Breakpoint_Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain
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The Dan Dennett quote about reverse engineering comes from an interview at Edge entitled “The Normal Well-Tempered Mind” on January 8, 2013.
VI
John von Neumann was a brilliant mind by any definition. He was a mathematician but made contributions to fields as diverse as computer science, the humanities, physics, economics, and statistics. He also worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear bomb and was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton alongside Albert Einstein. Much of his writing about computers focused on biological similarities and analogies. He wrote a book called The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958), in which he first mentioned the concept of a singularity. The first use of the word, however, came prior to von Neumann from science fiction writer Vernor Vinge.
This section references Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).
Chapter 11 – Conclusion | Termites | Extinction
There are many works on the nests of the leaf-cutter ants, including the comprehensive work by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
A fascinating documentary featuring Bert Hölldobler called “Ants: Nature’s Secret Power” contains impressive footage of the excavation of a large leaf-cutter mound and is available in its entirety on YouTube. The Hölldobler quote in this chapter comes from this documentary.
The biologists working on the Brazil site mentioned in this chapter include Aldenise A. Moreira and Luiz Carlos Forti. Of the several articles they published on their findings with numerous colleagues, the following article was primarily used: Aldenise Moreira, Luiz Carlos Forti, Ana Paula Andrade, Maria Aparecida Boaretto, and Juliane Lopes, “Nest Architecture of Atta laevigata (F. Smith, 1858) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae),” Studies on Neotropical Fauna and Environment 39, no. 2 (2004): 109–116.
Termites are very similar to ants in many respects. References used in this section include these five: (1) Eric E. Porter and Bradford A. Hawkins, “Latitudinal Gradients in Colony Size for Social Insects: Termites and Ants Show Different Patterns,” The American Naturalist 157, no. 1 (January 2001): 97–106; (2) J. M. Dangerfield, T. S. McCarthy, and W. N. Ellergy, “The Mound-Building Termite Macrotermes michaelseni as an Ecosystem Engineer,” Journal of Tropical Ecology 14 (1998): 507–520; (3) Dini M. Miller, “Subterranean Termite Biology and Behavior,” Virginia Cooperative Extension, Publication 444–502 (2010); (4) Ulrich G.
Muller, Nicole M. Gerrardo, Duur K. Aanen, Diana L. Six, and Ted R. Schultz, “The Evolution of Agriculture in Insects,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics (2005): 563–595; and (5) Roger E.
Gold, Harry N. Howell, Jr., Grady J. Glenn, and Kimberly M. Engler, “Subterranean Termites,” Texas A&M System AgriLife Extension
E-Publication, December 2005.
You can see pictures of, and obtain more information about, the incredible Eastgate Centre at the architect’s website, http://www.mick
pearce.com.
I
This section references Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives—How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do (New York: Little, Brown, 2009) by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.
The essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read was originally published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. Today you can read it online.
The Matt Ridley quote is from yet another great TED talk, “When Ideas Have Sex.” It was given at the TEDGlobal 2010 Conference.
Many animals are “social,” but very few are “eusocial,” including humans, ants, and termites. Biologists have divided animals into various social levels including presocial, subsocial, parasocial (which can include communal, quasisocial, and semisocial animals), and eusocial, which is the highest level of sociality.
Mark Moffett’s quote about the similarities between humans and ant colonies is from Jennifer Viegas’s article, “Human Societies Starting to Resemble Ant Colonies,” published by Discovery News on May 2, 2012.
II
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2006) is referenced in this section. Additionally, see his essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine (May 1987): 64–66.
Afterword: The Internet Is a Brain
The Internet is a brain was the main topic of my 2009 book Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press). In the book, I outlined a path toward creating a thinking and conscious internet, which I have summarized here. Portions of this appendix come from that book, with the courtesy of Harvard Business Press. More detailed notes are available in Wired for Thought.
I
Purdue University psychologist James Townsend provides a fun and insightful account of the distinction between serial and parallel processing in the brain and outlines why it is so important. While it is a scientific paper, it is relatively accessible: “Serial vs. Parallel Processing: Sometimes They Look Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee but They Can (And Should) Be Distinguished,” Psychological Science 1, no. 1 (January 1990): 46–54.
II
Quotes from Dan Dennett in sections II and III come from Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
III
Howard Margolis’s quote comes from his book Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Douglas Hofstadter’s ingenious book I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007) does a remarkable job of describing parallel processing as a recursive process similar to the feedback of a speaker when a microphone is too close or a series of mirrors that reflect infinitely into one another. Hofstadter states it this way: “In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.”
In Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell argues that great success is composed of two components: The first is luck, or timing. The second is practice, which, in many ways, is the mind’s way of automating its strange loop.
