Abstract
That the Internet will become an autonomous partner in cognition is far from inevitable. What appears as an inexorable process can be driven off-course when it collides with countervailing trends. Will we reach the physical limits of computing power, and is the growth of the Internet itself subject to physical limitations? Can we be assured that the infrastructure of the Internet will be maintained? Does the brain have a physical carrying capacity beyond which it is unable to engage in coupled cognition with the Internet? Will we encounter the limits of our ambitions, and abandon the dream of autonomous cognition and brain-Internet interfaces? What will result when our impulse to extend cognition via the Internet confronts any number of limits upon that impulse?
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Notes
On scenario development and scenario thinking, see Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Paths to Strategic Insight for Yourself and Your Company (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996)
Kees van der Heijden, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996).
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 39–41.
Jeff Stibel, Breakpoint (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 85–86. ‘The archival infrastructure in the case of the Internet is only ever temporary, in response to its permanent dynamic rewriting. Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition (Wikipedia). The memory spaces geared to eternity are replaced by series of temporally limited entries with internal expiry dates that are as reconfigurable as the rhetorical mechanisms of the ars memoriae once were … Ostensibly the largest digital archive, the Internet is in fact a collection or assembly … The archive is defined as a given, preselected quantity of documents evaluated according to their worth for being handed down. The Internet, on the other hand, is an aggregate of unpredictable texts, sounds, images, data, and programs.’
Claudius Gros, Gregor Kaczor and Dimitrije Markovic, ‘Neuropsychological constraints to human data production on a global scale,’ European Physical Journal B, 85: 28, 2012, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.6849v1.pdf See also ‘Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth, Say Computer Scientists,’ MIT Technology Review (December 1, 2011), http://www.technologyreview.com/view/426246/human-brain-is-Iimiting-global-data-growth-say-computer-scientists/
Dave Eggers, The Circle (McSweeney’s Books, 2013), 190.
Peter Swirski, From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 197.
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 5.
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Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1973).
Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998), 5–7
‘Towards a Cultural History of Exhaustion’ Centre for Medical Humanities Blog, Durham University (May 8, 2013), http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/towards-a-cultural-history-of-exhaustion/; John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion,’ in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 62–76.
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© 2014 David J. Staley
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Staley, D.J. (2014). Limit. In: Brain, Mind and Internet: A Deep History and Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460950_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460950_5
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