to an individual ant at 250,000. But how about a mouse at 75 million or a housecat at 1 trillion?

  What about a collective intelligence, one that comes not from a single brain but from a group? If intelligence comes from a network of neurons, it stands to reason that the network doesn’t need to be in a single body. It is worth considering whether an ant colony, with its trillions of neurons, is deserving of our consideration. Could it be that the ant itself is a mere part, that the colony is the organism? The answer to this question has profound implications for other networks. If we accept that the brain is a smart network even though individual neurons are simpletons, and that the ant colony is intelligent even though an individual ant isn’t, we’re acknowledging that networks possess intelligence beyond the sum of their parts. And if that is the case, then the internet as a collective unit could also gain intelligence, rationality, and consciousness once it reaches equilibrium.

  IV

  In 1880, the United States brought together the world’s leading experts to determine what New York City would look like in 100 years. At the time, New York was a fast-growing hub of entrepreneurship and innovation. The city had launched the first elevated train, was experimenting with an underground subway, and was on the verge of a major feat, launching the first skyscraper—the Equitable Building. After some deliberation, the team came back with unanimous consensus: New York City would be destroyed within 100 years.

  Why?

  It turns out that there was a massive population boom in New York City. The network of people had gone from 30,000 in the early 1800s to nearly four million people, doubling in size every ten years. At that rate, the experts concluded, the city would need more than six million horses to transport all of those people by 1980. But New York already had an enormous manure problem. Each one of the city’s nearly 200,000 horses was excreting roughly 24 pounds of manure and a quart of urine . . . every single day. With the increased need of horses to keep up with the population, even 20 years of growth would put the city knee-deep in shit.

  Predicting the future is hard for a number of reasons. For one thing, most people just assume more, much more, of the same. Long-term predictions are hard, and our brains are not equipped to do them well. We take what is current and project into the future. Or we take what is current and apply some flair (think flying cars). Rarely does one take a novel approach to the future, at least without getting ridiculed.

  But there is another approach to looking ahead. Instead of trying to predict the future, we can use hindsight to see if there are any historical or biological parallels. We could have predicted book readers such as the Kindle, for instance, had we looked back in time to the history and convergence of electronics and the printing press. We could have predicted that humankind would one day learn to fly by looking to the birds. Of course, for both flight and e-books, we did so in our own way.

  New technologies and companies that leverage the internet are multiplying, and that is driving internet usage to new heights. Most people are surprised to learn that a typical home in North America today generates over 5 percent of what the whole world did during all of 2008 in terms of internet traffic. Think about it: twenty homes today generate the same amount of traffic that the entire internet produced in 2008. The internet is pervasive, and it is growing at an ever faster pace, taking up more energy, more bandwidth, more time. But it will not just yield more manure and urine. Just as New York City avoided its horse breakpoint with the invention of cars and mass transportation, so too will the internet benefit from new innovations, the likes of which we can’t yet fathom. Beyond the breakpoint lie new ideas, new technologies, and new opportunities.

  Three

  Cannibals | Brains | Internets

  The business of life was booming on Easter Island in the sixteenth century. Long considered the most remote inhabited island on earth, this South Pacific island was blessed with plentiful natural resources and a peaceful, cooperative population. The island’s most prominent feature was its beautiful forests, home to a couple dozen species of trees, many growing up to 100 feet tall. With trees come birds, and at least 25 different species of nesting birds were drawn to the island’s trees as a safe, comfortable home.

  The humans of Easter Island made their homes from forest wood as well. They were excellent woodworkers, adept at building houses as well as large canoes for fishing tuna and porpoises from the surrounding waters. When they cleared a section of forest, they left a few trees for shade and cultivated the remaining land for crops. Thus the Easter Islanders enjoyed a rich diet of fish, vegetables, and all manner of grain. They were stout people, and more than a few could have been described as plump.

  Fossil records indicate that the population flourished, growing from a couple hundred in the thirteenth century to around 15,000 people by the year 1600. But at roughly that point, something terrible happened: the network of people on Easter Island collapsed. Within a century, the population shrank to a mere 2,500.

  Though there is no written record of the Easter Islanders from this time period, it’s amazing what information archaeologists can glean from the artifacts they’ve dug up. They discovered that most of the trees had been killed, the birds had grown extinct, and the fish had stopped surfacing near Easter Island. By excavating garbage sites, archeologists learned something even more startling: the Islanders started eating each other. Where previously there were discarded bones of fish and birds, after the collapse, archaeologists found rat bones and human bones, the latter most often found split open with the bone marrow missing (i.e., eaten).

