Google and the Noosphere

Today was one of those days where I felt like my head was going to explode. Part of it was due to a bad headache I had for a while this afternoon. But most of it was just too many ideas bouncing around too fast in my head. So, despite their muddled nature, I'm just going to spill them out here now in an attempt to relieve the pressure.

"A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?"
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have an inkling as to what it might be...

First, let me tell you about the idea of the noosphere. According to Wikipedia:

In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek "nous" meaning "mind" + "sfaira" meaning "sphere", in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere." In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere.

For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.

Now, check out some of what Google has been writing about on their corporate blog in the last couple of days.

Regarding the increasingly social nature of the Internet:

It will be great when the instant I think of something to tell my friends, or something I need from my friends, they're available to me in some way. Remember when Google embedded IM into Gmail, and you could suddenly see -- without changing applications -- that the friend you were about to email was online and easily reachable right at that second? That little green bubble of presence right in front of our eyes brought a little extra ping of closeness that email hadn't had until then. That was in 2006, at the start of the AJAX-powered wave of dynamic web apps. Now, many sites and services are adding even more sophisticated plumbing (like profiles and friends and presence and comments) that brings the immediacy of social interaction to more and more places on the web. Reaching your friends can be really active, as IM is today, or it can be passive, like changing your status message.

In the coming decade, the web will become as effortlessly social as chatting with your family or roommates at home is today. Social features will be embedded and around and through all variety of spaces and places on the web. Sometimes you'll go to a place because you want to see your friends, and sometimes the place you're in will get better because you can bring your friends there. It will make it easier to strike up new relationships, new communities, new expressions of what your life is about. The web will connect people to the small moments that in many ways matter most.

Regarding the future of online video:

Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.

In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.

And regarding the exponentially increasing power behind Google's computers as they sort through an exponentially growing pile of data:

In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.

...

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.

...

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin's ideas seem more like mysticism than scientific hypothesis to most people. And they probably are. But still, they seem to be hinting at something real. Something which has become much more real since those men died. Something that is becoming more real by the day.

It's not just far-out philosophers talking about this stuff anymore. Engineers at Google are doing it. And, as they explained in the last post I quoted from above, their powers are growing exponentially.

Google just celebrated its tenth anniversary as a company. Their technology has improved radically in that time. But before too long they'll be making as much progress as they made in their first ten years in a single year. And it will continue to snowball from there.

Returning to the realm of mysticism...

Have you ever felt in passing as though you were a single neuron, reaching out and connecting to other people-neurons and forming a massive new collective brain? I have. Ever wonder what would happen if that were to become more than a metaphor? Or what would happen if the brain were to wake up? I have. But I don't claim to know. It's just a passing feeling.

If you want to learn more about these ideas, I have two book recommendations for you: Robert Wright's Nonzero and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. They're probably not right about everything, but they both have a lot of fascinating ideas. And, like Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin before them, I think they're definitely on to something. Something big. It's still hazy and we can't quite make it out. But it's getting clearer all the time.

Something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. Over the course of the coming years and decades, I believe we will find out exactly what it is. It will no doubt horrify many and amaze all. And it will quite probably transform the world beyond recognition within the lifetimes of many of us who are around today.