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

  E.O. Wilson’s Foundation

  http://www.eowilsonfoundation.org

  Harvard Center for Brain Science

  http://cbs.fas.harvard.edu/

  Internet World Stats

  http://www.internetworldstats.com

  Naked Pizza

  http://www.nakedpizza.biz

  The Singularity

  http://www.singularityu.org

  Stanford’s Neurogrid Project

  http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html

  TED

  http://www.ted.com

  WordNet

  http:/wordnet.princeton.edu

  Notes

  Chapter 1 - Introduction | Reindeer | Networks

  The most comprehensive account of the St. Matthew Island reindeer was written by David R. Klein of the Alaska Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Alaska. He attributes the reindeer collapse to overconsumption as well as an extremely harsh winter in 1963–1964. See “The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,” Journal of Wildlife Management 32, no. 2 (1968): 350–367. A more recent review of the lichen in the area is provided in Stephen S. Talbot, Sandra Looman Talbot, John W. Thomson, and Wilfred B. Schofield, “Lichens from St. Matthew and St. Paul Islands, Bering Sea, Alaska,” Bryologist 104, no. 1 (2001): 47–58.

  There has been some recent debate among scientists as to which had a greater impact, the weather or the reindeer population, but the general consensus continues to be that the reindeer overconsumed and overshot their environment. For a contrary viewpoint, see the November–December 2009 article in Weatherwise, “What Killed the Reindeer of Saint Matthew Island?,” by David Klein, John Walsh, and Martha Shulski.

  II

  Robert F. Bruner states in Deals from Hell: M&A Lessons That Rise above the Ashes that only 13 percent of the 501 companies listed in the NYSE in 1925 still existed in 2004 (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005), 1–2. That number is almost certainly lower now.

  III

  It should come as no surprise that Darwin plays a central role in most of the theory throughout this book. One of Darwin’s most important points is often either misunderstood or completely ignored. He made it very clear that there is no such thing as “good or bad” when it comes to evolution, stating that “there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.” See On the Origin of Species—A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 5. People often mistake this thought as a reason to believe that Mother Nature has a hand in what we humans define as progress. Stephen Jay Gould eloquently explained this in Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), p. 63: “Evolution, to us, is a linear series of creatures getting bigger, fancier, or at least better adapted to local environments.” But “natural selection talks only about adaption to changing local environments . . . no feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress.” Gould also noted that written in Darwin’s personal journal were the words “never say higher or lower.”

  Chapter 2 – Ants | Anternets | Manure

  Information about harvester ants comes from conversations with Deborah Gordon, her two books, and her numerous journal articles. Gordon’s books are Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) and the earlier Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). Her journal articles can be found on her Stanford University web page. For a general overview, Dr. Gordon gave an impassioned speech during the 2003 TED Conference entitled “The Emergent Genius of Ant Colonies,” which can be found at http://www

  .ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html. Note the HREF tag “Deborah Gordon digs ants,” which I thought was interesting enough that I repeated it in the first line of chapter 2. TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” is a global set of conferences created to disseminate ideas.

  For a more general overview of ants, also see Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler’s The Ants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Edward O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) and The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).

  I

  Many general interest books on the brain are worth reading, although none that I know of compare the brain to ants. For a general overview, see How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), Consciousness Explained by Dan Dennett (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), Principles of Psychology by William James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), and In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric Kandel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

  The Deborah Gordon quote comparing ant communication to Twitter messages comes from an article by Molly Vorwerck, “Deciphering Ant Communication,” The Stanford Daily, November 16, 2010.

  The phenomenon of ants circling until they die is discussed in Frédéric Delsuc’s article, “Army Ants Trapped by Their Evolutionary History,” PLoS Biology 1, no. 2 (2003): e37.

  The quote in which Deborah Gordon discusses hassling ant colonies comes from her TED talk, mentioned above.

  II

  Dan Dennett compared the internet to an alien invasion when he was interviewed by Dr. David G. Stork and Michael O Connell for the documentary 2001: Hal’s Legacy. The interview is entitled “Evolution Intelligence: Daniel C. Dennett Interview.”

  Internet statistics change as rapidly as they are published, but two of the best sources are Internet World Stats, which tracks the world’s internet usage (http://www.internetworldstats.com), and Netcraft, which does a monthly survey to estimate the number of websites on the internet. The most recent survey can be found at http://news.netcraft.com

  /archives/category/web-server-survey.

  Wikipedia estimates that in 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in 2000. YouTube provides its own statistics at http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics.

  The Washington Post reported Netflix statistics on May 17, 2011: “Video Viewing on Netflix Accounts for up to 30 Percent of Online Traffic” by Cecilia Kang.

  ZDNet announced in 2011 that “Facebook Is Bigger than the Whole Internet Was in 2004.”

