The internet. What is it and what is it becoming. If you were alive in the 1800s, and witnessed the birth of the telegraph, you would truly believe yourself to be living in a wondrous age. News no longer had to be carried by tall ship, or pony. Instead words could be conveyed across a continent - across the sea even - instantly.


As the telegraph began to spread - new companies popped up to service this hot, hot technology. It was a bubble. Everyone wanted into the telegraph business. Stocks were hot and vast networks of poles and wires were being deployed to points around the globe. Telegraph operators and technicians paid tuition to be trained up on this cutting edge technology - and could command high wages for their specialist knowledge. They were the MCSEs of their era. And by that I mean bloated corpses of a profession concerned more with propping up their arcane, proprietary technology than advancing the science of their field. (zing!)



But disruption happens. As telegraph stations were being built and deployed in towns and cities around the world, a new technology was creeping up. The telephone. The telegraph companies were displaced by phone companies in some cases - in other cases the telegraph companies managed to co-opt the nascent phone technology (AT&T). People could now communicate with *voice* and even in the privacy of their own home. Few saw it coming.

I'm making this point about technology and disruption because I feel like the web may be the telegraph. We're so blinded by its revolutionary nature, Facebook, Youtube, Wikileaks - that we don't see what's coming next to disrupt the web.

If I was living in the age of the telegraph, I don't think I would have predicted the rise of the telephone but I hope that I would be quick to recognise it as it began to rise - and would pivot to embrace it. That's what I would like to do, so I'm sharing my idea - and you're probably going to think I'm a complete loon.



I think the network is going to wake up. Yes, that's right - I think HAL, Terminator and Haley Osment are all on their way - soon. We're getting so close now - we already have conversations with Google and Wikipedia. Yesterday I typed this: "Who's that guy who looks like Jesse Eisenberg?" Boom. The first two words were my answer. How much longer until these vast troves of data start replying in natural language and also remembering context - so that I can ask "Who was that guy I asked about yesterday?"



I know that this kind of position makes me seem like a technology dilettante. Who types full sentences into Google? - that's dumb. I realise that we're talking about a large collection of indexed text in databases. There are no smarts in that. But the sum of all this data is becoming something more. The auto-complete feature is impressive enough - imagine if it was connected to a natural speech recognition system providing a constant search of whatever you happen to be saying at the moment. A constant slideshow of images and wikipedia results streaming by to provide an impromptu backup to every conversation you have.

Imagine going to a pub that was sampling all of the conversations in the room and displaying images about the "dominant meme" conversation onto a large screen on the wall. Or randomly jumping to wikipedia pages, or youtube videos from snatches of overheard conversations "Lady Gaga, elephantitus of the scrotum, white russians". All of this information, recorded and assigned to you and/or anonymised to the masses.



You could review every conversation you ever had - fully indexed with helpful links. This kind of integration with the data will lead to the eventual waking of the net - but when it wakes up, it's not going to be an independent entity. Instead, it's going to be part of us. We're building an A.I. But it will be made of everything we've ever said, written, seen or heard - and in doing so we will blend with it.

Or maybe not - it's just an idea, but I do have a strong hunch that we're just at the beginning of this information revolution and that the web may well just be the telegraph. Maybe it's not an A.I. It could be enhanced kitchen utensils. Let me know your thoughts.

Oh and sorry to anyone who is an MCSE - I hope I didn't come across as mean. (but you really are doomed)