Why We Need a Right to the Internet

[_JohnStuartMill]

The Internet can save us. But it needs our help.

We humans have come a long way in the last 50,000 years. In that time, we’ve gone from a small group of apes in an isolated rift valley to an organism that controls 80% of the entire biosphere. We can leave our home planet if we wish. We can harness subatomic physics for our own bellicose whimsy. We are creating new life forms from biologically-inert chemicals. We are man, destroyer of worlds.

Our technological progress is not an accident: Distinct factors make us good at figuring out and manipulating our world. Language, the ability to communicate experiences, enabled us to learn from each others’ mistakes, and to collaborate with other minds. At first, these networks of minds were small: groups of 10-15 nomads solving problems on the savannah. But the group intelligence we developed soon spawned the technology (such as seafaring ships or agriculture) to spread humans to other areas of the globe, and to settle in ever more densely populated areas. No individual could have constructed these new technologies solely from her own mind: they arose from a thousand happy accidents: mindless yet novel collocations of material, each building on each other, in the same way that genetic mutations develop new forms of life. (Visiting a museum of science can make this analogy even more vivid, by showing the evolution of simple tools into complex ones: wagons, trains, automobiles, airplanes, and submarines can all be thought of as the bodies of organisms, ordered cladologically.)

These new technologies have accelerated the process by which they themselves were created, and thereby enabled even newer technologies. As human culture grew and spread to all corners of the globe, it diversified immensely, and thereby brought more new experiences into the collective consciousness. Just as a computer gets better at solving problems when it is given more data, so has the accommodation of these new experiences into the collective schema made human civilization more powerful. Seafaring ships and agriculture made possible primitive astronomy and libraries; these in turn made possible physics, chemistry, higher mathematics, and engineering; now, we apes can propel ourselves around the globe using refined iron ore and rotten dinosaur meat. We can gaze billions of light-years away, or peer into subatomic landscapes. And these new capabilities generate new experiences in turn, which then generate new technologies, ad infinitum (although this process has been reset a few times). Recently, humans have discovered the most important catalyst for this process that has ever existed: the Internet.

The Internet accelerates technological evolution in a way that nothing else ever has. Two hundred years ago — that is, .5% of the time anatomically-modern humans have existed — human cultures were separated by arduous months-long transoceanic journeys. Now, these cultures can communicate their experiences across the globe instantly. This makes collocations of experiences possible that didn’t exist before: a mind connected to the Internet can learn to do things that would be impossible for an unconnected mind.

But individual minds aren’t the only — or even the best — things that can learn. Human culture has learned how to do many things of which no individual ape in the savannah could ever conceive — no individual human could have erected in her mind a spacecraft, for instance. Modern technologies require large teams of people, using technology that had already been developing for thousands of years. 21st-century medical advances (of the kind that could prolong human life indefinitely) arose in this way. If Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, we stand on piles of giants: we are the beneficiaries of an immense network of knowledge, much of which originated in the minds of people long since dead, and the fine mechanics of which we appreciate only dimly.

Knowing how this network operates is not merely academic exercise; it can help us improve the network’s performance. Take as an example something that has improved humanity in much the same way the Internet has: norms against lying. When someone lies about something consequential to a lot of people, then the beliefs held in the collective mind become less true. And when the beliefs held in the collective mind are less true, then it’s less efficient at figuring things out — lies create a friction in the system. And if the collective mind is less efficient at figuring things out, then technological advances — including those medical advances that could prolong our lives indefinitely — happen less frequently, if at all. Lies don’t only harm the people to whom they’re told; they make everyone worse off by retarding the general progress of society. The origin of moral and legal proscriptions against lying can be explained in this way: Either ancient philosophers and lawmakers gradually intuited lying’s disutility and took measures to combat the practice, or — more likely — the individual cultures that randomly adopted those proscriptions beat out other cultures (through technological conquest or cultural assimilation) without understanding why.

Anti-lying values and laws aren’t the only ones to have evolved because of their positive effect on the network of human knowledge: so did the values and laws regarding free speech. Consider the culture of free speech (and the related practice of religious toleration) that arose in Northern Italy in the late 15th Century. This culture streamlined the transmission of ideas from mind to mind, and removed dogma’s protection of bad ideas. The result: an immense flowering of art, science, and medicine we know as the Renaissance. The culture of free speech and growing religious toleration proved so useful to human progress that it spread widely throughout the Continent, and was, like the anti-lying culture, later codified into law. No one doubts that human civilization has been advanced as a result.

These rights and norms (to not be lied to, and to free speech) have improved the network of human knowledge immensely, but they’re nothing compared to the Internet. The ability to record high quality videos and send them across the globe instantly is as important a technological advance as trade or language. Let’s return to the analogy given earlier that “just as a computer gets better at solving problems when it is given more data, so has the accommodation of these new experiences into the collective schema made human civilization more powerful.” Advances in computing power have increased by orders of magnitude the amount of data shared by the collective schema. Evidence strongly suggests that this trend will only accelerate.

