The Global Organism
Chapter 1

We are becoming a single global system

The history of humanity can be describes as a long and accellerating coupling of us all into a single connected system. Once, most people were firmly rooted - or even tied in serfdom - to a local community that was more or less self contained. As history progressed the interactions with other village and regions grew as the technologies to remove distance were developed: Roads, mail, railroads, cars, telegraph cables under the Atlantic, telephones, airplanes, television and the internet. In the later years this tendency has picked up a lot of speed, not least because of the simultaneos systematic global efforts to standardize, and to remove trade barriers and border controls.
Globalization is high on the political agenda and it has become very visible in our everyday lives. Connecting the globe is the Great Project of our times, and it will affect all aspects of life in the coming years. Economically, culturally, politically, technologically and environmentally we are being knitted ever closer, and, for better or worse, we are becoming ever more mutually committed and dependent upon each other.

Once most people never left the parish, once you could speak of self sufficiency. These days you cannot live through a day without your actions, on the job or as a consumer, affecting conditions all over the planet. And likewise, we are subject to the global currents that emerge from the actions of millions of consumers far away from us.
Once companies were local, selling their goods in the vicinity. Gradually the company could start expanding, selling to costumers in the whole country, maybe even exporting. Nowadays, even a small startup company immediately faces global competition and it is required to orient itself towards a global market.
Along the way we have established public authorities to balance and check that the activities of private enterprize doesn't completely overrule considerations for the common good. Those authorities have grown accordingly, from the local to the national level - and meanwhile even the European Union has started to look as merely an intermediate stage on the road towards global governance.

The network will encompass more people and cover larger areas, as the technology becomes cheaper and is extended into every outback of the planet. Should a few tribes deep in some economically insignificant jungle succeed in evading, they will never the less be connected to the rest of us simply because they too must share the riscs that humanity's development project brings with it. We will all be affected by global warming or pollution - even those that have never flown an airplane or used a telephone.

Internet everywhere
The coupling is not limited to people, our machines are also being connected. The force of the internet will be built in to all imaginable and un-imaginable gadgets - exactly like electricity was. Once an electric tooth brush seemed an absurd vanity, these days it's a standard commodity, and meanwhile the brush has even been fitted with a little bit of intelligence; a tiny micro processor that can tell the user when the brush has been running for the prescribed 2 minutes.
Likewise micro processors - computer chips, that is - will be integrated into doors, windows, refrigerators, garbage bins, thermos, shoes, glasses… you name til. One speaks about "things that think" or "intelligent objects".
The computers in our gadgets will make them capable of sensing their surrounding and making decisions - in its simplest version as a thermostat, which senses whether it's too hot or too cold, shutting down or turning up the heat accordingly.
In addition to thinking, the chip in our gadgets will be capable of communicating - and therein lies the real revolution. When a radiator can exchange observations and reach decisions in interaction with the other radiators, the solar panels, the weather forecast, the current price of various sources of energy - and the human inhabitants, of course - they can collectively reach decisions that are much better qualified.
In connection, our gadgets will form what one might call "intelligents surroundings". Just like all the telephones in the world are connected in one system, all the little gadgets and various intelligent surroundings will eventually be connected in one enormous system. In the future there will only be one computer - but it will be everywhere.

Always on
In the usual future scenarios of the IT industry we will almost constantly be situated within intelligent surroundings - apart from those rare moments in which we almost ritualistically signal our independence and basic instincts by going off-line, fearlessly indulging in pure, uninterrupted quality time.
Our homes, our workplace, shops, malls, cars, trains, planes and bicycles will all be environments that constantly notice who we are, what we are doing, and - according to a detailed profile of our habits - the system will try to assist and service us in ways we can hardly even imagine we might need today.

At my grandparents' house, back in the sixties, we had a television that was a major piece of furniture, with a rounded screen that could be hidden behind a wooden roll-front when not in use. If you wanted to watch it, you had to turn on the TV well ahead of time. We kids would sit intensely observing how the two green strips in the little glass tube under the screen slowly grew closer. When they finally overlapped, indicating that the TV had warmed up, we could yell at the grown-ups to come.

