>>Tim O'Reilly: I want to start -- We're not on my first slide.
This is too bad.
Okay.
Here we go.
I want to start at a very high level.
Edmond Schlossberg once said, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other
people can think."
We see all this amazing technology coming at us.
But we need to understand the big picture of what it means and where it's going.
And that's a little bit of what I want to talk to you about today.
And in particular I want to talk about the context that is taking us through this extraordinary
convergence of technology and human potential all the way to what we literally could call
a global brain.
That's a bold statement.
And, of course, we've heard versions of this before back in the '60s, '70s, and even the
'80s.
We had this idea of global consciousness, and it was this wonderful, mystical state.
Here is the Harmonic Convergence in 1987.
You might remember that we were all going to be unified through some mystical means.
Of course, in the '80s, we also had more dystopian visions of what the global brain would look
like.
It was going to be a malevolent artificial intelligence.
The reality has turned out to be something very, very different.
That picture is a picture of the routing map of the Internet.
And what's so striking about it, albeit only at the level analogy, is how similar it looks
to the neuronal structure of the human brain.
We are making connections.
We are building through the Internet a network-mediated global mind.
It is not Skynet.
It is us, augmented and connected.
So Jeff Bezos reported once a fascinating conversation that he had with computer scientist
Danny Hillis in which Danny remarked that global consciousness is that thing responsible
for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.
It's a deep, deep insight.
Very simple.
But the fact is that our communication technologies are what allows memes like orange, Sanka's
brand color, somehow becomes a universal symbol, meaningful around the world.
So this kind of global consciousness is something that we've had for a long time.
But it's getting faster and faster.
It is the global consciousness that lets us all understand that when you start typing
"lady," you come up with Lady Gaga.
And we know about Lady Gaga, and we know about Larry Page.
And this, in so many ways is a triumph, as we've already heard, of artificial intelligence,
as is, for example, IBM's recent demonstration of Watson playing Jeopardy, what was thought
for a long time to be a supremely human game.
We're making real progress in the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.
But there's a another really, really important thread in the quest for computer intelligence.
It's not AI algorithms.
It is an aspect that was originally talked about in an incredibly seminal paper in 1945,
actually, an article in "The Atlantic" by Vannevar Bush called "As We May Think."
He said, "One cannot hope to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows
an associative trail.
But it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and
clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file
and library.
It needs a name.
And, to coin one at random, Memex will do."
That was 1945.
But, of course, the worldwide web is Vannevar Bush's Memex, or at least the current interpretation.
In fact, if you do a search for "As we may think," the first Google result is that original
paper which "The Atlantic" has put back online.
And, sure enough, the speed and clarity of retrieval, just as Bush required, we can get
to it in two clicks.
That is an augmentation of our intelligence.
It becomes even clearer when you think about our mobile devices.
They literally can see around corners.
We have a device now, which we now start to take for granted.
But it knows where we are better than we do.
It is an augmented sense of senses.
We now are increasingly GPS-enabled humans.
We are sensor-enabled humans.
But there's a further element to this.
That is something that J.C.R.
Licklider, another computer pioneer -- and, incidentally, the DARPA program manager who
funded the work on TCP/IP and the early Internet -- wrote a paper in 1960 called "Man-Computer
Symbiosis."
He said, "The hope is that in not too many years the human brains and computing machines
will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think
as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling
machines that we know today."
Actually, this human-computer symbiosis is, in fact, the most important thread that is
making us smarter, that is tying us together.
Back in 2004 I launched a concept now called Web 2.0, which is really not a new version
of the web.
But it was really about the idea that there was something that distinguished the companies
that survived the dot com bust from those that failed.
And all of those that succeeded, in one way or another, had figured out how to harness
collective intelligence.
A really simple example of that is the original insight that Google had.
Page rank.
It wasn't just a matter of applying algorithms to crunch the data in all those documents.
It was actually figuring out the links that humans made were actually an indication of
value and meaning.
And Google found more and more signal in the activity of humans.
They were able to predict which ads humans would click on.
We are all part of that Google machine.
Every time we make a link, every time we click on a link, Google is harvesting our intelligence
implicitly.
And that is part of why we're being woven together ever more tightly into this global
brain.
But I want to talk about ways that this is happening less obviously, more subtly.
And I want to point you to the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2005.
This vehicle, Stanley, from a team put together at Stanford, won the Grand Challenge by going
7 miles in 7 hours.
Well, this year Google announced that they have an autonomous vehicle that's driven hundreds
of thousands of miles in ordinary traffic.
Peter Norvig, Google's chief scientist said, "We don't have better algorithms.
We just have more data."
What's really critical is what kind of data?
It turns out that those Google Street View cars you've heard about, the ones that are
filming the images of the streets were equipped with all kinds of other sensors.
So, when that Google autonomous vehicle is driving on its own, the robot is remembering
the roads that humans have driven before, augmented humans with senses that even the
humans were not aware they were carrying.
Now, here is Vannevar Bush's Memex as imagined by a "Time" magazine article in 1945.
It was a collection of pulleys and microfilm and the like.
Kind of silly, not at all the way it turned out to be.
I think our future will also turn out to be very different than the way we imagine it
now.
The Internet, as we're experiencing it today, is still a child.
It's a baby.
But now here's the real point that we have to think about.
If the global brain is still a child, what should we be teaching it?
How should we be rearing it?
All right?
Predictive analytics in these information applications that we're building mirror human
learning.
If you're around a small child, you see the way they're continually learning from the
world.
If you're around an Internet application, you see the way that it's learning from the
world.
But the algorithms and the goals we set for them also mirror human vices and virtues.
When you have a goal like Google's access to all the world's information or my own company's
goal of changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators, this is trying to
teach the global brain to be smart and virtuous and kind.
But, if you, for example, are sitting there trying to figure out how to extract profit
without regard to what happens to people on the other side, you're perhaps teaching the
global brain to be a practitioner of vice.
So my question to all of you is: How can we make the emerging global brain be not only
more resilient, not just smarter, but also more moral?
Mary Oliver, the poet, said, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and
precious life?"
Now, here's the thing that's really obsessing me, if we are building a global brain and
it is our future child, our collective intelligence, we have only one child, only one world.
We'd better get it right.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]