IV
The 500,000 dopamine neurons number is, like all neuronal figures, a guess. Neuronbank.org estimates it is between 400,000 and 600,000, referencing two respectable sources: (1) A. Bjorkland and S. Dunnett, “Dopamine Neuron Systems in the Brain: An Update,” Trends in Neuroscience 30, no. 5 (2007): 194–202; and (2) S. Chinta and J. Andersen, “Dopaminergic Neurons,” The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology 37 (2005): 942–946.
The example of a cup of coffee spinning in mental rotation comes from Read Montague, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (New York: Plume, 2006), 83.
Plato presented his theory of forms in several of his works. It is covered most extensively in Republic, Book III, V, VI–VII, and IX–X.
Steven Pinker’s quote comes from How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
Daniel Goleman’s quote comes from Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995), 15–17.
V
The quote from Doug Lenat comes from an interview with Jeffrey Goldsmith published in Wired Magazine in April 1994 with the title “CYC-O.”
The Erik Schmidt quote was originally written in a letter to George Gilder of Wired Magazine back in 2003 and reprinted in an October 2006 article in Wired entitled “The Information Factories.”
Researchers reported on Spaun in a 2012 Science article by Chris Eliasmith, Terrence C. Stewart, Xuan Choo, Trevor Bekolay, Travis DeWolf, Charlie Tang, and Daniel Rasmussen entitled “A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain,” Science 338, no. 6111 (November 30, 2012): 1202–1205. You can also read about Spaun in Reb
ecca Boyle’s article, “Meet Spaun, the Most Complex Simulated Brain Ever,” Popsci, November 29, 2012, which is the source of the quote from Chris Eliasmith. Also see Francie Diep’s article, “Artificial Brain: ‘Spaun’ Software Model Mimics Abilities, Flaws of Human Brain,” Huffington Post, November 29, 2012.
John Markoff wrote about how entrepreneurs are using data to mine human intelligence in “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” New York Times, November 11, 2006.
Index
99designs, 112
Academic Room, 109
AdSense, 128–9
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 31–2
AdWords, 128–9
agricultural revolution, 161, 186
Akamai, 42–3
AltaVista, 19, 85
Amazon.com, 40–1, 111, 123, 152–5, 232n
America Online (AOL), 35, 123
Anderson, Chris, 220n
Anderson, Tom, 67–8, 221n
Android, 58, 95, 227n
anternet, 14–15
ants:
breakpoint for colonies of, 7–10, 12, 20, 49–50, 180–1, 185, 214n
carpenter, 118
colony intelligence of, 9–10
communication of, 135–8, 184–5
compared to human brain, 10–12, 47–8
crowdsourcing and, 101
as eusocial insect, 214n, 237n
harvester, 9–12, 49–50, 136, 185, 210n
leaf-cutter, 180–81, 235n
nest construction of, 180–81
slave-making, 48–50, 218n
survival and, 118, 185
Apple, 83–4, 95–6, 143, 154
apps, 57–9, 72–3, 90, 96, 121, 220n, 227n
Arbib, Michael, 147–8
ARC Mate, 171
Ariely, Dan, 121
ARPAnet, 31
Arrington, Michael, 221n
artificial intelligence, 3, 144, 152, 171–7, 189, 192, 196
AT&T, 132
bandwidth, 25, 35–7, 212n
Battelle, John, 220n
Bell, Alexander Graham, 43, 190
Berger, Hans, 162–3, 166, 176, 223n
Berners-Lee, Tim, 220–1n
Bezos, Jeff, 154, 232n
Birdsong, David, 141, 230n
Blekko, 89–90
Blum, Andrew, 215n
brain, human:
amygdala, 198–9
ant colony compared to, 10–12
breakpoint of, 30–1, 140
cerebral cortex, 142, 191, 196
description of, 190–2
distributed computing of, 191
fixed-carrying-capacity and, 30–1
forward thinking of, 150–1, 197–8
growth of, 5, 11–12
hippocampus, 198
internet compared to, 189–201
intuition and, 199–200
modularity and, 40–1
motor cortex, 146–8, 166
reverse engineering of, 149, 172–5
search and, 97
slowness of, 196–7
social breakpoint of, 69–70
visual cortex, 198–9
