1. Origin, history, and evolution of the web

The Information Technology was born when writing was first invented five thousand years ago. It allowed us to store data from human memory. The first outsourced storage from our biological brain. Then the invention of printing many times multiplied the power of writing and storage. The first modern techniques in IT were the Telegraph of 1842, the telephone of 1846 and the radio of 1896 which allowed transmitting of information through space enabling to connect with people from a distant location.

In the 19th century, there were no smartphones, no personal computers, no cloud computing, but there was telegraph, the mother of the current internet. If we compare all the mode of transmission from classic messenger model to the modern internet, we could see that the speed of message delivery increased to near real time. The cost of transmission of the digital message is close to zero.

However, the biggest weakness of telegraph was that translating in/out of Morse codes by human operators. That was a major drawback that time, which took hours of human operator’s efforts with overloaded tasks. Then electric communication technology allowed a message to be sent in coded format, which then travels multiple places through human messengers, passed on person to another office, then retransmitted (decoded) by another operator. The challenge continued. As the number of human operators/networks began to grow with the increase the volume of traffic, the necessity for increasingly sophisticated human systems and organizations to perform the manual routing slowed down the whole system.

Now the modern day internet is open, free, decentralized network where anyone can send/receive any digital data anytime. Anyone can publish, share or like others data. Now people can search the human knowledge from thousands of years. It has evolved from a human messenger network to document network, and now into a resource network where everything is part of the internet. (such as Computers, documents, people, things)

When the first computers appeared in the 1940s, few enthusiastic commentators thought it was an “electronic brain.” During those times, it appeared quite extraordinary that a machine could perform a long series of calculations with high precision and attain results that were equal to or better than those of the human brain.

In 1997, Deep Blue (A chess computer) became the first machine to win a chess game against a world champion. However, it took 40 years for programmers and computer scientists to reach this performance and they used such a vast machine against a brain weighing 1.5kg. However, the important factor to note is the replica of a program is near to zero cost and instantaneous.

Computers are faster than a human being. However, faster is not always better in problem-solving. For instance, given two pictures, a human brain can quickly identify the difference between a cat and a dog. However, the same task is still complicated for today’s computers. Computers are amazing, incredible. They are without question the most important invention of the 20th century. Clearly it has dramatically changed the way we live, and mostly for the better.

No one fears, inner personality may not be preserved even after the artificial organ transplant, such as arms or legs or teeth or kidneys or even one’s heart, are replaced, as long as the brain is not involved. However, what would happen to one’s personality if a transplant replaces the entire or part of the brain? Science fiction has frequently shown an interest in the hypothesis of a human with a brain transplanted from another person or with an artificial one.

The internet is evolving at the speed of light. Why compare with the light’s speed? Ok. Let’s ask a few simple questions

• How much learning of facts a person who uses the internet every day is acquired through the Internet?
• How many apps, websites are making him better?
• How much is knowledge/experience shared on the Internet?
• What’s the average communication speed of the entire internet?
• How many devices are connected at a given point in time?
• What’s the average execution speed of the web (such as PC, Server, Mobile, IoT)?
• What’s the economic values of today’s internet companies alone?

Currently, we have formulated to predict the processor speed in the future (doubles every 18 months). However, do we have formulated for Internet’s evolution? For e.g.: Deriving a bandwidth law helps to build better infrastructural elements. Currently, we have no such measurement for Internet, due to its many dimensions and complex structure.

The internet is expanding in three dimensions
1. In its physical perspective, (number of connected devices, speed, and coverage of network communication)
2. Commercial value perspective
3. Productivity perspective (such as distributed computation, faster memory/CPU, machine learning algorithms)

General public’s everyday life and businesses have been increasingly depending on the Internet. However, it is still in the early stage when compared with our civilization and nature. The ideal future of the Internet should become an artificial ecosystem, which is complementary to human’s biological and physical limitations.

After billions of years of growth, nature has created beautiful, elegant and efficient natural ecosystem. It is too early to expect the internet’s future in such form. At the same time, as an artificial system, the resources, applications and end-users are expanding rapidly. Now, is the right time to start working on The Internet, the web, social network. Study their governance and strategy for building the simple system, which provides safe, enhance, improve productivity and improves the people’s standard of life. Hence, the natural and artificial system can co-exist to benefit the humanity. All these networks are not merely tools which can be used for the positive or negative purpose, they have enhanced brain components, if we use it for negative things would severely impact nature of life.

