When Web and Chaos Theory Meet, The Future Could be Weird by Andrew LeonardA little over three years ago, the World Wide Web sprang from plaything for insider physicists into culture-engulfing phenomenon. As phase transitions go, it was a doozy, comparable to the invention of the automobile or the telephone.
So what's next? Life moves fast in the '90s. We're presumably already on the verge of having everything change, again. What's it going to be? WebTV? Bandwidth too cheap to meter? Push media? Or are all those possibilities just incremental advances - part of the stabilization of a still chaotic system? Maybe the Web's own emergence is just a precursor to the main attraction, the real phase-transition - that moment when the networked society morphs into something beyond our own comprehension. Or control.
In physics, a phase transition occurs when, for example, a liquid changes into a gas, or a solid becomes liquid. But phase transitions are not unique to physics. In fact, according to the precepts of a relatively new field of science known as "complexity theory," phase transitions are a common element of all complex, adaptive systems - be they economies, civilizations, or life itself. And the Web, EFF webmaster Eric Tachibana points out, is clearly a complex system. His provocative essay is one of the only papers on the Web to discuss the issue directly.
Complexity has been a buzzword in avant-garde science circles for nearly a decade. An offshoot of chaos theory, it offers an intellectually attractive unified field theory of existence. Complex systems self-organize, they adapt, and the interaction of their constituent elements spawn unpredictable results, or phase transitions. After a major phase transition, like the introduction of the automobile or the move from single-celled to multi-cellular life, the system tends to be chaotic, but after a while things settle down into more-or-less stable states.
The question is: Where is the Web as we know it today on the complexity spectrum? Is it still foundering through an initial stage of post-phase transition chaos? Is it settling down? Or has the stage merely been set for bigger and better things?
Vernor Vinge is an expert in unpredictable phenomena. A mathematician at San Diego State University who is somewhat better known for prescient science fiction novels like True Names and A Fire Upon The Deep, Vinge specializes in thinking about the incomprehensible. One of the cornerstones of his vision is the idea of a future in which emergent super-intelligences leave humanity far behind. In The Technological Singularity, an essay published in the Whole Earth Review in October 1993, Vinge postulated that there were a number of possibilities for how such a super-intelligence could emerge. High on the list was the networking of group consciousness through a medium such as the Internet.
In October 1993 the Internet had not quite stormed the bastion of mainstream society. So I called Vinge and asked him - was the emergence of the Web a step toward that "technological singularity?" And just how would the group mind become a super-intelligence? I've always been baffled by the rhetoric about linking the world's population through modems and phone lines to create some sort of Gaia-like metabeing.
Vinge is more cautious in person than in his science fiction. The singularity he speaks of, he says, could still be a while in coming, and may not ever occur. And the arrival of the Web itself, he says, did not constitute such a singularity. By his definition, life post-singularity is unexplainable, perhaps even incomprehensible, by life in the pre-singularity world. We haven't reached that stage yet.
But things are definitely not settling down. The Web, says Vinge, is poised to become unimaginably more complex. Vinge sees a future in which every object has hundreds, or thousands, of network connections - or nodes - all constantly exchanging information with each other about location, state of activity, purpose. For example, the car tells the garage door that it is approaching. The garage door lets the house know when the car is safely inside, at which point interior doors unlock, etc.
When that happens, says Vinge, "then the environment itself begins to wake up. ... If this stuff were extended down to a low level, it would get very strange - the ground basis of reality would start to change."
EFF webmaster Tachibana takes it a step further. He boldly predicts that by 2020 we won't even recognize ourselves. "I'm sort of pretty far on the wacko side of things. We'll be in a post-biological phase, where cyborgs become reality. The Web is a very important step in that process."
Complexity theorists have a term for the point at which a system is poised between anarchy and order - they call it the "edge of chaos." It's a stable situation, but not very. If the likes of Tachibana and Vinge are correct, we haven't even begun to reach the edge. The real fun is yet to come.
Kind of makes the idea of WebTV seem a little boring, doesn't it?
Original article can be found here
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