it is the plausibility of the impossible

supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the
first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed
23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine.

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

It's on.

Amish Web sites?

"The network is the computer."

At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages
- in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a
freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965.

Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for
most people

He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some
other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and
permanent.

Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for
most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was mischaracterized as either
corporate email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males
(read: pimply nerds). It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to
type. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?

The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable, so I recently
spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising
new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder
the nays. It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the
Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine
explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for
doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals."
Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline:
"THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven
Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and
online shopping with one word: "baloney."

exceeds 600 billi

phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew
about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed the focus group belief that
audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own
entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much
trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply
out of reach of amateurs

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured
by users, not corporate interests.