Wednesday 8 August 2012

Your Friend

It sits on your desktop, or your lap, or in the palm of your hand - the computer.

It keeps your appointments, it keeps your little black book, it allows you to keep
in touch with friends, family and Joe Black living on the other side of the world
and yet..

Do you really know what is inside of it?

For those of you who have seen the movie TRON, do you not ever wonder if that
computer working for you or are you working for it? Is it just a machine, doing as it
has been programmed or is there some independent thought somewhere inside?
Every time you send a message somewhere, parts of it can get lost - where do
those lost bits go and when they get there what do they do?

A long, long time ago when the earth was just a blue ball floating in space, there was
nothing in the seas that covered most of this planet - nothing but little bits of this and
that. Something happened that caused two of those bits to together, and then a third
bit added itself. Eventually enough bits got together to form something that had
rudimentary intelligence.

Skip forward 4 billion years (give or take a few hundred million) and humans show up
on the planet. Humans grew up, evolved and got smarter(with a few notable exceptions) and they built this vast open space called the Internet. Vast,  huge, full of little bits going to here and there, and little bits just hanging around not doing much but being there waiting for something to happen. Something to happen that will cause two of those little bits to get together.


1 comment:

  1. XLNT piece, EO. Not sure if you can build a market when you're so blatant about your genius, but it's worked for William Gibson, so maybe.
    You and the other half need to start a Salon, at which we can explore these ideas in greater depth.

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