Post #3: Learning to Walk
Before I learned to walk, my body was like a spastic little baby. My various body parts were unable to communicate with each other.
As the weeks and months marched on, my body’s nervous system grew new connections, new pathways that enabled body-wide communication. As these pathways gained stability, my brain could reliably send electrified information into my arms and legs, gaining the confidence to take that first step towards the NCAA D3 athlete this body would become. Not so spastic anymore grandma, not so spastic anymore.
When I think of humanity, I think of us as a single human body learning to walk. To this day we continue to thrash spastically in many directions, like a baby’s body. Our countries continue to fight each other, to the point of killing. Within our countries we fight, whether it’s political stalemate or social conflict. Our collective body is fighting itself as it tries to make progress, tries to walk somewhere good.
To move past these challenges, we need better coordination. Like when a new human body gains control of itself, our species needs to keep building connections, building pathways that we can send information through to coordinate our movements. We need a species-wide “nervous system.”
Building Humanity’s Nervous System
Many innovations have enabled humans to better coordinate our movements. And when we reach a new level of coordination, we’re able to innovate in new and more complex ways, leading to the next level. Here’s a very brief journey through some of these innovations.
When we developed language, it allowed two people to develop more reliable connections, forming coordinated pairs. Those pairs became groups that used language to build reliable pathways among themselves. Coordination increased.
When we developed ways to put our language onto materials, whether by etching into stone or painting onto animal skin, we could asynchronously build connections across geographies. What an amazing power it was to transcend time and location with our connections. Coordination increased.
Then came the mass production of written materials via technology like Johannes’s printing press, enabling larger parts of humanity to connect more quickly. Then Ben developed the postal service, sending these mass communications in regular intervals across wide areas, a massive win for coordination. Coordination increased.
When we figured out how to electronically encode our languages into binary, the pace of connection building took on an exponential curve. Nikola harnessed electrons in wonderful ways, then Samuel used those electrons to send short and long electronic beeps and boops at nearly the speed of light. This Morse code progressed our body into a less spastic stage, enabling groups to coordinate their actions more efficiently. Coordination increased.
Then we learned to transmit our voices along these electronic paths, with radio and telephones pushing us into a higher bandwidth state of connection. You could be where you are, and I could be where I am, and yet our voices could be in the same place at effectively the same time. Coordination increased.
Then the fax machine. Another amazing innovation for our connectivity, but the fax machine was too short lived to warrant a full paragraph.
Skipping some important steps along this journey of building our society’s nervous system, we finally arrive at the present and I daresay most interesting contribution: the internet.
It’s Still Early Days for the Internet
Humans have been joining the internet community over the past 30 years at a remarkable rate. In 1990, almost nobody used the internet. In 2022, 5 billion people use the internet. That’s an average of 156 million people joining the network each year and counting. Within 10 years from today, we’ll likely have every human on earth connected to this network. For the first time in our history, nearly real-time coordination across our entire species will become possible.
The last 30 years of using the internet has been a fascinating experiment. We have cats on top of business applications on top of immersive games on top of naked people on top of video chat on top of movies on top of ecommerce on top of “social media” on top of crypto projects on top of a million other things.
While amazing, it can be easy to forget that this nearly endless array of internet projects is about connecting people. A person puts cat photos, movies, or games online for you to enjoy. A person creates the “online shopping” experience and ships the product to you. A person makes a new crypto protocol for you to engage with. The internet, in its variety of forms, is about coordinating human relationships.
The tricky project that we’re now facing as a society is to determine how we want to coordinate ourselves using this amazing new network.
The Next 30 Years
The internet we’ve created gives our species high-bandwidth communication pathways for text, video, audio, and soon touch (aka haptics) and I bet smell isn’t far off. The internet is evolving to look more and more like an individual body’s nervous system.
As we continue building pathways to send more information more quickly to more people, so grows our ability to coordinate. For one simple example: once we have every human on earth connected to the internet, it becomes possible to simultaneously send the exact same message to every member of our species. Think about that for a moment. Never before in human history, and as far as we know in the history of life on earth, could one species communicate across every single one of its members at the same time. It’s a powerful network we’re building that unlocks so many possibilities.
We won’t have to spastically move into our future for much longer. Walking is almost within our grasp.
The big question is: how do we want to use this this network of computers, wires, and electromagnetic waves to coordinate our species?
I’d like to see us use this network to stop spazzing our way through existence and start walking. Not asking us to run yet, just a little walking. That means leveraging the internet to become a coordinated body where one foot trusts the other. That means using the internet to exchange information that’s relevant to the decisions we want to make together. And then actually making those decisions. That means using the internet to more efficiently and peacefully deal with our disagreements. It means using the internet to drive our society towards a more awesome and existentially relevant future.
Next Up
There’s word in the previous paragraph that could use a post or more of exploration: “relevant.” For an individual body, it’s the brain that makes judgment calls as to which information is relevant before it delegates its decision to the limbs and mouth. Can this internet that connects us be a brain? Or do we need some other part of our nervous system that isn’t currently being built?
In the next post, I’ll explore how we can surface relevant information over the internet, enabling us to judge where to place these limbs that we’re just gaining control over.
Xoxo.