Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? Read online

  IS THE INTERNET CHANGING

  THE WAY YOU THINK?

  The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future

  Edited by John Brockman

  To KHM

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Preface: The Edge Question

  Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement: W. Daniel Hillis

  The Bookless Library: Nicholas Carr

  The Invisible College: Clay Shirky

  Net Gain: Richard Dawkins

  Let Us Calculate: Frank Wilczek

  The Waking Dream: Kevin Kelly

  To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways: Richard Saul Wurman

  Tweet Me Nice: Ian Gold and Joel Gold

  The Dazed State: Richard Foreman

  What’s Missing Here?: Matthew Ritchie

  Power Corrupts: Daniel C. Dennett

  The Rediscovery of Fire: Chris Anderson

  The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise: June Cohen

  The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility: Noga Arikha

  The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television: Leo Chalupa

  The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays: Paul Kedrosky

  The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There: Eric Drexler

  Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere: David Dalrymple

  A Level Playing Field: Martin Rees

  Move Aside, Sex: Seth Lloyd

  Rivaling Gutenberg: John Tooby

  The Shoulders of Giants: William Calvin

  Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics: Mark Pagel

  Publications Can Perish: Robert Shapiro

  Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?: Frank J. Tipler

  We Have Become Hunter-Gatherers of Images and Information: Lee Smolin

  The Human Texture of Information: Jon Kleinberg

  Not at All: Steven Pinker

  This Is Your Brain on Internet: Terrence Sejnowski

  The Sculpting of Human Thought: Donald Hoffman

  What Kind of a Dumb Question Is That?: Andy Clark

  Public Dreaming: Thomas Metzinger

  The Age of (Quantum) Information?: Anton Zeilinger

  Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto): Hans Ulrich Obrist

  The Degradation of Predictability—and Knowledge: Nassim N. Taleb

  Calling You on Your Crap: Sean Carroll

  How I Think About How I Think: Lera Boroditsky

  I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person— I Am a Poet: Jonas Mekas

  Kayaks Versus Canoes: George Dyson

  The Upload Has Begun: Sam Harris

  Hell if I Know: Gregory Paul

  What I Notice: Brian Eno

  It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Can Find Out: Marissa Mayer

  When I’m on the Net, I Start to Think: Ai Weiwei

  The Internet Has Become Boring: Andrian Kreye

  The Dumb Butler: Joshua Greene

  Finding Stuff Remains a Challenge: Philip Campbell

  Attention, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness: Howard Rheingold

  Information Metabolism: Esther Dyson

  Ctrl + Click to Follow Link: George Church

  Replacing Experience with Facsimile: Eric Fischl and April Gornik

  Outsourcing the Mind: Gerd Gigerenzer

  A Prehistorian’s Perspective: Timothy Taylor

  The Fourth Phase of Homo sapiens: Scott Atran

  Transience Is Now Permanence: Douglas Coupland

  A Return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna: Jesse Bering

  Take Love: Helen Fisher

  Internet Mating Strategies: David M. Buss

  Internet Society: Robert R. Provine

  Don’t Ring Me: Aubrey de Grey

  A Thousand Hours a Year: Simon Baron-Cohen

  Thinking Like the Internet, Thinking Like Biology: Nigel Goldenfeld

  The Internet Makes Me Think in the Present Tense: Douglas Rushkoff

  Social Prosthetic Systems: Stephen M. Kosslyn

  Evolving a Global Brain: W. Tecumseh Fitch

  Search and Emergence: Rudy Rucker

  My Fingers Have Become Part of My Brain: James O’Donnell

  A Mirror for the World’s Foibles: John Markoff

  a completely new form of sense: Terence Koh

  By Changing My Behavior: Seirian Sumner

  There Is No New Self: Nicholas A. Christakis

  I Once Was Lost but Now Am Found, or How to Navigate in the Chartroom of Memory: Neri Oxman

  The Greatest Pornographer: Alun Anderson

  My Sixth Sense: Albert-László Barabási

  The Internet Reifies a Logic Already There: Tom McCarthy

  Instant Gratification: Peter H. Diamandis

  The Internet as Social Amplifier: David G. Myers

  Navigating Physical and Virtual Lives: Linda Stone

  Not Everything or Everyone in the World Has a Home on the Internet: Barry C. Smith