  What happened?

  Scientists believe that the human population of Easter Island hit a breakpoint and massively overshot the environment’s carrying capacity. While the island’s natural resources appeared to be abundant, the ecosystem was in fact more delicate than the inhabitants realized. The large trees were slow-growing varieties—what could be chopped down in minutes took many years to regrow. We don’t know
if the people didn’t understand this or just couldn’t regulate consumption, but the result was the same. The people drove all of the island’s native trees to extinction and completely wiped out the forests. With the destruction of the forests came the extinction of the nesting birds and the other small animals that once lived there.

  Island communities are often able to live off the sea, and Easter Islanders were excellent deep-sea fishermen. But this became impossible without boats, wooden canoes, to be specific, which could not be built or maintained in the absence of large trees. The fossil record bears this out: when the islanders could no longer fish the oceans, they gathered shellfish from the shore. But that food source, too, quickly became overexploited.

  The land was overtoiled as well. Agriculture, which had flourished throughout most of the island’s history, was ruined owing to soil erosion and nutrient depletion. With no surrounding forest, the few remaining crops were left unprotected from the harsh sun and strong winds. The annual harvest became a fraction of what it once was. Europeans who arrived in 1722 described the few remaining islanders as “emaciated and miserable.”

  The Easter Islanders weren’t simply hungry; they experienced a collapse of their entire civilization that pulled them back into the dark ages, literally. No trees meant no fire, no boats, no walls for their homes, no cremation of their dead. No fish and no harvest meant distrust of their priests, many of whom had previously maintained power by claiming a direct relationship with the gods who provided bountiful harvests. We can all imagine who was eaten first.

  The food shortages led to resentment and fighting. The Easter Islanders, prosperous only a few generations before, descended into civil war and cannibalism. Easter Island is a textbook example of human population breakpoint and collapse.

  I

  Islands are environments with fixed carrying capacities, so studying them gives us the chance to truly understand what happens when a network hits its breakpoint. Of course, the earth itself is the ultimate fixed-carrying-capacity environment. Ecologists rightly warn that our fate will be the same as that of the Easter Islanders if we don’t control the growth of our population and the decimation of our natural resources.

  The brain also resides in a fixed-carrying-capacity environment. You can think of the brain as an island, but instead of being surrounded by water, it’s bounded by our hard skulls. In other words, the brain is a physical network operating in a constrained environment. And by any measure, the brain is packed in pretty tight. The 100 billion neurons in an adult human brain have the equivalent surface area of roughly four football fields. It’s all crammed in and folded upon itself, which is why it looks so wrinkly.

  The brain is not limited merely in terms of size. Indulge for a moment in a little thought experiment: What if your skull stayed soft, like that of a baby? Would you end up with a monstrous brain that would make you much smarter than all of your friends? Or would your brain grow only until it hit a breakpoint? Turns out, if it grew any larger you would have the same sad fate as our islanders. This is because of the brain’s immense energy needs: the brain consumes nearly 20 percent of all our energy despite being a mere 2 percent of our body mass. If your brain grew larger but your lungs and heart stayed the same size, the brain would overshoot capacity to such an extent that your neurons would start to suffocate and die off from lack of oxygen and nutrients. Nature has perfectly calibrated our brain sizes to the carrying capacity of our bodies—as it has for virtually all other animals—and this is dictated predominantly by our energy consumption.

  We could just get bigger bodies, but that didn’t work out so well for the dinosaurs. Bigger does not always mean better. Most people think humans have the biggest brains on earth, but we actually only have the biggest brains relative to the size of the rest of our bodies. Elephants, for example, have bigger brains than we do, but by all accounts, they have smaller brainpower. Networks are all about efficiency—not size—because efficiency allows a network to be more robust and powerful within a fixed-carrying-capacity environment. Remember that even humans do not gain real intelligence until after the brain reaches its breakpoint—smaller adult brains have greater intelligence than the significantly bigger brains of children. It turns out that being stuck on an island is not necessarily a bad thing.

  II

  The early history of the internet looks a lot like an island. Originally called ARPAnet, it was created in the mid-1960s by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a division of the US Department of Defense. ARPA’s mission was to preserve the United States’ technological superiority, something the government felt was in jeopardy after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. ARPAnet, for its part, was created to enable communication between ARPA’s full-time scientists and scientists from universities and private research institutions.

