The Internet on Your Brain

As though the first person to ever suggest it as an idea, Michael Morost writes a long intro to his book about a future when humans and the internet are connected in massively parallel, the same way the left and right sides of the brain are connected by the corpus callosum:

A human-machine integration is far beyond current technology, of course. But technology advances by integrating. That is, when one system improves, it spurs improvement in other systems so they can keep up. When those systems improve, they in turn spur the first system to improve. The systems become increasingly dependent on each other. Their futures become mutually bound.

Take, for example, desktop computers and the software that runs them. Better computers let software engineers write bigger programs. Bigger programs create a demand for better computers. The computer manufacturers are happy to oblige, and the cycle starts all over again. A push is matched by a pull, which evokes a new push. That push-pull dynamic has rammed innovation into overdrive.

A push-pull dynamic is hobbled, though, when one system can’t improve as fast as the other. The Internet is improving very fast. The human body improves very slowly. Our hands evolved to grip spears and plows, and so can type only so many emails in a day. Our senses evolved to monitor a largely unchanging savannah for friends and predators, and so can pay attention to only a handful of events at a time. To be sure, some human attributes like IQ appear to have risen in the twentieth century, but the rate of increase is much slower than technology’s. There is no Moore’s Law for human beings.

This mismatch between humans and the Internet imposes inherent limits on how much either can improve. This is unfortunate, because they are a natural match for a push-pull dynamic driving each other upward. Their strengths are complementary. The Internet is fast, while humans are slow; capacious, while humans are forgetful. Conversely, humans are self-aware while the Internet isn’t, and humans can interact with the physical world while the Internet can’t. But they also have aligned strengths: they are both intensely networked, intensely communicative entities.

One way to overcome the separateness of humans and the Internet is to increase the speed and density of their information exchange. Nature has already solved an engineering challenge like this, in fact, in your own head. Your brain has two hemispheres, each of which controls the opposite side of your body. Your left hemisphere controls your right hand and the right side of your face, for instance. In a normal brain the two halves work together smoothly and efficiently because they are connected via the corpus callosum, a bundle of 200 to 250 million nerve fibers. Their separateness is overcome by what scientists call “massively parallel connectedness.”

But if a surgeon severs the corpus callosum, as has sometimes been done in last-ditch attempts to control epilepsy, it soon becomes clear that the two hemispheres have very different desires and intentions. One hand buttons a shirt while the other simultaneously unbuttons it. One hand pulls down one’s trousers, while the other pulls them back up. In his book The Bisected Brain Michael Gazzaniga wrote that splitting the hemispheres “produces two separate, but equal, cognitive systems each with its own abilities to learn, emote, think, and act.” In an intact brain the corpus callosum lets the hemispheres exchange so much data so quickly that functionally they behave as a unified brain. The rapidity and density of the connection effectively erases their differences.

Morost goes on to suggest the future:

As I said, the lack of a fast and efficient interface sets inherent limits on how much humans can do with the Internet. If human minds could work directly with the Internet, two grand unifications would happen at once. First, humans would become more closely connected with each other. As I will explain later in the book, we would have entirely new ways to sense each other’s presence, moods, and needs. A person with a suitably wired brain could be aware of other people as if they were part of her own body, the same way she knows where her own fingers are. Second, humanity and its tool, the Internet, would become a single organism with entirely new powers. Not just a mere hybrid, but a new species in its own right.

Well, that might be a bit poetic for me. Readers can read my version of this concept here. I want to touch on a brief problem with the future. Imagine he and I are right, and not far in the future it become possible, either by surgery or by less invasive means, for a computer and a human being to directly connect via the nervous system. The floodgates are opened.
One cannot seriously believe that such a technology is affordable to most people. Think of it like this: the internet viewed through a PC or mobile device is a Kia Rio, and a direct neural uplink to the internet would be the Maserati. You create this world where the classes become even more lucidly divided. Either you peck away at a keyboard, you poor, huddled masses...or you browse right from your brain like the celebrities do.
This is how all technology goes, right? The first movers are the "haves" and then innovation and mass production creates cheaper and cheaper markets until even the homeless have smartphones. I'd be fine with that, except I agree with Morost's thesis above: integration of the internet and the brain will accelerate the evolution of both. Which sucks for poor people because how do you catch up with something that is accelerating away from you?
The simplest answer is that you don't. You just try to move as fast as you can, sacrifice so your kids can live like the "haves" and hope they never fall behind. Isn't that the American way? Try to live a decent life so your kids can live a life better than you did?


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