So, ever since I got a smartphone in January (T-Mobile G1, which is way more awesomer than some crappy iPhone), I've been thinking that maybe devices like that are the first sign of something big; maybe as big as any other stage of human development.
I've thought a lot about the progression of evolution on earth, starting from simple chemical responses to stimuli, through the development of a nervous system which allows much more complicated and adaptive responses to the environment, including instincts, and then to the big leap of a brain which can store information entirely separately from the genotype.
The major contribution of our own species, of course, is the ability to store information outside the phenotype as well as outside the genotype, and, even more importantly, transmit it between individuals. Stephen Hawking believes that, in terms of information created, the last three hundred years have been eventful as the previous ten thousand, which, in turn, have been as eventful as the entire preceding three-and-a-half billion years.
That's a pretty grandiose claim, but I'm not sure it's wrong, and I'm really curious where it goes from here. I think the global communications infrastructure we're building is the start of the next big leap. We've spent the last few millennia amassing information, and now we're tackling the problem of retrieval. With access to a computer and the internet, we've already been able to do that to an unprecedented degree for a couple decades now, but I think the portability afforded by handheld devices really ups the ante. The ability to arbitrarily retrieve information on demand, from anywhere, is a pretty phenomenal development. Since I got my G1, I've never needed to stop for directions. I've never wondered what time a movie is playing. I can check the calories of a restaurant's menu items from the parking lot, to make sure it's compliant with the Burrito Diet. I can have a news aggregator and voice synthesizer read me top headlines as they come down the pipe while I drive to Chicago.
Is it out of line to wonder if humanity's future is as a big distributed processing system? Will our knowledge be stored in one central collection, and our brains function more or less as a local cache? We're already more than halfway there, I think; with Google and Wikipedia, I can already gain surface knowledge on any topic in minutes. The only thing missing is a more efficient way to get information in and out of the brain, and I think we'll see that within my lifetime. When retrieving information on any topic is as simple as just "remembering" it, will individual education be a meaningful concept anymore?
I'm beginning to think that the nightmare of the runaway AI enslaving humanity might already be outdated. It's looking more and more like we are the runaway AI. I don't see us developing into a hive-mind like the Borg; I think it'll be more of a gestalt, something like Gaia from Asimov's books, individual minds and a collective whole existing simultaneously. But I think it will happen, and I think we've already started the stage of our evolution that will take us there.
Since 127 A.D. 