Episode 9 — The Internet: The Birth of a Planetary Nervous System

10:30 p.m., October 29, 1969. The University of California, Los Angeles.

The lab was filled with the low hum of vacuum-tube computers and the whir of cooling fans. A graduate student named Charlie Kline — Charlie, for short — sat down at a terminal. His fingertips were slightly damp with sweat. On the screen was a simple command prompt. The goal was clear: to send a message from a computer in Los Angeles to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, hundreds of kilometers away.

At the time, it was something close to impossible. For computers of different makes, different operating systems, and different languages to talk to one another was like a person who speaks only Korean trying to communicate with a person who speaks only Spanish, without a telephone. But an experimental network called ARPANET had built a bridge between them.

Charlie tapped the keyboard. He typed L. An L appeared on the screen. Success. Next he typed O. The O appeared too. And then, at the very moment he tried to type G, the system froze. A crash. All that had been transmitted was two letters: LO. He had meant to send LOGIN, but it cut off at LO.

But that break was not a failure. It was the most important first word in human history. The moment one computer connected to another, information was no longer trapped in a single place. Did Charlie know, in that moment, that the two letters he had typed would become more than a simple communication test — that they would become the first synapse of a nerve cell connecting the entire planet into a single brain?

Twenty years later, in 1989, at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics.

An English researcher named Tim Berners-Lee sat at his desk. He felt a certain frustration. The laboratory was full of computers and full of researchers, yet the information was scattered everywhere. One document lived on this computer, some data on that one. To reach a piece of information, you had to physically go to it, or type in a complicated string of commands.

He thought: Why isn't all this information connected to one another? Why can't I click on a document and jump straight to a related one? He seized on the idea of hypertext — embedding, inside a document, links to other documents. Click a link with the mouse, and information would flow on, free of the constraints of space.

He proposed the World Wide Web — the WWW. It was the decisive moment that turned the internet from the exclusive preserve of experts into a tool for the masses. If the internet was the road that had been paved, the web was the car that drove on it, the shop, the library. Information exploded. Websites that had numbered only in the dozens in the early 1990s grew to tens of millions within a decade.

What does this mean?

The nerve cells of the human brain — the neurons — do not think alone. A neuron takes on meaning only when it connects to other neurons. A single neuron is nothing more than an electrical signal, but when hundreds of billions of neurons are joined by synapses, consciousness is born. Intelligence is born.

The internet followed exactly this structure. Each computer was a neuron. Fiber-optic cables and wireless signals were the synapses. In the beginning it was nothing more than simple data transmission, but as the number of connected nodes grew exponentially, quantitative change gave way to qualitative change.

Now we could learn of events on the far side of the planet in real time. Stock prices in New York were reflected instantly in Seoul. One researcher's discovery was shared in an instant with a researcher on another continent. This was the birth of collective intelligence. An individual human holds only limited knowledge, but humans connected to the internet could now share the knowledge of all humanity.

Humans had now become beings who could no longer live without the internet.

When the internet went down, society was paralyzed. Banking systems stopped, transportation systems fell into chaos, communication was severed. This meant that the internet was no longer a mere tool but had taken its place as the nervous system of civilization. Each individual human brain still sat inside its skull, yet human cognition had already extended outward, out into the network.

We entrusted our memory to Google. We entrusted our sense of direction to navigation apps. We entrusted our relationships to social media. The human nervous system had been physically extended through copper wires and fiber-optic cables. This was a continuation of how the printing press had externalized memory and the steam engine had externalized muscle. This time, it was the neural connections themselves that had been externalized.

And here an interesting question arises.

Once the nervous system is connected, what comes next? In biological evolution, what came after the nervous system developed? It was the central processing unit — the advancement of the brain. The more complex a neural network becomes, the more it requires a higher intelligence to control and analyze it.

The neural network that was the internet was nearing completion. Billions of devices around the world were connected. But the being that understood, judged, and created the information moving across that network was still the human. Information moved only when a human clicked; knowledge was extracted only when a human searched. The network was fast, but the brain interpreting it was still bound by biological limits.

The nervous system had already expanded to a planetary scale, yet the brain remained at the level of the individual. This mismatch created, once again, a bottleneck. Data overflowed, but the speed at which it could be turned into insight was slow. Human cognitive speed, unable to keep pace with the network, was beginning to reveal itself as the limiting point.

The next step to close this gap was clear.

Now that the neural network was complete, what was needed was a brain — an artificial intelligence — to run on top of it. If the network was the blood vessels, then AI had to become the heart that circulated the blood, and the cerebral cortex that processed the signals. If the internet had connected information, it was now AI's turn to connect the meaning of that information.

Having witnessed the birth of the neural network, humanity asked once more: Why, with all these connections, must we still do the judging ourselves? Why do we succeed at gathering data, yet fail at turning that data into wisdom?

After the liberation of connection came the liberation of movement. The neural network was complete, but it was still fixed to the desk. When a human moved, the connection broke. To stay connected at all times, the neural network had to come into the palm of the human hand.

After the birth of the internet — that planetary nervous system — an age was preparing to open: one in which we would carry that nervous system on our bodies at all times.

Next: Part 3 — The Acceleration of Connection, The Information Revolution | The Smartphone: How Humans Became an Always-Connected Brain