  There was nothing terribly exciting about the early net—a few computers connected to one another by phone lines. Like every innovation before it, the most riveting details remain utterly boring and cryptic to most people: a 1024-bit packet of information was sent in 1968; the first two mainframes were connected in 1969; the first letters, L, then O, crossed the internet soon thereafter; a third letter—G—led to the first internet crash minutes later (so much for logging on). Ethernet was invented in 1973; TCP was adopted in 1983; the first use of the smiley face :-) came in that same year.

  Fast forward to 1990 and the US Department of Defense decided to move its classified information to a different network and passed responsibility for ARPAnet to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which merged ARPAnet with its own NSFnet. Most historians agree that the NSF was a good steward of the network of networks. It doubled in size every seven months and grew to 50,000 networks, including 4,000 institutions, at its peak. The internet grew, but it was still ultimately controlled by the US government, and nothing can be more limiting to a network than government control.

  The government was under tremendous pressure to allow commercial interests to participate in its network, so the NSF executed plans to relinquish control to private industry starting in 1994. It swiftly funded private contracts for the creation of four Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)—one each in California, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Then, in 1995, the NSFnet was officially decommissioned, and the internet as we know it was born.

  No longer an island bounded by government regulations, the internet exploded into its exponential growth phase. It grew from a couple hundred thousand university and government users in early 1995 to over 16 million users across all industries by the end of 1995. That number more than doubled the following year. Within five years, the number was over 300 million. And we broke a billion users a mere ten years later. Today the number is an astronomical 2.4 billion users, or roughly 34 percent of the world’s population.

  Just look at the sheer physicality of the internet. There are now hundreds of thousands of feet of fiber-optic cable running below our feet and across our oceans. Look at the devices we’ve connected. A quick view at a desk covered with with laptops, tablets, and smartphones makes it clear that we are not talking about one device per person, as was the case less than a decade ago. In 2012 the number of devices exceeded 9 billion (well over the number of people on earth), and Cisco predicts the number will skyrocket to 50 billion devices by 2020. That number is likely understated by a factor of 4.

  These devices include many things you may not have considered before. Some cows, for example, are more connected than most people. A company called Sparked creates chips for cows that, when implanted, transmit over 200 MB of data per year regarding the cow’s health and location. Ankle bracelets on female cows can even determine when they’re in heat and send an alert to the farmer (or the bulls) that it’s time for insemination.

  If you have a car built in the last couple of years, chances are there’s a portal online where you can log in to view your car’s maintenance needs as determined by sensors o
n various components. Several insurance companies offer a safe driver discount if you allow them to implant a chip in your car that sends the company information about your driving habits.

  Similarly, produce farms on the cutting edge have sensors that measure various patches of soil for appropriate moisture and nutrients. Most send that information to the farmer; some send it straight to a fertilizing robot that automatically spreads more water or fertilizer to that portion of soil. CyberRain is an internet sprinkler system for the home that doesn’t water your yard if the forecast calls for rain. Some of the newest refrigerators are connected to the internet and can tell you when the milk’s gone bad.

  Some of us have internet devices within our own bodies. For those with severe gastro-intestinal problems, internet-enabled nano-cameras relay information about potential digestive diseases. A high-risk patient can wear sensors that feed his doctor data on blood pressure and heart rate, effectively providing an early warning system for heart failure. And BrainGate is a microchip that sits in the brain and allows people to interact with the internet using nothing but their thoughts.

  All of these devices (and animals) are as much a part of the internet as you and your laptop. With growth in the number of devices comes a corresponding upsurge in internet traffic, which is probably the best way to measure the size of the internet. So how big is it? It’s monstrous and growing more so. Remember, twenty homes today produce the same output in a year that the entire world generated in 2008. Every single hour in 2011, we generated enough traffic to fill 7 million DVDs, and by 2015 that number will increase four-fold. So why hasn’t the internet hit its breakpoint?

  III

  Islands give us great insights into networks for obvious reasons: external influence is limited, and the population can’t simply pick up and move on to a better place. Remember that the St. Matthew Island reindeer met the same fate as the Easter Islanders. But when not bound by an island, sometimes a network gets the chance to move to a place with a higher carrying capacity. Reindeer and humans can migrate, after all, and the same is true for technologies, although those network migrations happen through innovation.