beware: extrapolation at work
You're probably already forgotten the news story about Bill Nye. Sorry, I'm not firing fast enough these days.
So here's the deal. Bill Nye is talking at USC, and he passes out. Bad sushi or something. Whatever. He's fine, apparently.
But here's the interesting part. Instead of everyone rushing the stage to see what's wrong with him, or call an ambulance...apparently everyone tweeted. As one.
The Yahoo story characterizes this response as "the digital public's civic indifference" and "youthful digital passivity".
Maybe. Or maybe we're evolving. It strikes me that our constant, incessantly connected, instantly messaged habits are becoming more and more like the behavior of another life form: The neuron.
In Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows, he mentions the idea that our tools mold us and may--in fact, certainly are--evolving us. As we grow to use maps and globes, our directional senses wither, making room in our brains for other functions. As printed language becomes prevalent, our memory capacity shrinks, making more room for other cognition.
This evolution is not under our control. We are formed by our tools--consciously or not. The thought comes that perhaps it's not us that is the end-goal of evolution. Maybe some other entity is evolving. Maybe, as Marshall MacLuhan put it, we are becoming "the sex organs of the machine world". Or of some other world.
What if we're evolving into a world brain? I'm serious. Here are some numbers.
| Service | Population | connections per unit | Message Rate (per day) |
| 160 million | 126 | 7.5 * 10**7 | |
| 500 million | 130 | 10**9 | |
| Human brain | 100 billion | 7000 | 1.8 x 10**17 |
A couple of notes: my number for Twitter users and message rates assume continued expansion at a rate of 300,000 per day, and corresponding increase in update rates. This is, admittedly, a sketchy proposition. Twitter and Facebook are actually similar in terms of number of users, richness of connection and frequency of communication. They are both distinguished by anemic connectivity, when compared to the human brain's 7000 inter-neuronal connections. It's also hard to guess how many times your entire brain "fires" per day. I guessed 1.8 x 10**17, assuming an active firing rate of 400/second, and the brain is "active" 1 hour per day. That's 180 million billion firings per day, compared to Facebook's paltry 1 billion.
OK, so Facebook is off the mark at becoming a human brain by several orders of magnitude. On the other hand, a neuron firing is a single impulse. Binary. The average Facebook update? Rather more . Between text updates (a couple hundred characters--say 1000 bits, at 8 bits/character and 125 characters in the average update?) and videos (megabytes and megabytes), most Facebook updates, I guess, are pictures. The Facebook picture limit was 720x720 pixels until recently, so let's say that a picture on Facebook takes 720*720*8 = 4 megabits. Take that 4 million bits as the average message length, and the daily Facebook "firing rate" is 4 million billion. Facebook is only off the human brain, in terms of raw information flow, by two orders of magnitude. Now that's a little scary.
If rate of neuron firing were all there was to intelligence, then computers would be intelligent already (which they may be--see my earlier post).The rate isn't apparently as important as the richness of connectivity.
There are 500 million Facebook users, each with 130 axons--er, friends.This compares poorly to the brain's 100 billion neurons, each with 7000 connections--200 times too few, and 50 times too poorly connected.
200 and 50 are starting to look like small numbers, though. There are 500 million folks on Facebook--and 6.9 billion on Earth, growing, according to UN's medium estimates, to 10.5 billion by 2050. That's more people than there are neurons in a human brain.
So. If Facebook acquires a significantly larger portion of the world's population, and if we become more friendly and talkative, then the connectivity of that organism approaches that of the human brain.
H.G. Wells wrote a series of essays in 1938 about a "World Brain", but his World Brain was a tool created by people--an informational repository for improving human welfare and achieving world peace.
The real World Brain seems more Orwell than Wells. More like a beehive than a Utopia. The neurons are there to comprise the brain--not the other way around.
Sweet Dreams.