  Ephemera and Back Again: Chris DiBona

  What Do We Think About? Who Gets to Do the Thinking?: Evgeny Morozov

  The Internet Is a Cultural Form: Virginia Heffernan

  Wallowing in the World of Knowledge: Peter Schwartz

  One’s Guild: Stewart Brand

  Trust Nothing, Debate Everything: Jason Calacanis

  Harmful One-Liners, an Ocean of Facts, and Rewired Minds: Haim Harari

  What Other People Think: Marti Hearst

  The Extinction of Experience: Scott D. Sampson

  The Collective Nature of Human Intelligence: Matt Ridley

  Six Ways the Internet May Save Civilization: David Eagleman

  Better Neuroxing Through the Internet: Samuel Barondes

  A Gift to Conspirators and Terrorists Everywhere: Marcel Kinsbourne

  The Ant Hill: Eva Wisten

  I Can Make a Difference Because of the Internet: Bruce Hood

  Go Virtual, Young Man: Eric Weinstein

  My Internet Mind: Thomas A. Bass

  “If You Have Cancer, Don’t Go on the Internet”: Karl Sabbagh

  Incomprehensible Visitors from the Technological Future: Alison Gopnik

  “Go Native”: Howard Gardner

  The Maximization of Neoteny: Jaron Lanier

  Wisdom of the Crowd: Keith Devlin

  Weirdness of the Crowd: Robert Sapolsky

  The Synchronization of Minds: Jamshed Bharucha

  My Judgment Enhancer: Geoffrey Miller

  Speed Plus Mobs: Alan Alda

  Repetition, Availability, and Truth: Daniel Haun

  The Armed Truce: Irene M. Pepperberg

  More Efficient, but to What End?: Emanuel Derman

  I Have Outsourced My Memory: Charles Seife

  The New Balance: More Processing, Less Memorization: Fiery Cushman

  The Enemy of Insight?: Anthony Aguirre

  The Joy of Just-Enoughness: Judith Rich Harris

  The Rise of Internet Prosthetic Brains and Soliton Personhood: Clifford Pickover

  Immortality: Juan Enriquez

  A Third Replicator: Susan Blackmore

  Bells and Smoke: Christine Finn

  Dare, Care, and Share: Tor Nørretranders

  Getting Close: Stuart Pimm

  A Miracle and a Curse: Ed Regis

  “The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data”: Lisa Randall

  Collective Action and the Global Commons: Giulio Boccaletti

  Informed, Tightfisted, and Synthetic: Laurence C. Smith

  Massive Collaboration: Andrew Lih

  We Know Less About Thinking Than We Think: Steven R. Quartz

  An Impenetrable Machine: Emily Pronin

  A Question
Without an Answer: Tony Conrad

  Conceptual Compasses for Deeper Generalists: Paul W. Ewald

  Art Making Going Rural: James Croak

  The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Max Tegmark

  Everyone Is an Expert: Roger Schank

  Pioneering Insights: Neil Gershenfeld

  Thinking in the Amazon: Daniel L. Everett

  The Virtualization of the Universe: David Gelernter

  Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder: Rodney Brooks

  Present Versus Future Self: Brian Knutson

  I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be: Paul Bloom

  My Perception of Time: Marina Abramović

  The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock: Stanislas Dehaene

  I Must Confess to Being Perplexed: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic: Yochai Benkler

  Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much: Ernst Pöppel

  internet is wind: Stefano Boeri

  Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space: Galia Solomonoff

  The Power of Conversation: Gloria Origgi

  A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule: Nick Bilton

  Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale: Jesse Dylan

  A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind: Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Sandbars and Portages: Tim O’Reilly

  No One Is Immune to the Storms That Shake the World: Raqs Media Collective

  Dowsing Through Data: Xeni Jardin

  Bleat for Yourself: Larry Sanger

  Acknowledgments

  Also by John Brockman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface: The Edge Question

  The Edge project was inspired by a 1971 failed art experiment. This venture was titled “The World Question Center” and was devised by the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator. Byars believed that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Widener Library at Harvard and read 6 million books. Instead, he planned to gather the hundred most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in, and have them ask one another the questions they were asking themselves. The expected result (in theory) was to be a synthesis of all thought. But it didn’t work out that way. Byars identified his hundred most brilliant minds and called each of them. The result: Seventy people hung up on him.

