5.3 The Digital Revolution on Its Way
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give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’
And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey,
we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”
Later, Steve Jobs even found himself forced to leave the Apple board for a number
of years. But when he returned, he had the iPod, iPhone, iPad as well as iTunes and
the AppStore developed, i.e. products which made Apple the most valuable company
in the world for some time.
This is just a small part of an even larger story. There was, in fact, another important development. In the late sixties, Arpanet was created to allow a few military
computers to exchange information with each other. But it was then opened up
for public use and became the Internet. This eventually unleashed the power of
information. Later, to support the collaboration between Swiss and French teams
contributing to the CERN elementary particle accelerator, physicist Tim BernersLee (*1955) invented a hyperlink protocol supporting the development of web pages
that can be linked with each other. This gave rise to the World Wide Web (WWW)
and eventually made computers useful for ordinary people rather than just experts.
It also made the Internet attractive for doing business and enabled a multi-billion
dollar market. However, Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas did not have an easy start either.
At CERN he didn’t get the support he requested, so he went to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C).
Now, there are about 3 billion Internet users in the world. Eventually, the creation
of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 linked more than a billion people together
in giant social networks. We are no longer just users of this system. We are also
(co-)creators of data and services. In some sense, we are now “human processors”
and nodes in a globe-spanning information system.
5.4 Computers More Intelligent Than Humans?
For decades, the processing power of computers has doubled roughly every
18 months. If this trend continues, some information systems may surpass the power
of a human brain sooner than we think. Our brain has approximately 100 billion
neurons, a firing rate of 200 times a second, and a signal speed of 120 meters per
second. This has to compete with the current generation of supercomputers, which
have 100 times fewer transistors, but operate 20 million times faster, and have a
signal speed which is two million times faster.
Therefore, computers are outperforming humans in increasingly many ways.
Whereas a century ago, some companies maintained departments with hundreds
of employees to perform business calculations, these were later replaced by simple
calculators. Computers are far better than us at doing calculations—and even at chess.
89
give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’
And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey,
we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”
Later, Steve Jobs even found himself forced to leave the Apple board for a number
of years. But when he returned, he had the iPod, iPhone, iPad as well as iTunes and
the AppStore developed, i.e. products which made Apple the most valuable company
in the world for some time.
This is just a small part of an even larger story. There was, in fact, another important development. In the late sixties, Arpanet was created to allow a few military
computers to exchange information with each other. But it was then opened up
for public use and became the Internet. This eventually unleashed the power of
information. Later, to support the collaboration between Swiss and French teams
contributing to the CERN elementary particle accelerator, physicist Tim BernersLee (*1955) invented a hyperlink protocol supporting the development of web pages
that can be linked with each other. This gave rise to the World Wide Web (WWW)
and eventually made computers useful for ordinary people rather than just experts.
It also made the Internet attractive for doing business and enabled a multi-billion
dollar market. However, Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas did not have an easy start either.
At CERN he didn’t get the support he requested, so he went to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C).
Now, there are about 3 billion Internet users in the world. Eventually, the creation
of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 linked more than a billion people together
in giant social networks. We are no longer just users of this system. We are also
(co-)creators of data and services. In some sense, we are now “human processors”
and nodes in a globe-spanning information system.
5.4 Computers More Intelligent Than Humans?
For decades, the processing power of computers has doubled roughly every
18 months. If this trend continues, some information systems may surpass the power
of a human brain sooner than we think. Our brain has approximately 100 billion
neurons, a firing rate of 200 times a second, and a signal speed of 120 meters per
second. This has to compete with the current generation of supercomputers, which
have 100 times fewer transistors, but operate 20 million times faster, and have a
signal speed which is two million times faster.
Therefore, computers are outperforming humans in increasingly many ways.
Whereas a century ago, some companies maintained departments with hundreds
of employees to perform business calculations, these were later replaced by simple
calculators. Computers are far better than us at doing calculations—and even at chess.