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
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.