  Source for mobile traffic growth comes from Cisco Visual Networking Index: “Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2012–2017.”

  To discover the similarities between ant communication and the internet’s TCP, Deborah Gordon worked with Stanford computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar. The resulting paper, “The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information,” was published in the August 23, 2012, issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

  For more information on how the brain uses a process similar to TCP to limit the flow of information, see Rene Marois and Jason Ivanoff’s journal article, “Capacity Limits of Information Processing in the Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 6 (2005): 296–305; and also an article by The Physics arXiv Blog, “New Measure of Human Brain Processing Speed,” MIT Technology Review, August 25, 2009.

  III

  Neuroscience is truly an evolving field, and because it is so new, information tends to be sparse or becomes out of date very quickly. I discuss the problem of finding accurate brain statistics further in chapter 10. Nonetheless, I have tried to use the most commonly cited statistics regarding the brain. For the number of neurons and connections in the human brain, I went with an adult mature brain having around 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. It should be noted that recent research suggests the number of neurons m
ay be around 86 billion, although this number is largely up for debate so I opted for the most conventional number throughout the book. For information on the latest research into the 86 billion theory, see Frederico A. C. Azevedo, Ludmila R. B. Carvalho, Lea T. Grinberg, José Marcelo Farfel, Renata E. L. Ferretti, Renata E. P. Leite, Wilson Jacob Filho, Roberto Lent, and Suzana Herculano-Houzel, “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513, no. 5 (2009): 532–541. The number of neural connections is also contested, but the general consensus is 100 trillion connections. See, for example, Robert W. Williams and Karl Herrup, “The Control of Neuron Number,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 11 (1988): 423–453; Gordon M. Shepherd, ed., The Synaptic Organization of the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press: 2003); Narayanan Kasthuri and Jeff W. Lichtman, “Neurocartography,” Neuropsychopharmacology 35, no. 1 (2010): 342–343; and Carl Zimmer, “100 Trillion Connections,” Scientific American 304, no. 1 (2010): 58–63.

  The number of neural connections in the brains of infants and children is even harder to determine accurately, but the consensus is that they peak at roughly 1,000 trillion neural connections. See, for example, Dennis Garlick, “Understanding the Nature of the General Factor of Intelligence: The Role of Individual Differences in Neural Plasticity as an Explanatory Mechanism,” Psychological Review 109, no. 1 (2002): 116–136. The research shows that the number of neuronal connections decreases significantly from its childhood number, but again, sources vary as to how many connections are lost. For more information about the brains of infants and children, read The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kohl.

  Recent data have shown that neurons, not just neural connections, also decrease during adolescence. Lawrence K. Low and Hwai-Jong Cheng of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California-Davis published their finding in 2006 that 50 percent of post-mitotic neurons do not survive until adulthood: “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,” Series B, Biological Sciences 361 (2006): 1531–1544. Also see J. A. Markam, J. R. Morris, and J. M. Juraska’s “Neuron Number Decreases in the Rat Ventral, but Not Dorsal, Medial Prefrontal Cortex between Adolescence and Adulthood,” Neuroscience 144 (2007): 961–968. Markam’s research was also covered by ScienceDaily on March 19, 2007, in their article, “The Brain Loses Neurons During Adolescence,” written from materials provided by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. For more detail on the numbers of neurons and connections, see my book Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009).

  The amazing rate of neuronal growth of fetuses can be found in Ross A. Thompson’s journal article, “Development in the First Years of Life,” The Future of Children 11, no. 1 (2001): 21–33.

  The extent to which ants and other eusocial insects collapse or prune their colonies is not well understood. It is clear that for each species, there is a breakpoint at which the colony stops growing, but no one has investigated the extent to which it overshoots first or the reasons that it does. It should also be noted, as Dr. Gordon has pointed out to me, that in these cases, it is not the environment that the animals are overshooting—that would, of course, lead to a total collapse, similar to what happened with the St. Matthew Island reindeer. Instead, they are likely overshooting some other natural equilibrium point, a topic we return to later in the book.

  The data about the number of devices connected to the internet come from Cisco’s 2011 white paper entitled “The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet is Changing Everything,” which can be downloaded at cisco.com. For an impressive visual representation of the internet of things, including cows and farmers, see Cisco’s infographic at http://share.cisco.com/internet-of-things.html.

  The reindeer data used to create Image 2.3 are from David R. Klein’s article, “The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,” Journal of Wildlife Management 32, no. 2 (1968): 350–367.

  The MySpace data used to create Image 2.3 are from the article, “The Rise and Inglorious Fall of MySpace,” by Felix Gillette, which appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek on June 22, 2011. Additional MySpace data were gathered from MySpace’s Wikipedia article. The rise in number of links on the homepage was calculated by using the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org to look at older versions of MySpace.

