Original title: People are in the network, how can they deal with themselves.
A "mesh world" of accelerated links is roaring.
On the third day of 2024, the first batch of Starlink satellites directly connected to mobile phones have been launched into the sky, successfully realizing direct communication between mobile phones and satellites. The 2.6 billion people in the mountains, deserts, and seas where the network is still thin are close to the possibility of direct connection to satellites and unimpeded direct communication with mobile phones.
A great change has occurred between the virtual and the real, between the world of yesterday and the world of the future, between man and machine, time and space. This change and its biggest variables – technology, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, blockchain, Internet of Things, virtual reality, digital twins, biocomputing, air-space integration, etc., point to a common evolutionary structure – the "net".
The web between people, people and things, and things is becoming denser and boundless. The "chain reaction" that will start at some point will eventually hit us, like a distant ocean tide rolling and crashing against the shore.
How is the mesh formed and how does it work? How does it affect us as nodes, atoms, cyborgs?
The "native product" of human society
The annual "Science and Technology Spring Festival Gala" CES "rolled" out of the sky in Las Vegas. With the spring breeze of AI, daily fields such as home, travel, health, and games have sent signals for the future.
Electric vehicles that are not only "transferring the smartphone app to the car", sports headphones that can monitor human health data, household appliances that link powerful interfaces but are almost the best, cooking robots that pick up their own ingredients automatically, and smartphone ...... that can be translated into the other party's language in real time when playing
Covering all things and linking all things has become one of the most important evolutionary directions of technology in the past century. In particular, the ubiquity of artificial intelligence has enhanced the interconnection between people, people and things, and things and things. Full-time, autonomous, intelligent and seamless interaction makes the "Internet of Everything" ready to emerge.
Visual China.
Have you noticed that our lives have long been covered by all kinds of "nets".
The "link rate" of life is too high. Order a dish, scan a code, and you are already "chained". When you get home and want to know when your clothes will be washed, scan the code, you and your washing machine are also "chained". After CES on the cloud, the concentration of this link will be even higher in the future. Electric cars, mobile phones, not to mention, TVs, air conditioners, ovens, toothbrushes, flower pots, lights, ......Nowadays, the toilet seat is too smart, and it is "chained" without paying attention.
The creator also has a soft spot for reticular structures: the structure of human neurons is a web, the root system of plants is a web, the largest structure in the universe is a web, and the shape of ant information transmission is also a web.
The net can create convenience. Before the formation of traffic and transportation networks, devout travelers, who wanted to go to the Mediterranean, needed to lead their horses over the mountains, ride camels, cross deserts and grasslands, and sleep in the open without being knocked down by disease, and it would take several years to reach it. And today, half a day is enough. If you just get in touch with the Romans, a **, a message, a few minutes, seconds or even a few minutes can be achieved.
The links between people are getting shorter and shorter. In a world of "six degrees apart", ideally, six times of sharing, the news can reach anyone on the planet.
The price of the link.
net, is able to close the distance, compress the space. But is the network as dense as possible?
The reticular structure is extremely susceptible to expansion in a short period of time. In 1994, when the World Wide Web was still relatively small, search engines such as Lycos began to emerge and could index hundreds of thousands of web pages. By 1997, with the popularization of the Internet and the rapid growth of content, the indexing volume of search engines had reached hundreds of millions. In 2023, that number has surpassed trillions.
As the number of nodes on the network continues to increase, a whole network will undergo qualitative changes. If there are too many nodes, people will be trapped by the overloaded structure, and the denser the network, the more panicked they will be.
Visual China.
When you open your mobile phone, the app keeps jumping, and when you don't have these apps, people can only solve various life problems with your bare hands. When there are too many, the existence of the app itself becomes a problem.
How do these "helpers" who originally made life more convenient get more and more tired? As the evolution of the mesh goes all the way, it sometimes goes in the opposite direction: cyberattacks, cyber scams, and online rumors and contagions that symbolize over-linking. If it is excessive, alienation will occur.
Excessive linking is an unbearable burden. In the past, people escaped reality in the internet, and today, people flee the internet in the real world. While we easily acquire knowledge, we may lose slow thinking.
A prism of the future.
The net, which spreads happiness, tolerance and love, also spreads viruses, emotions and noise.
The web of digital societies is connected with unprecedented breadth and speed, and the power of judgment is left to algorithms. Different populations are increasingly divided by segregation in their own echo chambers with increasing systemic deviations.
The herd effect "exacerbates the spread of information loss." Sometimes, a mistake of two or three nodes in a mesh structure can point to the loss of a "flock" of sheep – choosing a restaurant with an overreputation, killing promising technological achievements, or even triggering an unnecessary bank run.
Digital technology has advanced the planet to 20 version, but overly dense mesh connections are easy to dazzle people. We have seen that in many science fiction works such as "The Matrix", "Deadly Magic", "Snow Crash", human beings allow technology to step on the gas pedal and dismember the lives of digital nomads.
The overlap of technological evolution and civilization constitutes the fate of the future. The course of civilization is a process in which human beings look farther and farther away. With the extension of vision, the universe and the world of human cognition will become more and more extensive.
We still remember "Delivery Rider, Trapped in the System". In the dense grid, if the judgment is handed over to the network of technology, and the humanization is reduced to a string of data, a node, and a hard disk, who can stay out of the matter?
What will humanity look like in the future? Will they still remember the time when ancient tools were just emerging and ancient civilizations were just sprouting? In ancient times, our ancestors left unique symbols and languages on stone tools, walls, caves, and utensils; Nowadays, the records we leave behind exist in the form of ** and data, and the traces of human life seem to be preserved bit by bit. But this "memory" is too fragile, and once the server is hacked and damaged, there may be nothing.
Reporter: Zhang Manzi.
*: Half Moon Talk WeChat***