  A decade later, I picked up on the idea and founded the Reality Club, which in 1997 went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.

  For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I have used the interrogative myself and asked contributors for their responses to a question that comes to me, or to one of my correspondents, in the middle of the night.

  It’s not easy coming up with a question. As Byars used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have.

  The 2010 Edge Question

  This year’s question is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” (Not “How is the Internet changing the way we think?” Edge is a conversation, and “we” responses tend to come across like expert papers, public pronouncements, or talks delivered from a stage.)

  The art of a good question is to find a balance between the abstract and the personal, to ask a question that has many answers—or at least a question to which you don’t know the answer. A good question encourages answers that are grounded in experience but bigger than any experience alone. I wanted Edge’s contributors to think about the Internet, which includes but is a much bigger subject than the Web or an application on the Internet (or searching, browsing, and so forth, which are apps on the Web). Back in 1996, computer scientist and visionary Danny Hillis pointed out: “A lot of people think the Web is the Internet, and they’re missing something. The Web is the old media incorporated into the new medium.” He enlarges on that thought in the introduction.

  This year, I enlisted the aid of Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the artist April Gornik, one of the early members of the Reality Club, to help broaden the Edge conversation—or, rather, to bring it back to where it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when April gave a talk at a Reality Club meeting and discussed the influence of chaos theory on her work, and Benoit Mandelbrot showed up to discuss fractal theory. Every artist in New York City wanted to be there. What then happened was very interesting. When the Reality Club went online as Edge, the scientists were all on e-mail—and the artists weren’t. Thus did Edge, surprisingly, become a science site, whereas my own background (beginning in 1965, when Jonas Mekas hired me to manage the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque) was in the visual and performance arts. Gornik and Obrist have brought a number of artists into our annual colloquy.

  Their responses were varied and interesting: Gornik’s (with Eric Fischl) “Replacing Experience with Facsimile”; Marina Abramović, “My Perception of Time”; Stefano Boeri, “internet is wind”; Terence Koh, “a completely new form of sense”; Matthew Ritchie, “What’s Missing Here?”; Brian Eno, “What I Notice”; James Croak, “Art Making Going Rural”; Raqs Media Collective, “No One Is Immune to the Storms That Shake the World”; Jonas Mekas, “I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person—I Am a Poet”; and Ai Weiwei, who wrote, “When I’m on the Net, I Start to Think.”

  A new invention has emerged, a code for the collective consciousness that requires a new way of thinking. The collective externalized mind is the mind we all share. The Internet is the infinite oscillation of our collective consciouness interacting with itself. It’s not about computers. It’s not about what it means to be human—in fact, it challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score. It’s about thinking. Here, more than 150 Edge contributors—scientists, artists, creative thinkers—explore what it means to think in the new age of the Internet.

  John Brockman

  Publisher and Editor, Edge

  Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement

  W. Daniel Hillis

  Physicist, computer scientist; chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; author, The Pattern on the Stone

  It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has evidenced this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in a turn-of-the millennium essay titled “Hooking Up”:

  I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stock broker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does and only that. The rest is Digibabble.

  This confusion between the network and the services that it first enabled is a natural mistake. Most early customers of electricity believed they were buying electric lighting. That first application was so compelling that it blinded them to the bigger picture of what was possible. A few dreamers speculated that electricity would change the world, but one can imagine a nineteenth-century curmudgeon attempting to dampen their enthusiasm: “Electricity is a convenient means to light a room. That one thing the electricity does and only that. The rest is Electrobabble.”

  The Web is a wonderful resource for speeding up the retrieval and dissemination of information, and that, despite Wolfe’s trivialization, is no small change. Yet the Inte
rnet is much more than just the Web. I would like to discuss some of the less apparent ways in which it will change us. By the Internet, I mean the global network of interconnected computers that enables, among other things, the Web. I would like to focus on applications that go beyond human-to-human communication. In the long run, these are the applications of the Internet that will have the greatest impact on who we are and how we think.