We Are All Carbon-Based Super Servers

Posted on | March 5, 2009 | Comments

When you talk about combining men and machines, you usually think “Borg.” In the Borg model, technology is added to man, resulting in a human that is more like a machine.

We’re about to cross over into more of a “Tron” age, though, kind of the opposite of Borg. In the Tron model, the man is added to the technology, resulting in a machine that “thinks” more like a human.

I know, what the hell am I talking about.

I’m talking about the recent prognostications that Twitter and facebook have the potential to replace Google as the primary means by which we find information online. This is another one of those insights that’s less than obvious until you reflect on it a little.

Networks connect machines. Those machines perform work. They store information, process it, and pass it along. They do this with silicon processors that run software written in binary code – 1’s and 0’s that when strung together form complex instructions, like the Basic programs you played with in high school if you’re of a certain age, or PowerPoint, or even the Google search algorithm.

This whole system works pretty well, but it has limits. You know them all too well.

Now think about what would be possible if you replaced the machines connected through a network with human beings. It’s really not that big a change. People perform work, the same as machines. We store information, process it, and pass it along. We do it with a carbon-based processor we call a brain, where sequences of firing neurons are strung together to form complex thoughts, like this, and this, and this.

Thing is, people are way smarter than the machines they create (at least so far.) In one sense, a social network is a kind of harness for these carbon-based super computers. We perform the work of finding interesting things on the web, sorting the good from the bad, and answering direct questions in ways more nuanced than machines will be capable of for a very long time.

Digg is a kind of human node supercomputer, harvesting the collective perception of which content is worthwhile and (by implication) which is not. Delicious is the same. Diigo too. But these “computers” are blunt, single purpose instruments. They’re like the specialized, single function microprocessors in an electronic toy.

Networks like facebook and twitter, though, capture a rich and diverse torrent of user-created goodness 24/7, 365/year. Their “software” evolves based on what people are interested in, as the human nodes in their networks store, process and share information with one another.

And what does all this mean for brands?

Well, consider all the time and energy that’s gone into gaming the Google algorithm to drive search results higher in the queue. Brands with the broadest influence among wired human beings will have the power to do exactly that in the carbon-based “machines” that are already operational across the bigger social networks. These machines will help everyone else make decisions about the things they want, the things they buy, and the things they like. And that will be a valuable capability indeed.

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