These days we wait in front of screens displaying Windows or Mac OS, and despite the wonders of technology, we are still not beyond the little strip growing at the bottom. We still need to wait for connection to the electronic world. Boot up, log on, clicking to get back to where we left…

Readers that are blessed with a high speed internet connection will know that fast and constant access is crucial to the way you use the net.
Enormous investments are made to extend constant connections everywhere. We will - that's the theory - not have to wait for the computer (or the laundromat or our wristwatch…) to log on to the net, cause it will already be connected, and it will not log off again. In fact, many gadgets will hardly be functional unless they are in contact, just like a cellphone is worthless unless it's connected - and just like our electronic devices are dead without electricity. Off line, the car or the stereo will be out of order or running shakily at a much reduced performance.
In many cases we ourselves will be unable to fully function without connection to the net - at least in the major cities. It will be dangerous to walk down the street, impossible to enter buildings and impossible to pay for goods or transportation without identifying yourself and interacting with The System.

Many windows to cyberspace
We will still watch TV, and in most cases we will probably still prefer old fashioned, linear, coherent movies and programs. But users will soon grow accustomed to - and start expecting - that the program is much "deeper" than what you see on the screen. Just below the surface of any program will be the possibility to choose additional information, different soundtracks, captions, chat rooms, whatever… and armed with a remote control the threshold will be very low for interfering and adjusting what you are receiving a bit.
The same devices which bring us news, entertainment, movies, music and so on will also be a source of lots of much more concrete, practical information, that we can use in our daily activities; shopping, accounting, communicating, transportation, education, healthcare etc.

Idealy, the services that we use should be "context sensitive" so that the devices we use to receive informations can adjust what they are showing us according to the situation. Basically, all the screens in our surroundings are windows opening to the same electronic universe that contain all kinds of very different informations.
To some extent the system should be able to follow your use of it, and gradually learn more about your needs and habits. This way you might experience that you can use any computer as if it were your own personal costumized device, and it will have a pretty good idea of what you might need online, because the moment you identify yourself on the net, it will gather your personal informations and preferences and show them on that screen.
Steve Emmott of the NCR Knowledge lab in London thinks the concept of context sensitivity will grow in importance as the amount of information on the net swells: "There's so much information in this universe of networks that finding it on these devices is just not appropriate. The right information should be finding you".

I-wear
The next step after laptops and handheld computers are computers that you wear. The gear that matches your cell phone, palmpilot, walkman or remote control could be like clothes, a wrist watch or eye glasses: something that's always with you and which you couldn't manage very well without. The concept is called "wearable computing" or simply "wearables", and it's making its way through the R&D and design departments of the electronics industry - along with the term "pervasive" computing, which is used to describe, how computing power seeps in everywhere.
Some of the best research in the field was unfortunately cut off suddenly in the middle of 2001, when Starlab, the leading European research center focusing on the far future, fell victim to the dot.com crash.
I visited Starlab a few months before, when no one yet knew what was in store. In a Bruxelles suburb, in a castle reminiscent of capt. Haddock's Marlinspike Hall in the Tintin cartoons, a hundred of the worlds leading scientists were gathered under the slogan: A place where a hundred years means nothing.

One of the more short term projects at Starlab was the development of "I-wear" - clothes that think. Among the goals were to integrate the electronic circuits directly into the clothes, by weaving them, like fibres, into the fabric, so the material itself could function as the processor, antenna or battery.

The vision of Starlabs' head of research, Walther van der Velde, was - and still is - that clothes should have senses. The buttons of a shirt should double as a microphone or as a camera, and the fabric should have integrated sensors for temperature or humidity. Another important function would be the ability to track the location of the person wearing the clothes by integrating GPS or some other positioning system.

Sports apparel maker Adidas was among the sponsors of the project, and on my tour of the lab I noticed a pair of soccer shoes with a bundle of wires sticking out. Walther van der Velde imagined a training outfit that could assist an athlete in optimizing a training program by measuring how far he or she runs and if it's through flat or hilly terrain. The suit should also measure the reactions of the body, such as the pulse and sweat, and in this way the suit would be able to supply good advice on how whether to push harder or relax a bit. The suit should even be capaple of sensing and then warning the athlete if particular proteins in the sweat indicate that an injury or an inflammation is building up

Tag the world
Each individual computer in our clothes, watch, glasses or where it may be need not be very powerfull. The crucial point is whether it's connected to the net.
Today, when our desktop PC starts losing its breath dealing with the ever growing programs and rising numbers of pictures and sound we need to buy another, more powerfull model. Compared to the way we use electricity, this would be as if every device had it's own built-in power supply. Instead, we've chosen to collect the necessery electric power from the grid.
Future computers will not need a large processor or memory to draw upon the ressources of the net and to participate in the exchange of informations and observations. It is not just a matter of being able to send bits back and forth, though. The other main requirement will be that the person or device can identify itself electronically.

