I got to say, the Internet, as a singular invention, just keeps climbing up that list of the ‘most important’ inventions of all time. I expect in about 15 years time it’ll pass up electricity, the internal combustion engine and the printing press to take the number one spot. Right about when some 90% of the earth’s population has high-speed wireless access (via your ‘phone’ more so than your laptop, though it’ll be a semi-hybrid of the two anyway) to the internet.
What will change when we hit that point? Well, consider that:
- The invention of writing effectively allowed humankind to ‘remember’ knowledge reliably for timescales longer than a generation. That changed a lot.
- The invention of the printing press effectively allowed groups of people to ‘discuss’ (mainly a one-to-many transmission) knowledge on the timescale of days to years, depending. That arguably changed more.
- The internet stands poised to allow 6+ billion minds to all digest and contribute to our collective body of thought – on the timescale of seconds.
Methinks that while I don’t know what change that last one will bring, I’m confident it’ll be solidly redonkulous.
This all makes a key assumption: that we’ll get to 90% global penetration of the Internet, in a form that’s still a relatively free, simple, and open communication, many-to-many style. So are we really moving that way? Well, this photo was taken last week in Siwa, an oasis some 300km out a not-entirely paved two lane dead-end road into the Egyptian Sahara desert by Libya.
It’s a little hard to see in between all the crumbling rubble – but the sign on that building in the lower left says (in arabic and english but not siwi) “Cafe” and “Net”. Yup, free wifi with your foul. We are definetely pushing those edges, we are pushing the Internet out to the edges of our civilization harder and faster than clean water or basic shelter. And while that might not make a ton of sense – it sure is damn exciting.