Random Access - Friday, Dec 15, 2000Is the Internet aware?
by Chris Gulker
Is the Internet aware?
I mean, does it think? Have feelings? Does it do its holiday shopping at Amazon.com? If so, where does it have the stuff delivered?
Perhaps this line of reasoning makes you think I'm getting a bit dotty in my retirement. I did mention I was retired didn't I? I'm about to turn 50, and last month I just decided to have a little middle-age crisis. I told my startup- - my day job when I'm not moonlighting as an Independent columnist - that I just had to stop for a while.
Turns out, retirement is hard. You have all this, like, time to deal with. But that's another story. I may not be intelligent, retiring into a down market, at least in my wife's opinion, but maybe the Internet is. And you don't have to take my word for it.
Take Larry Smarr's word for it. Larry Smarr, if you're not acquainted, is an astrophysicist who was one of the founders of the National Centers for Supercomputing Applications in the US in 1985. Working to link the NCSA's original 5 centers led to a little thing we call the Internet today. NCSA also pioneered the computer graphics and visualization that you now routinely see in television commercials and feature films. And then there was a grad student named Mark Andreesen whom Smarr encouraged to write a program called Mosaic.
Anyway, a lot of people think Larry is pretty good at inventing the future. Many of the technologies he and his NCSA colleagues began working on 15 years ago are infrastructure relied upon by the American economy today. I thought it would be good to hear what Larry was up to these days, so I went to the Pervasive Computing conference in San Francisco last week.
And that's where Larry posed the question about an aware Internet. Now, Pervasive Computing is about the proliferation of computers, and the crowd was mainly expecting to hear about PDAs, WAP wireless devices, Net appliances and such. So Larry's question really caught a lot of people by surprise.
Larry went on to say that his new mission is to extend the Net (the next generation of which he predicts will become known as the Grid) and the devices connected to it. He envisions processors and a wireless Net everywhere. A bridge, for example, will be able to tell engineers if it's been damaged in an earthquake. The billions of processors already embedded in cars and appliances will be joined by even more billions embedded in walls and roads and yes, even humans.
To make the latter point, Larry showed a clip from an Israeli 'Pill Cam', that wirelessly transmits images from the intestinal tract after being swallowed. If your car has 30 or 40 processors to monitor it and keep it running, why not drop a couple into our own engine compartments? They could monitor vital signs, and with a miniature GPS receiver on board, could signal our location in the event of say, a heart attack. If the paramedics didn't arrive in time, they could at least find out what went wrong by querying your own personal version of a 'black box' like the ones airliners carry.
Larry's wired world would also enable devices that would merge the cyber and 'real' worlds. The Stud, an ear-mounted device under development at Orange, could retrieve information by voice command, offer driving directions, alert us to parking places and remind us of upcoming appointments. Your spectacles or sunglasses could overlay information on your visual field. It could point you to items in the supermarket, note historic buildings ("Chris Gulker slept here in ought-one") and let you read email while standing on a tube platform.
So, Larry said, there will someday be billions of connected processors. But there's already something like 400 million computers connected to the Net. A human brain, Larry reckons, exhibits the equivalent of a petaflop of processing power - a quadrillion floating point operations per second, in computer terms. That same power can be had from 1 million 1 gigahertz Pentium III processors. So it's likely the Net's 400 million machines currently represent far more than a petaflop.
There's a theory of intelligence called the computational theory that holds that intelligence naturally arises in a sufficiently powerful medium, be it silicon or flesh and blood. If that's true, then Larry's question is more than conjecture. The Net could be, in some way, 'aware'.
We basically have a planetary computer, according to Larry: and lots of pewople and businesses are trying to do things with it. There's the SETI@home experiment at the University of California at Berkely. It uses screensavers on some 500,000 computers around the world to process radio telescope data in search of intelligent signals. Several companies are trying to harness globally unused CPUs into gigantic supercomputers that corporations and researchers could use to handle difficult computationally-intensive problems like protein folding.
One company, Entropia, is offering a Fight Aids@home background application that attempts to model the HIV protein's response to millions of drug compounds. And Entropia is not alone: United Devices, Distributed Science, Parabon, Mojo Nation, Data Synapse are among the startups who plan to use thousands of PCs to tackle everything from influenza remedies to better search engines.
But, as far as I know, no one's announced a plan to link a million or so machines to see if they become aware.
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