Altered States

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© Elsewhere

 

The World-Wide-Web, that ubiquitous subset of the internet, truly is a vast, albeit virtual space, comprising around 1.8 billion resolvable hostnames [read: web sites]. It all started with just the one web site in 1991, hosted by Tim Berners-Lee, the web's inventor; on a Next cube computer at CERN in Switzerland. By the time we had our first dial-up in our office in 1993, there were only 130 websites out there in the entire of cyberspace, with as I've said before, no method or tool with which to search and find stuff, but with only 130 sites, knowing where each of them was located was easy enough. Within twelve months, Yahoo had arrived and the number of web sites had reached nearly three thousand. By the time Google appeared in 1998, the numbers were up to about two and half million. The next ten years saw the numbers grow rapidly, to over one hundred and seventy-two million.

The amount of data sloshing around the planet today is estimated to be around forty trillion gigabytes [40 zettabytes], a figure I'd imagine anyone would struggle to visualise at the best of times. We have come a very long way in a little less than thirty years. Where the whole thing will end up is anyone's guess, considering most of the world only started to wake up to the internet's existence just over twenty years since; a sobering thought when you put it in the context of industrial history's timeline thus far.

Will the Net's growth plateau? Common sense would say it will have to, given the increasing amounts of physical, electrical energy required to power all the data-centres that make up the internet and the cloud. If the energy requirements can be met by sustainable, renewable means, then at least this extraordinary expansion rate can probably be maintained at least until the current i.p. address space runs out and there are no addresses left to issue.

However, waiting in the wings is i.p.v6, which has more addresses available than the number of atoms in the known universe. What we fill all this practically infinite space with is probably more pertinent than our ability to provide it, technically impressive though that is. I suspect it will be more of the same inanity and misinformation that is becoming the norm on todays [relatively] constrained internet, just lots more of it.

When AI kicks in properly and human intervention and content creation are pushed to the sidelines - which will happen by stealth as its normalisation will be by its being indistinguishable from the real and as such will go pretty much unnoticed by most; content will be for the most part fictive and the assumed reality of it all illusory.

A warning sign was this largely unaccounted event, only noticed by expert eyes. The fact that people were interacting with a non-existent 'being' quite happily is truly worrying. The gap between the real and the fake in the human world is closing rapidly. AI could alter irrevocably the realities of a large swathe of online humanity, leaving them reference-free, with no fixed point to return to and no way home to what really is real.

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