EPILOGUE
The Brain of the New Machine
ON A ROUTINELY sunny afternoon in Sunnyvale, California, a green Mustang convertible pulled into the parking lot of one of the many mirror-glassed corporate offices that line Highway 101. Sunnyvale and its neighboring urban villages are home to some of the most amazing inventions of our time. Within a twenty-five-mile circumference, inventors have created the semiconductor, the vacuum tube, the integrated circuit, the personal computer, and more. A new breed of even more competitive high-tech innovators is pushing the boundaries even further.
It was for this reason that the young man, as he approached the building, had to go through an elaborate security check. Because it was a Saturday, the check went quickly. He rode up the elevator into a vast space filled with identical-looking cubicles. His cubicle had the requisite pictures of his girlfriend and parents, plus dog. The horseshoe-shaped desk was cluttered with books and papers; the two big computer screens were alive with tropical fish awaiting a more important task.
He sat down and began to type rapidly on the keyboard. It was as though he was unleashing ideas that had stormed around in his mind that night—thoughts that he had held in abeyance until he could get back to work. Now what looked like a vast network of electrical wiring appeared on the screen. Grasping the computer mouse, he moved a few of the branches around. Then he sat back and pondered what he had done.
His thoughts reeled back to his undergraduate years at the Universitá di Roma, where he had studied the philosophy of mind, and to his time at Brown University, where he had studied linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
The brain, he knew, looked like the images shown in figure E-1. He returned his fingers to the keyboard. Now he brought up an image of the Internet. What he saw is shown in figure E-2.
He knew from his graduate studies that the similarities between the images were more than happenstance: he was looking at two brains, one more primitive than the other but nonetheless a brain. He began to type again, more rapidly now.
Had you been standing in the parking lot looking up at the curved glass building, you would have seen him there. The afternoon light was dimming into evening, lights were coming on in the office, the name of Internet titan Yahoo! was glowing bright purple over the highway. (Of course, intelligence on the Web moves quickly, so if you go to look for him now, you will find him at Google.)
The human brain and the Internet
Source: Image (at left) courtesy of Paul De Koninck, www.greenspine.ca; image (at right) courtesy of the Opte Project through the Creative Commons license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/.
This young man is not a figment of my imagination, not a fictional character. He is a friend and colleague, and one of many high-tech entrepreneurs looking for the connection between the Internet and the brain.1