See also neurons
brain-computer interface (BCI),
164–5
BrainGate, 34, 165–7, 174–5, 233n
breakpoint:
of ant colonies, 8–10, 49–50, 180–1, 185, 214n
of the brain, 30–1, 71, 140–1, 148–9, 159, 187
carrying capacity and, 19–20, 45, 133
crowdsourcing and, 110–11, 116
defined, 1–2, 19–22
of Facebook, 68, 128–30
forced slowing of growth and, 119
of human memory, 52–3
hypergrowth and, 4
identification of, 5
of the internet, 5, 34–6, 56–9, 62
language and, 139–41
money and, 127
as network phase, 19–22
profit and, 68
of road networks, 126
of social networks, 69–70, 72, 185
of termite colonies, 181
of St. Matthew Island, 1–2
venture capital and, 122–3
of Wikipedia, 104–6, 110, 224n
of Yahoo!, 83–4
Brin, Sergey, 85, 122
Bruner, Robert F., 209n
Budiansky, Stephen, 125, 228n
cannibalism, 28–9, 57
Carr, David, 113
Carr, Nicholas, 55, 63
carrying capacity:
of airlines, 127
of ant colonies, 49–50
breakpoint and, 19–20, 133
defined, 18–19
Easter Island and, 28–31
of ecosystems, 18
elasticity of, 20–1
energy and, 51–3
fixed-carrying-capacity environment, 29–31
of human population, 186
of the internet, 35–7, 45, 53–6, 71
network phases and, 18–21
overshoot of, 20, 22, 30, 45, 83, 119, 186, 214n
of Ponzi schemes, 36
profit and, 128
of roadways, 125
utility as a limit to, 50–3
of Wikipedia, 104
Cauz, Jorge, 106–7, 225n
Center for Internet Addiction, 55
Chacha, 92
Chomsky, Noam, 138
Christensen, Clayton, 228n
Cinematch, 151
Classmates.com, 69
cloud computing, 34, 41–2
cloud labor, 111
CloudCrowd, 111
Colbert, Stephen, 79
collaborative filtering, 153
Collabowriters, The, 116
communication. See language
comScore, 220n
content delivery network (CDN), 42–3
cooking and intelligence, 38–9, 216n
cows, 33
crowdfunds and crowdfunding, 113–15, 169, 226n
crowdsourcing, 99–111, 116, 151, 224n, 226n
CyberRain, 33
CYC, 199
Darwin, Charles, 171, 210n. See also natural selection
Dawkins, Richard, 171, 218n
Deep Blue, 172, 176
Dennett, Dan, 13, 173–4, 176, 193, 195, 211n, 226n
DesignCrowd, 224n
Diamond, Jared, 185–6
Digg, 133
digital revolution, 162, 186
distributed computing, 191
Domino’s, 79
Donoghue, John, 165, 176
dot-com crash of 2000, 123
DuckDuckGo, 89–90
Dunbar, Robin, 69–70, 222n
Dunbar’s Number, 70
Easter Island, 27–9, 34, 57, 126
Eastgate Centre, 181–2, 236n
EdanSafe, 167
Edgecast, 42–3
Edmodo, 130–1, 229n
Efstratiou, Dr. Christos, 227
Elance, 111
Eliasmith, Dr. Chris, 201, 217n,
239n
Eliasson, Jonas, 126, 221n, 228n
Elmer-DeWitt, Philip, 220n
emergence, 183
Emotiv, 168
Eons.com, 19
equilibrium, 22–3
Ethernet, 31, 35–7
eToys, 19
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 66
eusocialit
y, 214n, 237n
Evi, 95–6
evolution. See natural selection
Facebook:
advertising and, 129–30
Beacon, 92
breakpoint of, 68, 70, 128–30
former Google employees and, 91, 223–4n
Google+ compared with, 73
Graph Search, 92
Instagram acquired by, 74–5
lawyers’ monitoring of, 77
mobile users of, 71–3
as a network of networks, 70–1, 130
profit and, 127–8
search and, 91–3
Pinterest and, 76
Twitter compared with, 74
users and usage, 14, 67–8, 71–3
See also Zuckerberg, Mark
Fetz, Dr. Eberhard, 163–4, 166, 176, 233n
Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, 109
Filo, David, 84, 122
fixed-carrying-capacity environment, 29–31. See also carrying capacity
Flickr, 75
Forrester Research, 153, 232n
Forti, Luiz Carlos, 236
foursquare, 75, 93
Fowler, James, 183
Fox, Douglas, 217n
free markets, 65–6
freemium model, 124, 132
Friendster, 69
Gammonoid, 172, 176, 234n
Garlick, Dennis, 213n
Geary, David, 160
General Electric (GE), 112, 226n
Gladwell, Malcolm, 78, 195, 238n
Goldberg, Elkhonon, 150
Goleman, Daniel, 199
Google, 19, 56, 67, 122, 200
AdSense, 128–9
AdWords, 128–9
cloud, 42
energy usage of, 39–40, 216n
former employees who went to Facebook, 91, 223–4n