The current Internet was a planned one? Initially, it was designed for a different purpose (e.g. Military) than what it is used today. What will it look like after a decade or two? It might have trillions of nodes connected and evolved into Internet of everything (including systems like a smart city), as a physical character of the biggest artificial networks, impacts directly to other networks which are typically run on top of it (such as the web, social network). Don’t we responsible for its design of unseen rapid evolution and massive scale?

Web, the game-changer

Society itself is a network where individuals linked by family, friendship or professional relationships. Similarly, The WWW is a system of HTML (currently) documents connected by href (URLs), that allow us to browse with a click from one web document to the other. With an estimated size of over one trillion documents. The Web is the largest system humanity has ever created. It exceeds in size, even the human brain (10¹¹ neurons).

The biggest network emerged from the internet was a web. Web’s capability is increasing in the last 20 years,
regarding speed – content creation, gathering, delivery, processing, and
regarding scale - number of users, devices and machines.

Currently, just 35% people on the planet are accessing the web, remaining users are unable to access, there might be many reasons, but core ones are - lack of education or no internet connection. If the entire world connected to the web, the services provided the web immediately available to the world, all around the clock. It adds new capabilities to the users, companies, and governments.

To understand the importance of the web in our life, we could ask simple questions - like How long can they continue their life without the internet?
- Even a single day with no access to the web makes us like an ancient world.

The web becomes part of our life. Things are happening favor of the people who has access to the web would many folds multiply the benefits, their knowledge level increases rapidly, an individual who connected with the web has many folds more powerful (e.g. Decision making) than a person who do not have access to it. In other words, it provides extremely faster communication, no need to memorize everything in our head, we can check product reviews and price before we buy it. The news about the world is always delivered personally. We are always learning. We speak a lot in online, forums, comments, updates and blog posts. Each service (such as Search, E-commerce, and social network) provides tremendous learning, planning, and eventually provides living a better life.

Few examples of how the web changes everything.
1. The web is not merely a communications medium, and it is part of our brain. Thinking already started to happen outside of our brain and but the decision is chosen by us (at present), for an instance - for the given keyword on the search engine, ranking algorithm (machine thinking) sorting the best results, Then we make decisions.
2. The web creates new relationships, two hundred years ago a person having an average of a few friends, now it has increased to hundreds.
3. New asset, regarding wealth, the web provides a new form of asset called digital assets, such as knowledge, reputation, and creations.
4. Automation: the web is as a system helps to automate most of our activities.
5. Living in Web years; The analog world makes us live in a natural life consist of 80 years or so, but web life makes us live with faster activities.

In future, assume that someone got into an accident, by clicking a single button, in her/his mobile. The web can play a protective role here. The mobile communicates with the server about the situation and tells his software agent that he/she needs immediate medical treatment. The agent queries all the nearby hospitals and checks the facilities of the hospital such as can treat accidents? Does the hospital have an ambulance? moreover, Doctor availability. Once the hospital has been chosen, it would send messages to the ambulance driver, doctors. Till he/she gets the treatment, the agent provides all the services to protect him. The scenario is only a sample to show the power of the web. By 2030, we could see such a service and thousands of other services from the internet.

The network is getting intelligence, here machines are not alone, they are connected, also connected along with people. We teach the network every day, each click, each like it matters. What a world would look like when the machines pass the Turing Test. It is based on putting a computer in one room, a human in another room, and testing if outside spectators could distinguish between the two using a communication (e.g. via a keyboard). Once the machine becomes indistinguishable from humans, they will have been said to have passed the test. It is evident that the Turing test will be passed sooner, Perhaps in 2020 or 2030, but it will happen. Imagine the future.

Web is evolving into an Artificial intelligence network

Note: Agent is an Intelligence software module. (i.e, In an informal term, Agent = Intelligence)

Also, note that linking is not just connecting things, it contains significant innovation, the last three entries in the table are logical (the web, semantic web, agent web). In each change, the current one is playing as a platform for the succeeding innovations. e.g. The Internet is a platform for the web.

Thus, it drives and curiosity makes us visualize the Web in all new, different dimensions. Understanding what the web is? For instance: The Internet, a network is not just set of nodes (computers) connected to the world, but it is a network of people (connecting minds) who use computers. Moreover, this has already changed the way we do things. When network expands with more people connected, it would be an enormously unbeatable intelligent system in this universe. Let’s turn the pages of the remaining chapters of this book to scratch an overview on such a global brain.