A key technology in this respect is the development of chips that are cheap enough that they can be placed on more or less anything. And of course there are labs hard at work on just that.
The centre of the effort is "The Auto-ID center" at the M.I.T. universitety in Boston: Here, Dan Engels and his colleagues are developing ultra cheap so-called "RF-tags"; tiny chips, that emit radio signals and in that way can identify themselves to all devices that have a tag reader built in, so they can receive the signal. The immediate goal of the Auto-ID center is to bring the price of a chip below a penny. "Part of our vision is to put tags on all of the objects and put tag readers everywhere in the world" says Dan Engels: "We want to tag the world".

The first application of the little chips will be to replace the barcodes that are used on all goods in stores. If there's a chip on every item in the supermarket then the costumers could simply put their groceries directly in their bag and leave the shop without having to stand in line at the cashier. In stead their purchases would automatically be registered when they pass a tag reader at the exit, and the payment could be drawn from their account.
Automatic identification of objects could be useful in many other contexts. The most important feature of the system is the fact that it creates a clear and simple connection between a physical object and its electronic "doppelgänger", that consists of information about the object on the net.
A costumer who buys a tube of suntan lotion would thus be able to find a range of information on the net that might be usefull. If the costumers' computer has a tag reader built in, then the tag on the tube would function as a link to a website on the internet.
So you scan the tube, and the computer logs on to the website of the producer. Here, you might find very detailed information about the contents of the suntan lotion, including special information for people with infants or allergies. You might find advice on safer ways to suntan or you could find advertisements for the manufacturers' other products. Maybe there's even an extensive site devoted to "life in the sun" and the many products that might call for: bathing suits, travels, music…
The old fashioned barcode tells what type of product you're dealing with but the rf-tag is much more precise. The signal from the chip identifies the individual instance of a specific product. So the computer knows not only that it's dealing with a tube of suntan lotion, it knows exactly which tube of suntan lotion.
If there has been a mistake in production and a batch of lotion contains some bad ingredients, you could alert the costumers as soon as they scan one of the bad tubes. Less dramatic, they could also be notified if a tag reader notices that the tube has exceeded the "use by" date.

Identifying every object on the planet
The technical specifications for the code that the rf-tag emits to identify itself has enough "name space" that all objects that are produced in the world can have their own unique code. In fact, there are enough numbers that each of the subcomponents that the product is built from could be uniquely tagged as well.

Dan Engels from the Auto-ID center imagines that there will be tags on many more objects than those that are sold in stores. For instance, tags could create a link between a paper document and electronic information in a database. At hospitals the medical records of patients could be tagged, making it easy to jump from information written on paper to the information in the computersystem. Tagging a medical record should also ensure that it won't get lost.
The idea is to have a vast number of tag-readers installed in rooms, in computers, cell phones and all sorts of other devices that will constantly scan the surroundings and notice which objects are close. This could make it easier to track down the location of a tagged object - a medical record, for instance. At the same time it becomes very simple to track who have used the record and when, and whether the person that asks to have the medical record is authorized to see it.
The exact same principle could be extended to many other types of documents - perhaps even money.

Making life easier for robots
Dan Engels expects that it will take ten years for rf-tags to become as widespread on goods as barcodes are today. By then tag readers should also have started spreading outside stores and warehouse.
At the Auto-ID center the researchers are working on refrigerators, microwave ovens and other home appliances with built-in tag-readers. If you want to heat a frozen pizza in the microwave oven, you hold the box close the ovens' tag-reader. In that way the oven gets to know what item it's suppose to heat, and it can automatically log on to the website of the manufacturer to download the appropriate instructions for cooking.

Household robots are another target for the efforts of the Auto-ID center. Robots have a hard time navigating the world, and that difficulty is one of the main obstacles for using robots as helpers in the home. If all objects in the house were tagged so that a robot with a tag reader would know exactly what was where - that would make life a lot easier for the robot.

