The Massive Planet-Spanning Computer Intelligence is You

Short post today. I'm working on something much bigger, but until it's ready, I thought I would share with you something which I came across a few months ago and it still blows my mind.

I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid. One fairly common theme back then was built around the concept of a planet-spanning super-intelligent computer. Such a computer was either malevolent or patronizing; but either way, humanity got the short end of the stick. These stories captured the unease which people felt about the cold logic of the thinking machines. Even today, movies like "The Terminator" or "I, Robot" continue to explore our relationship with machines as an "us versus them" equation.

The reality, though, is that there is only "us". Instead of remaining cold entities across the gulf of "human versus non-human", computers have become seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our society. In the process, they are breaking down the "us versus them" walls amongst ourselves. Over the past two days, I've met with people in Paris, Walldorf, Tel Aviv, Palo Alto and Bangalore; and I'm not even working on anything big right now. This sort of thing has become just routine day-to-day work. And in the evening, I can spend my time learning how the people of Seoul, Korea feel about the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon river, or how this project influenced the new Bus Rapid Transit system in Mumbai. Heck, there's even a blog about the Mumbai bus system sitting on the same servers I'm using for this mad rambling! There are some evenings where I just spread out like a big flower and soak up the random, diverse thoughts of the globe. It sure beats watching ads for breakfast cereal on that near-useless media called television.

Anyway, what I wanted to share with you was how one creative individual was able to gather dozens of YouTube videos and splice them together in song. To me, this is a wonderful illustration of this thing which is happening to us today -- the seamless integration of computer technology with our social fabric in a way which, rather than destroying us, has brought us all much closer to each other.

Enjoy.