One Machine

Kevin Kelly predicting the next 5,000 days of the web. The specifications for the current web, the one machine, is interesting. It uses 5% of the electricty on Earth and holds and processes the equivalent of one human brain (1 HB). If technology continues growing at the current rate, 6 billion HB will be achieved somewhere between 2020 and 2040, outstripping the current human population (and hopefully the population then as well). He also mentions that every bit will be a web bit, that all bits go through the web, and you see that happening with traditionally non-web data usage like word processing or mobile phone traffic (actually internet would probably be more accurate). This coincides with the convergence of digital and atomic "worlds", rather than moving from one to the other (like in "The Matrix") he suggests that it'll be integrated and that we are the extension of the web rather than the other way around.

The second half of the talk is about the Semantic Web (found from here, here and here). He describes his own definition of the Semantic Web by showing how it fits into what has gone before. The stages of networking includes: connecting by site from one computer to another, connecting by page and linking between them and the last two stages (I didn't see a clear distinction between the two) is by data, idea or item.

His web site also mentions that computers are beating some of the best players at Go (the article is quite bad - teraflops as a measure of storage - this one is better).