The Web Comes to Life

The Web is now evolving at an exponential rate- morphing faster than society's capacity to comprehend its future ramifications. Its structure and computational dynamics are enormously complex- capable of processing billions of transactions and creating many millions of new links and connections every day. Its growth defies the current simplistic models of evolutionary, network and knowledge theory.

The Future Web will emerge by 2030 as a symbiotic extension of life- intelligence on a global scale. It already functions as the central information processing hub for humans on the planet, linking a third of the planet’s population and enabling the successful design and delivery of most complex projects.

The Intelligent Web 4.0, now evolving from current versions of the Social Web 2.0 and Semantic Web 3.0, will interact with the repository of available knowledge of human civilisation- past and present, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis. It will mark the emergence of a new intelligent entity- a sentient and cognisant multidimensional network powered not only by billions of processors and ultra-fast, reliable communications, but also harnessing the power of new generations of biological and quantum computers, capable of processing millions of operations simultaneously.

Web 4.0 will be ubiquitous by 2030, powered by a smart self-organising and pervasive computational mesh- capable of autonomously spawning countless virtual networks- optimising, greening and maintaining its own performance. It will envelop and connect human life through smart devices and automatic sensors and power all facets of social, business and scientific activity- always on, available and aware.

It will link not only most of the planet’s individuals and devices, but communicate with many other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically controlled cyber-physical devices. Its collective intelligence will cojoin biological- B-Life with many new forms of artificial A-Life- from humanoid self-learning robots to the intelligent software agents already roaming through cyberspace.

This seamless network of networks, is rapidly becoming the core asset of our civilisation, encompassing most of our information and knowledge legacy- algorithms, methods, processes, formulae, intellectual property and creative output- enabling most system research, development and service delivery.

Most significantly, it is evolving as a decision partner with humans in the management of the planet’s natural assets, built infrastructure and development projects, as we face the biggest challenges to our habitat and heritage. Through Web 4.0 and its future descendants, human intelligence will have co-joined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence and life, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. In effect these new cogniscent entities will explore alternative solutions and scenarios, evolving more powerful variants and equipped eventually with human-like emotions and the capacity to think creatively.

The principles of artificial life or A-Life are already being probed and analysed through computational models and at a public level through games such as Second Life. System principles relating to complexity, self-organisation, adaptive feedback, autocatalysis, cellular automata, and chaos theory are also being incorporated in models of artificial life and co-dependent organisms.

This level of collective intelligence will be essential for supporting the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving requirements, essential for civilisation's future progress particularly related to- global warming, conflict resolution, economic chaos, impacts of natural catastrophes and food and water scarcity.

Just as we routinely use computer design, control and modeling tools today and outsource the operation of superfast trains, planes, chemical refineries, manufacturing plants, stock market trading, web services and space missions to clever algorithms- so tomorrow this trend will extend to almost all processes, including personal medical diagnosis and research. Humans will stay in the decision loop but only only as co-partners; as components of the collective intelligence, even as smart software begets ultra smart algorithms, completely new ideas and theorems, which the human mind on its own cannot conceive.

By 2030 the web will manifest all the properties of a living superorganism- amplifying the mind power of its continuously connected 6 billion human processors, continuously learning and adapting through sensing its environment, expanding its collective intelligence and memory and monitoring and enhancing its own progress through countless feedback loops and statistical inference channels- while at the same time continuously mutating and self-replicating.

Multinational virtual teams of researchers are already establishing a presence on the Web to workshop ideas, generate solutions and implement projects with the aid of intelligent software. Research and development times for new products and services have already begun to collapse dramatically, with the time to bring new information services to market reducing from three years to three months over the past ten years. Utilising the technologies outlined above, over the next twenty years concepts will be seamlessly transformed to designs, designs to prototypes, and prototypes to production models, in time frames of weeks or days.

The emergence of the Future Web as a new life form will have an inestimable impact on all humanity and the planet as a whole. Evolving as the knowledge and decision hub of human society, it will accelerate social globalisation, cooperative research, knowledge discovery and symbiotic decision-making, as well as changing work-life balance of all humans in the future cyber-environment.

At the same time, synthetic biology, cyber-human symbiosis and bioengineering will also signal the creation of new and enhanced life forms for the first time in human history. This will open a portal via the web for the explosion of human potential beyond the confines of biological evolution alone.

The impact of the web on the evolution of the human brain is also likely to be very significant over the coming decades. Children are constantly being neurally rewired as the interactive internet becomes a seamless part of their lives in the form of video games and social networks.

Such games will continue on their trajectory towards creating worlds of virtual reality until there is no discernible difference from today’s reality. The impact of this increasingly fast sensory surround medium on humans is unknown, except that the young brain in particular will try to adapt to its new environment, in accordance with evolutionary theory, dramatically affecting social behaviour and development.

From a social perspective there will be great difficulty by the general community as well as most experts and professionals in coping with the scenarios outlined. The rate of scientific and technological change is becoming cognitively and socially overwhelming, making it extremely difficult to comprehend and analyse the bigger issues relating to future social impacts.

There will also be a high level of resistance in the general community to the implied cultural shifts and radical changes to the status quo of lifestyle and work practice involved; primarily resistance to sharing or ceding decision control to largely autonomous systems and new life forms- reasoning software forms capable of evolving higher cognitive functions such as consciousness, language, insight, imagination and creativity.

Although we have grown accustomed to using computers in the workplace and for social and service support over the past thirty years, working with new synthetic life forms such as intelligent agents and robots represent unknown territory for humans and will take a huge cultural adjustment. These challenges will be amplified by the need to gain acceptance on a global basis, often cutting across hundreds of years of cultural and social norms.

The intelligent web’s future cannot be entirely predicted, except that it will inevitably become more cognisant, with the capacity over time for increasingly complex problem-solving and decision-making.
The web is therefore not just a useful application running on the Internet. It is evolving as a collective sentient entity in its own right- interacting with and enabling humans as biological processing agents and in the process evolving a set of complex emergent properties that we can only vaguely imagine.

Cooperative intelligence has been beneficially applied over the eons on a small scale by every animal group, including those of humans, whether at the community, corporate or scientific level. But never before in human history have we witnessed the emergence of a new cyber life form with the potential to combine the mind power of billions of human and artificial brains, with the sum total of human intellectual capital and unimaginable computational power.

The evolution of the Web to level 4.0 and beyond is no doubt the most profound phenomena to confront human life in its chaotic history.
It offers both redemption and salvation from our destruction of the planet in the short space of 15,000 years. It also offers the next phase in human existence, from that of a warring but creative life-form, struggling to know itself and realise its potential, to a wise entity, capable of reaching the ultimate limits of harmony and fulfillment in its becoming universe.