The Brain Of Tomorrow

Over the past 10 years or so, there has come into being a strange new form of consciousness, a kind of living global brain.

Just like the biological brain that sits in your skull, it’s an impossibly complex mechanism that’s built out of information. And, just like a human brain, the masses of information it possesses are turning out to be incredibly useful for one particular and extraordinary task – making predictions about the future.

In a way, we’re all clairvoyants. We all possess these incredible future-sensing machines that are made, in the words of the celebrated neuroscientist David Eagleman, out of “an alien kind of computational material”. They weigh around 1.3kg and contain more connections  within one cubic centimetre than there are stars in the Milky Way. Information shoots around these connections  at speeds of up to 120m/s. Brains absorb information from their environment and use that information to build complex models of the world and the people in it. They then use those models to make predictions.

How do you know you’re going to be hungry at 7pm? How do you know what your partner will say if you tell her you’re not coming home from the office tonight, but are instead hopping on a Jetstar flight to Surfer’s Paradise to empty the joint bank account? How do you come to an opinion about who’s going to win the next election, and to what effect? Or, how good Scorsese’s upcoming Pacino/De Niro/Pesci movie is going to be? You’re able to make predictions  about all these things because your brain contains a colossal amount of information about how the world has behaved in the past. It uses this information about the past to ‘see’ into the future.

But now, there’s a new additional brain – a fresh, impossibly complex mechanism that’s built out of information. It began being constructed by all of us in around 2008, the year after the launch of the iPhone, when social media started exploding.

“Right now we’ve got a billion people, one seventh of the world’s population,  involved in social media,” says Johan Bollen, an Associate Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. “Every second you’ve got tens of thousands of people reporting conditions on the ground as they perceive it. Traffic jams, they lost their job, they’re a little anxious after the election. If you aggregate all that information, you get accurate real-time data about conditions on the ground. But you also get data about future developments.”

It’s not only information from social media that’s building this new world-brain. It’s also data from the GPS that’s in your back pocket, from the Fitbit on your wrist, from the Opal card that records your daily commute into Sydney’s CBD and from your preferred  net services client, such as Google, that knows all the things you do online, from where you shop, to who you communicate with to what your particular perversions happen to be. We’re all contributing to the building of this global brain with the constant streams of information we make about ourselves. And there’s a lot of it. By 2020, it’s been predicted,  there will be roughly 5200GB of data for each individual on earth. The ultimate ramification is that this brain will, at some point in the near future, be able to make uncomfortably precise predictions about you.

Right now, there are two major limitations to what this brain can do. Firstly, much of this information remains siloed. Nobody (at least, in theory) can connect the you on the inner-city  bus to the you who dropped $400 at blackrabbit.com.au at 2.16am.

Secondly, in order to turn all that raw information into solid predictions,  we need algorithms that can properly analyse it. These algorithms are the new brain’s intelligence. No matter how much information the brain holds, it can only be as smart as those algorithms are. Both these limitations will become drastically reduced over time. As tech companies keep rewriting their terms and conditions, and state intelligence agencies find new ways of tapping into this vast digital brain, the information it’s possible to glean about us as individuals will become ever richer, deeper and more connected.  The algorithms, too, are rapidly increasing in sophistication.

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