You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

The Internet happened. Stop acting so shocked.

Writing was invented a little over 5,500 years ago. And immediately afterward, it was used to compose letters and send them to distant places—dislocating knowledge from a single person’s mind and from geography. New media like parchment, paper, the printing press, and eventually the telegraph only made this transfer of knowledge easier.

Computers first emerged roughly 80 years ago. Soon after their invention, they began to be connected in networks. It’s tricky to pinpoint the exact moment the Internet, as we know it, began, but a good candidate is the launch of ARPANET in the late 1960s. For many of us, the Internet truly arrived around the turn of the millennium, when we first got it in our homes—and then in our pockets. Now it’s everywhere.

Most people’s attitude toward the Internet seems to have been that they expected to continue living in the same world humans had inhabited for millennia—only now with the added ability to surf to colourful websites with rounded corners for online shopping.

That’s not what happened, as should have been obvious to you, you fools.

The Internet begot Wikipedia and countless other sprawling and comprehensive repositories of knowledge.

The Internet begot the cloud, a planet-wide mesh of computing resources.

The Internet begot blockchains—a simple invention that now can’t be uninvented—placing the ownership of knowledge and value in the hands of everyone.

And the Internet begot AI. Of course, a tremendous amount of human ingenuity went into inventing AI, but you can still think of it largely as a byproduct of the Internet. Just as mammalian brains, when they grow larger and more complex, evolve intelligence, so has the Internet.

Now, we’re months away from AI reaching cosmologically significant powers, making everything that came before it—humanity, the cognitive revolution, writing, the telegraph, smartphones—seem insignificant by comparison.

When I talk to people, they often say everything feels weird. Trump got re-elected, conflicts erupt all over the world, strange behaviours abound. They’re not wrong—but the only question is: what exactly did you expect? What did you think a world with an internet was going to be like?!