But an exponential increase in computing power will not by itself usher in a secular heaven: Computing power is only useful if there is relevant data for it to manipulate, and we’re in danger of losing a trove of data. Over hundreds of millennia, human cultural evolution has created a wealth of data that we can’t yet fully appreciate, in the form of the diversity of human consciousness. Just as we should preserve teeming rainforests because they are likely to contain organisms that will prove useful for medical research, so we should preserve human consciousnesses for the unknown knowledge they contain.

A large majority of the six billion human consciousnesses in the world are disconnected from the Internet. This represents an enormous amount of data that has yet to be fed into the supercomputer that is Internet-connected human civilization, which is weaker as a result. This means that we’ll have to wait longer than necessary for those scientific advances that could prolong human life indefinitely, or advance human flourishing dramatically. But if we recognize a right to Internet access, we can be sure that we’re helping usher in that secular heaven.

[_Dr. Shades]

We humans have come a long way in the last 50,000 years. In that time, we’ve gone from a small group of apes in an isolated rift valley . . .

Humans and apes split off from a common ancestor roughly 6 million years ago, not 50,000 years ago.

Two hundred years ago — that is, .5% of the time anatomically-modern humans have existed. . .

Anatomically-modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years, not 40,000 years.

[_JohnStuartMill]

We humans have come a long way in the last 50,000 years. In that time, we’ve gone from a small group of apes in an isolated rift valley . . .

Humans and apes split off from a common ancestor roughly 6 million years ago, not 50,000 years ago.

Humans are still apes. We've gone from a small group of apes to a very large group of apes.

Two hundred years ago — that is, .5% of the time anatomically-modern humans have existed. . .

Anatomically-modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years, not 40,000 years.

You're right about this one -- I should edit it to say .1%. Helps my point anyway.

Thanks for reading, and for the sharp eye!

[_Dr. Shades]

Humans are still apes. We've gone from a small group of apes to a very large group of apes.

Right, but humans left the isolated rift valley--and stopped being a small group--no later than 125,000 years ago, not 50,000 years ago.

Thanks for reading, and for the sharp eye!

You're welcome.

[_bcspace]

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

[_asbestosman]

And when the beliefs held in the collective mind are less true, then it’s less efficient at figuring things out — lies create a friction in the system.

By and large I agree, but what of white lies? I don't always let people know when I think they're stupid or ugly or I dislike their food. It seems to grease the social wheels when I use manners which often involve an element of deception.

“just as a computer gets better at solving problems when it is given more data, so has the accommodation of these new experiences into the collective schema made human civilization more powerful.”

Yes, but the marginal improvement from more data may not be very significant. The utility may rapidly approach an asymptote. There are limits to how efficiently algorithms can do parallel processing of data and further limits on what how much better the answer will be. In A.I., we often look for solutions that are either good enough, or quite good instead of optimal. Indeed many data points may never be considered depending on the approach because it is too costly to do an exhaustive search especially when the optimal solution is only slightly better than a solution that is relatively cheap to discover.


Overall it's a good post, but I'm not completely convinced. I do wish to generally preserve and capture what we can before it is lost. However, as with all things I think we need to consider cost vs benefit while trying to maintain realistic expectations of both and keeping in mind marginal costs and marginal benefits. For me, I appreciate human culture not just for the hope of medicine, but also because it can be fun in and of itself. I can wonder what it's like to live in such a way or think about how I live from another perspective.

Another reason I'm not completely convinced is that it reminds me of the genius argument against abortion: we should ban abortion because they aborted fetus might have turned out to be the next Einstein or Mozart. Now I understand you are talking more about cultures rather than individuals. However you did mention that most of the billions of people on Earth are not connected. Furthermore, if it's a question of how much humanity as a whole will benefit from this connectedness, would we then think that it's silly to worry about bringing the internet to, say, those who have certain mental conditions? What about people who, though they may not be liars nevertheless spread misconceptions and are incorrigible?

[_The Nehor]

Sadly, the internet has devolved from a relatively civilized clearinghouse of information and exchange back when it took effort to get on the web and know-how to navigate it to it's current state. It now has much much more information and much more crap on it as well. There is no longer a barrier to entry in front of the idiotic and ignorant.

Possibly the largest collaboration of knowledge ever created by a broad base is wikipedia and it is hardly a definitive source or even accurate.

The internet helps in many ways but in others it may even be an impediment to expanding human thought. At least I don't remember anything comparable with renaissance scholars goatsexing or rickrolling each other.

[_asbestosman]

At least I don't remember anything comparable with renaissance scholars goatsexing or rickrolling each other.

Maybe not quite like that, but what about famous hoaxes like The Turk (chess playing automaton), the Forstas hoax, and possibly the Voynich Manuscript? Let us also not forget P. T. Barnum.

[_The Nehor]

At least I don't remember anything comparable with renaissance scholars goatsexing or rickrolling each other.

Maybe not quite like that, but what about famous hoaxes like The Turk (chess playing automaton), the Forstas hoax, and possibly the Voynich Manuscript? Let us also not forget P. T. Barnum.

True, but I think we've taken hoaxes and the like to a whole new level.

Oh, and we figured out the Voynich manuscript:

[_moksha]

True, but I think we've taken hoaxes and the like to a whole new level.

Call it new heights, it sounds better. Additionally, we can draw spiritual nourishment from some of them.