Future of PC

In the 1950s, only a fraction of a single megabyte of random-access memory existed on the entire planet. Today a single cheap home computer may contain 50 megabytes, and it is no longer a lonely island of silicon: since the 1970s, the world’s computers have begun joining together as the World Wide Web has spread like a mesh of fungus threads. The Web is encircling Earth, subsuming not only computers but cars and cash registers and televisions. We have surrounded ourselves and a global brain, which taps into our own brains, an intellectual forest dependent on a hidden fungal network.

Computers can dutifully do the things we tell them to do. They can control the path of a spacecraft at its slingshots around the rings of Saturn. They can track the rise and fall of insulin in a diabetic body. But it’s possible that once their global network becomes complex enough, it will spontaneously take on something like our intelligence, perhaps even our own consciousness. Research on artificial life and evolutionary computing has already suggested that computers can evolve an intelligence that doesn’t resemble our own. If a computer is allowed to come up with its own ways of solving problems, it evolves solutions that may make no sense to our brains. There is no telling what the global web of computers may evolve into. In time, our culture may become an intimate stranger to us, a symbolic brain. The li9ons of the wall of Chauvet will begin to dance. ~ Page 311