  Whether the ant or the colony is an organism has been discussed often in science and literature. Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler have a nice history of this debate in The Ants.

  IV

  The story about the nineteenth-century horse problem in New York City has been told numerous times, most recently in Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (New York: William Morrow, 2009). I relied principally on details from the Living City Archive at Columbia University (livingcityarchive.org), the Sirolli Institute (sirolli.com), as well as a November 16, 2009, New Yorker article entitled “HOSED: Is There a Quick Fix for the Climate?” Additional information on the history of New York City comes from a November 15, 1880, New York Times article entitled “The City’s Sanitary Work.”

  Consumption estimates for the internet come from the aforementioned Cisco white paper, “The Internet of Things.”

  Chapter 3 – Cannibals | Brains | Internets

  For a general overview of Easter Island, see Inventing “Easter Island” by Beverly Haun (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). For a detailed discussion of the overshoot of Easter Island, see Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  I

  For an interesting discussion about the brain’s energy consumption, see Nikhil Swaminathan’s article, “Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?,” Scientific American, April 29, 2008, which references this study: Fei Du, Xiao-Hong Zhu, Yi Zhang, Michael Friedman, Nanyin Zhang, Kâmil U_urbil, and Wei Chen, “Tightly Coupled Brain Activity and Cerebral ATP Metabolic Rate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 17 (2008): 6409–6414.

  The 20 percent number is widely recognized. See Marcus E. Raichle and Debra A. Gusnard, “Appraising the Brain’s Energy Budget,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 16 (2002): 10237–10239.

  II

  There is no shortage of quality sources for the history of the internet, but a unique perspective worth reviewing comes from Internet Society: http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet. Also of note is Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2012), in which author Andrew Blum recounts his fascinating journey through the wires of the internet.

  The “internet of things” has received much attention as of late. In addition to the aforementioned Cisco white paper and infographic, McKinsey & Company published a report in 2010 called “The Internet of Things.” The Economist published a special report in the November 4, 2010, issue called “Augmented Business” with the subheading “Smart Systems Will Disrupt Lots of Industries, and Perhaps the Entire Economy.”

  III

  For Metcalfe’s grave predictions about the internet, see “What’s Wrong with the Internet: It’s the Economy, Stupid,” IEEE Internet Computing, March/April 1997. Also of note is a speech Metcalfe gave in 2006 entitled “Framing the First Massachusetts Energy Summit.” Transcript reprinted online at http://vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/guest-blogger-bob-metcalfe-on-framing-the-first-massachusett-energy-summit.

  IV

  For a more in-depth look of the theory of how cooking drove our intelligence, see Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Food Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Herculano-H
ouzel’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 in an article co-written with Karina Fonseca-Azevedo entitled “Metabolic Constraint Imposes Tradeoff between Body Size and Number of Brain Neurons in Human Evolution.” Herculano-Houzel, it should be noted, is the same person who discovered that we may have fewer than 100 billion neurons in our brain. Her findings came as a result of investigating the metabolic rates of consumption in the brain. For a brief overview of the findings of Richard Wrangham and Suzana Herculano-Houzel, see “Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains,” by Ann Gibbons in the October 22, 2012, edition of the journal Science Now.

  V

  The 2 percent consumption number comes from a report by Greenpeace released in 2011. They detailed the energy use of major internet companies and rated each on its level of environmental friendliness. The interactive report is available at www.greenpeace.org.

  Google was tight-lipped for years about its energy usage but finally disclosed statistics in September 2011. The New York Times presented these stats in a September 8, 2011, article entitled “Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity” by James Glanz. Information about Google’s carrier hotel can be found in “Google to Buy New York Office Building,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2010.

  George Miller’s article about the limits of short-term memory is well worth reading: “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956): 81–97.

  A brief overview of the growth of content-delivery networks and the scale at which they operate can be found in an article by Mari Sibley, “The Incredible Shrinking Internet,” which appeared in SmartPlanet on June 20, 2012.

  Neuroscience has known about the fallibility of neurons for several decades, but the exact failure rate is unknown. The following two sources estimate that neurons fail to fire between 50 and 75 percent of the time: Alex M. Thomson, “Facilitation, Augmentation and Potentiation at Central Synapses,” Trends in Neurosciences 23, no. 7 (2000): 305–312; and William B. Levy and Robert A. Baxter, “Energy-Efficient Neuronal Computation via Quantal Synaptic Failures,” Journal of Neuroscience 22, no. 11 (2002): 4746–4755. A more recent figure was given in Discover magazine on November 6, 2009, in the article, “Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers’ Big Problem” by Douglas Fox. This article pegged the failure rate at 30 to 90 percent, an even bigger range (and higher maximum failure rate) than previously established.