Web Science - memento Thursday, December 20 2007
I believe every living thing in the word has ability to store information outside the brain to communicate, remember etc. Humans store/convey information by drawing, talk, writing, recently by digital form. By default, human brain is an imperfect object (problem 1) – the information may lost over time, limitation in remembering things etc. The way brain stores/retrieves information is so complex process. Recently web is a powerful medium to store/communicate idea/thought etc.
A person can communicate himself, for example a thought/idea is communicated within one self. It may be within the brain boundary (Ex: a dream) or may extended to one’s mouth (ex; self talk), Or may be outside the physical body (Writing in diary, personal note etc). Or A person/group of people communicate to other person or group. In either case, when the information stored/communicated outside the physical body, technologies comes into play to solve the brains limitation or to “outsource mental” functions. There are lots of technologies that we have been using it, recently on “the Web”. I have stored lot of my data in the web, I will be keep storing it. I guess the percentage of my information stored in web has increased from 0% (first day) to 4%(today), it may increase to 10% – 12% when I die. If a child born around the year 2100 will store lot more information than me. Probably may be more than 15%. Hence the human virtual memory volume will be increasing rapidly. Collectively all these virtual memory stored in the web is a virtual “Global brain” (ie: Collective outsourced mental functions). The global brain is very very powerful, since there is a freedom, democracy, cumulative knowledge etc on the web. All the online companies are now storing 1B people’s virtual memory. One day it may reach close to the total population. Currently the web solves (partially) brain limitations and adding much more services, but it is not solving lot of basic problems, for example my virtual brain is not always with me, its stored on cloud, its not mobile, my virtual brain is not in my control (privacy, moving data around cloud etc), the way it stores/retrieves is so much different than my physical memory, brain stores lot of additional information than web for example: context, environment/surroundings and so on. In a long run, we will be seeing some awesome services…
Few of My dreams are …
One day if a person’s brain has been damaged means, he should be able to restore it, Prediction/Possibilities: “If you do this, you probably get a heart attack”, “If you go this way, the chance of getting into accident is around 20%”, “If you drink this alcohol, your life time may decrease up to 3 days for each litter” etc
