MC Weekly Issue #3, Tuesday, December 6, 2005

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

We will build a global mind.

Since we launched Massive Change, a number of projects have either come to the fore, or have made significant developments, reinforcing our belief that humanity is “building a global mind.” Though some critics, like Robert Fulford, interpreted the declaration that information technology “will help make us all think the same way,” the evidence presented supports Fulford’s own understanding of “information technology as the agent of diversity and originality”. It’s a promise, not a threat.

In Massive Change we argued:

“The most profound impact of information technology has been to transfer the potential of the scientific method - the ever-expanding accumulation of knowledge - to the cultural sphere. Internet protocols allowed us to link any two computers, enabling an explosive global network of networks. Emerging grid protocols for distributed computing allow us to link everything else - databases, simulation and visualization tools, and the unused computing power of machines - generating a worldwide cultural accumulation beyond imagination, available to anyone, anywhere.”

Here are some incredible projects in that spirit:

The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org/ ) was founded in 1996. According to their website: “Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.” The Internet Archive maintains a variety of multimedia resources. This includes archived copies of web pages, taken at different points in time - through the Wayback Machine - but now also includes software, films, books, and audio recordings. The Wayback Machine contains well over a petabyte of data (a quadrillion bytes) and was is growing at a rate of at least 30 terabytes per month. The archive is free to use.

Wikispecies
In 2003, the Long Now Foundation announced the development of The All Species Foundation ( http://www.all-species.org/ ). Its aim was to produce a complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within 25 years (chosen to represent a human generation). According to its website: “In applied science, this completion of the Linnaean enterprise is needed for effective conservation practices, and for impact studies of environmental change.”

Though the project stalled because of funding shortfalls, the Wikimedia Foundation recently launched Wikispecies ( http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ), an open free directory of all species. “This will cover Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life to the extent that our users allow us.” “Wikispecies is free. Because life is public domain!” Best wishes to both projects as they will feed one another.

The World Digital Library
The Library of Congress recently established a project to create a World Digital Library. Kick-started by a donation or $3 million from Google, the library will bring together existing digital assets in the Library of Congress with vast library holdings around the world. For example, the World Digital Library aims to bring a collection of Islamic scientific documents from the 10th to the 16th Century on-line.

The World Digital Library builds on work well underway by the Library of Congress, including the American Memory of Project, a documentary record of America ( http://www.loc.gov/memory/ ).

The World Digital Library will both compete with and complement partner Google’s extraordinary Print Library project ( http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html ).

Both projects are joined by another “global-mind-building” project, the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of not-for-profit and for-profit organizations committed to building a free and open archive of text and multimedia on-line. Conceived by Yahoo and the aforementioned Internet Archive in 2005, this response to Google’s Print Library aims to keep works in the public domain easily accessible on-line.

The Singularity is Near
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is an update of Raymond Kurzweil’s 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Both books, and all of Kurzweil’s writings, make Massive Change look timid in comparison. In the new book, Kurzweil attempts to prove his own immortality through a combination of four postulates:

1. That a technological-evolutionary jump known as the singularity exists as an achievable goal for humanity.

2. That through a law of accelerating returns technology is progressing toward the singularity at an exponential rate.

3. That the functionality of the brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.

4. That medical advancements will keep his generation alive long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain.

According to Kurzweil: “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century–it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The ‘returns,’ such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity–technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.”

Grid Computing
Grid projects are designed to be distributed information systems whose computing goals can range from complex forms of interaction in the medical community (bioinformatics) - where researchers work toward the development of cures for diseases and viruses - to the analysis of seismic activity, as with the NEESgrid (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation). What distinguishes a grid from other distributed computing systems - or the Internet, for that matter - is its concern with integrating distributed resources using standard protocols and interfaces to provide capabilities that would not otherwise be available.

Developed by computer scientists Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, the Globus Alliance is a consortium of institutions working on a software system called the Globus Toolkit, which is focused on defining, developing, and assimilating an open source implementation of some of these core grid protocols.

The grid is exciting because it’s an evolutionary step beyond today’s Internet. It builds on the same technology that underlies email and Web browsers, but it extends that technology to allow us not just to access information as the Web does, or to send messages as the email system does, but also to tie together computing systems that may be geographically dispersed.

To read or listen to an interview with Ian Foster conducted for Massive Change radio, click here. Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.

Some of the text of the foregoing news article derives from the book Massive Change (Phaidon, 2004), by Bruce Mau with Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries.

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