It seems plausible that humans themselves will eventually be tagged in order to become part of the system and "readable" by machines. Many countries with toll roads have introduced systems where a creditcard-sized "smartcard" with a built-in chip is placed in the car. When the car passes the tollbooth the system automatically senses the cards' identity and deducts the proper amount from the cards' acount.
Cattle, dogs and other pets are often tagged with a little micro processor the size of grain of rice, which is injected under the skin. There are examples of wealthy and paranoid south american parents that have had their kids tagged in the same fashion to protect them in case of kidnapping.
Gill Pratt, who is head of "the Leg lab", a robotics laboratory at MIT, predicts, that it will be quite common to have chips implanted or in your clothes in order to prevent being run down by driverless cars or robots, that haven't sensed your presence.

I have to admit that those functions are not among those that top my personal list of wishes for my home. Sure, maybe there will be microwave ovens with tag readers. I can imagine a vacuum cleaning robot might be popular as well. If it can be made to be sufficiently cheap, easy and quiet, then why not? But like so often when it comes to predictions, it will propably turn out that companies and consumer find ways of using the technology that are completely different from what the inventors had envisaged.
The main point here is to see the general tendency: What space of possibilities will the technology open up, where could the penetration and connecting of computing and communication capabilites lead to? With that in mind you can start imagining tools to solve the problems that are real to us.

Layers of reality
In the early nineties there was a lot talk about "Virtual reality" which would make it possible to move around and experience an electronic universe as if you were actually standing inside it.
There is reason however to believe that we are more likely to experience "augmented reality". The word "Augmented" indicates that something has been added or extended. The idea of augmented reality is to add a layer of information on top of reality.
The extra layer kan be added in a number of different ways. It could be by wearing a pair of glasses that are transparent, like normal glasses, but which also are able to display a semi-transparent image on the inside of the lenses, like a computerscreen. By combining the glasses with sensors that sense exactly where the user is located and which way the head is pointing, you could for instance show pointers or explanatory texts, that match the object the user is facing.
Another possibility is to use the combination of a video camera connected to a computer. When you point the camera towards an object or a person, the computer will show the video images, with an added layer of extra information that could be usefull for understanding the scene that you're pointing the camera at.

Today we make a clear distinction between the physical and the electronic reality, but gradually those two worlds will start to overlap and interfere so much with each other, that it will no longer be meaningfull to consider them as separate and different. The display in my glasses will place messages and images in my field of view, a blinking symbol will notify me of incoming mail, a chart will instruct me what buttons I should be pressing to operate the device I'm standing in front of.
I will be able to watch images from many other locations, mixed with what I see with my own two eyes where my physical body is actually at - just as I could be virtually present in other, remote contexts. The buildings I pass or the rooms I'm in don't necessarily look the same to you as they look to me, because all surfaces could be augmented with electronic messages or images - matched to each person own profile.

Walking around in a metropols like Tokyo the blitz of messages from neon lights, giant video screens and loudspeakers is so intense, that the vision of augmented reality seems like an obvious, natural next step. And fittingly, Sony is spearheading the efforts to mature the concept of augmented reality for the mass market.
The team behind Sony's strategy is working in a nondescript building up a narrow alley somewhere in Shimbashi, a Tokyo district where Sony's headquarters are located and where every other building seems to bear the company's name.
On the 3rd floor you find Sony CSL - the Computer Science Laboratory. Things look very un-japanese there. The employees are not wearing suit and tie. Actually, most of them are wearing quite radical clothing. And it's messy there! Many of the offices are bursting from heaps of paper, various keyboards, circuit boards, collections of electronic toys, defunct computers, old monitors, gadgets galore… It's pretty schocking compared to the meticulous order that's usual in the offices of large Japanese companies.

For Jun Rekimoto, head of Sony CSL, the departing point of his research is the assumption that computers will become invisible. Keyboards and displays will simply become part of the surroundings, integrated into walls, ceilings and tables - and therefore, all those surfaces should eventually be able to function as doors between the physical and the digital universe.

A common global nervous system
If we really look ahead I believe technology will become so advanced and so discrete that we will hardly percieve it as something separate from our selves. We will fuse entirely with technology, becoming a new kind of creatures: an altered species, with new powers and capabilities, as dependent upon electricity and processing power as we are upon food, water and clean air. In fact, we've come quite far in that direction already.
Canadian media philosopher Marshall MacLuhan thought of computers and electronic communication as an extension of our nervous system. Equipped with video cameras, weather satellites and phones we can sense what's going on around the world - just as we sense our immediate surroundings through our eyes and ears.
An interesting aspect of this new electronic nervous system is that we have it in common. We all access the same sensory system, we draw upon the same enormous memory and the same processing of information. In numerous ways the internet resembles a gigantic global brain, with each individual connected computer acting as neuron, contributing to keep the whole alive and conscious.
Digital man will not be as independent as our analogue ancestors. We will be coupled so tightly that you can hardly tell where the individual person ends and the new common organism begins.

