Living in "the One"

In the video below, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, talks about the future of the web. His starting point is that the World Wide Web is just around 5000 days old. And yet, it has already transformed from a net where computers link to each other to a web in which pages link to each other. The next steps will be interlinking data, ideas, whole databases and physical objects. As a result what we now know as the Web will transform into the Internet of Things in the next 5000 days. The Internet of Things will possibly be more like an organism, and we are a part of this encompassing "One".

Not only the idea of "the One" is interesting but also how Kelly supports his vision. He refers to the dated vision from 5000 days ago that the future would be about "TV, but better". This has proven to be a wrong prediction - and what can (or must?) be learned from this false prediction is that something that appears impossible today has a likelier probability than something that is within the confines of our today's perception of reality. In that sense "the internet, but better" is not a likely end point of the next 5000 days.
Kevin Kelly also compares our total dependence on the alphabet today to the total dependence on "the One" that we may experience in the future: It will not be frightening, it will be the usual.

In a way, we have already started to ask "the One" about ourselves. Look at Gartner's prediction that trend watching will become a must for many companies in the future (see this posting). Demand for behavior monitoring is fuel for tools that can intelligently make sense of the blogs, comments, news that are being produced every day through semantic processing. Such tools already exist (e.g. Audience Wisdom of Active Inspire) and they will learn to become better.



Now, here some food for thought: When we will be totally connected to "the One" we will forget that we are connected. When we never plug out, we will lack a notion of being plugged in.

What if that has already happened and we are so wired into "the One" (or call it "the Matrix" :-) that we cannot even imagine what it is like to be outside? Well, I don't know but at any rate this is fuel for the Simulation Argument that I mentionend in an earlier post.) And, yes, I would like to plug in and out according to my own choice...

Video found through freshcreation