Wired article: 10 years that changed the world

It's always hard to predict the future and predicting the direction of future of the Internet was a will always be a difficult task. As someone who has never really known a time before the Internet, I find it interesting how many individuals and companies were skeptical about it's emergence. How could they not see the potential in creating networks of thousands, millions, and billions of people? It's easy to criticize because the Internet started out as a small and risky concept. And just imagine what will happen to the Internet in another 10 years because more likely than not, your predictions will just as incorrect as those who doubted the Internet years ago.

One of the topics I found most interesting in the article is the idea of the net as an AI and model of the human brain. For the past few years, the topic of the brain and computer as been fiercely debated in the field of psychology, one of my majors. I sat in my cognitive class, watching my professor lay out models of the human brain working as a computer thinking that a computer could never replicate in intricacies of the human brain. However, a network of several computers with interconnecting content like the web applies much more readily as a model of the brain. Memory models look at the brain as an endless numbers of connections between events, knowledge, and experience in a persons mind. The Web imitates these connections, and although the Web contains far fewer connections that the human brain, and as the article points out, the human brain only evolves to a certain point where as the Web is expanding rapidly every year. The metaphor is and interesting one and could lead to some interesting research in the future.