Syncronicity
Once the world consisted of cultures and societies that lived entirely separate from eachother. The sophisticated Egyptian pharoes and the primitive hunter-gatherers of the northern European stone age were contemporaries, but their stages of development were ages apart. The advancing coupling of the world implies that global time is syncronized. Everyone in the sphere of western consumerism - be it in the United States or in some middleclass suburb in Argentina - live in the same NOW, receiving breaking news, the latest hits and movies, software updates and changing prices of gasoline more or less simultaneosly.
The railroads made it a practical necessity to syncronize watches
so that the watches of long distance passengers travelling east-west wouldn't deviate at the end of their journey. In the age of aviation, the internet and continental power grids the globe must syncronize right down to the last decimal. The closer coupled we are, the faster events at one locations will spread to affect the rest of the system - the ups and downs of the stock markets are the standard example. If you want to take part and make it, you must live in global realtime.

The whole is more than the sum of the parts
For several hundred years the standard scientific procedure has been to reduce systems to simpler manageable components, that can be understood individually. The drawback of the method, however, is that you become blind to the characteristics that emerge in the dynamic interaction between the components. The behaviour of a living organisme cannot be fully explained or predicted by examining it in dead condition.

The counterpart to this approach has been "holistic" thinking. In practice this has been an almost mystic method that was scorned by the scientific community as being imprecise and substandard. Only within the last few decades have powerful computers made it possible to simulate and visualize the dynamics of complex systems.
This has led to an entire new scientific disciplin and to some badly needed explanations of the ways our world is shaped.
The science of complexity looks across the board at all systems that are complex, adaptive and dynamic - and there a lot of those - in order to observe some properties that reoccur in all of the systems' ways of developing. It turns out that one can often transfer experiences and understandings between very different types of systems: Fluctuations on the stock market, traffic jams in metropolitan areas, changes in the numbers of different species in an ecosystem, or developments in meteorological systems. They all share some fundamental common behaviours:

- Emergence or "self organization" are expressions that have become widely used. The idea is that allthough a system may consist of elements that each are very simple, very advanced patterns and properties can emerge in the interaction between the elements - patterns that can not be predicted by simply studying the individual parts or by watching the system when it's not running.
If you watch the pictures in a roll of film slowly one after another, they will each appear dead and motionless. But as you raise the speed, at some point a qualitative leap occurs: the images come "alive". Something completely new emerges in the interaction between them and the viewers' senses.
The extensive coupling of humans and machines alike that I have described in this chapter will also lead to the emergence of completely new phenomena - the internet being the obvious place to look. In the old days scientists and inventors had to work on their own or with the few others that they were able to meet at conferences or through scientific publications. Today, it's so much easier to find others, anywhere on the planet, working on the same problems and issues. And the cooperation can be instantaneous, you exchange results and experience with others concurrently. Technological and scientific progress is still driven by the efforts of individuals, but the results increasingly emerge as if they had been worked out by a common global brain.

When the interaction has achieved a certain balance, a complex system can be inert and robust to even powerful perturbations. But if the conditions gradually shift away from the initial condition it can create an unstable situation in which the slightest further change can trigger a massive slide in which the whole system changes phase or is thrown into chaos.
We know the effect from proverbs like "the straw that broke the camels' back" or "the drop that makes the cup run over". A practical example are avalanches of snow that often are triggered by no more than a loud sound. Another, perhaps somewhat worn, example was the way in which the World Trade Center attack threw the global political and economic system into another phase - and lead to war and the toppling of the regime in Afghanistan, a country at the exact opposite side of the planet.
All of this goes to show that a development can be quietly smouldering for a long time before suddenly breaking out in full force. It's a sobering thought when you're frustrated with the inertia of the world.
On the other hand, it's also a reminder that if you let a system deteriorate, you run the risc of only seeing how serious the damages are at the point where the whole system suddenly crashes. Seen in that perspective, global warming could be a classic example of a development that gradually changes the life conditions and rules of the game to the point where some new species and systems, some that fit the new conditions better, suddenly can take over.

To conclude; humanity and our machines are fusing into one connected and complex system. The tighter we are all coupled, the more our lives will be shaped by our interaction with the rest of the system, and the stronger the mutual influence and dependence will be between all the parts of the whole.