The 1st Human Operating System

An article by Ayelet Noff    13 Comments

Barak Hachamov has written a fascinating post regarding our gradual metamorphosis into digital beings as more and more of our every day activities occur in our virtual worlds. Unfortunately since the post is in Hebrew, many of you will not be able to read it so I wanted to share its key ideas with you.

In the past, the internet used to be only an information source for us. However, in the last few years, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet has become more than just an information source. It has become our way of interacting with our friends, expressing our thoughts and interests, and handling our day to day activities. Web 2.0 has turned the internet into something completely different than it used to be. No longer are we the passive viewers. Now we are the active users, creating content and building our virtual worlds with our virtual friends and virtual events. The cold, alienating experience of using the Web has turned into a personalized, customized experience for each of us. Information that we view is gradually becoming more and more targeted to our our immediate needs, our interests, etc. through the usage of personalized tools and the early beginnings of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Social networks such as Facebook allow us to interact virtually in ways that were not possible before. If someone were to describe to you ten years ago that in the recent future you’d be able to hug virtually, throw a sheep at someone virtually, even buy and sell your friends virtually, you’d say he was crazy. With all this interaction and the growing number of online friendships that we build, how does one give each of his friends the attention they deserve? How does one deal with this overwhelming amount of of personal, relevant information that requires his attention?

Just like the telephone, cellular phone, and internet are allowing us all today to do more and meet less, our gradual transformation into digital beings will soon allow us to do more and meet more. Our virtual reality creates more opportunities for us online as well as offline.  How many social events have you gone to thanks to Facebook? How many new people have you met with in real life due to Facebook? Those of us who have been internet freaks for a long time, secluded in our homes from the offline world,  have come out of our shells due to Facebook.

Barak writes that Facebook which we now use mostly to entertain ourselves with lots of silly applications and connect with our friends, is gradually turning into the first human attempt to launch a Human Digital Operating System. As each of us creates a profile, adds applications, schedules events online, etc. he creates the digital self. Whether we realize it or not, we are all participants in this human experiment. We are creating and enhancing the prototype of our own operating system.

Our operating system is working all the time without us even noticing and is digitally mapping our way of thinking, our habits, and our interests. Gradually activities and experiences that were only available to us offline are entering our digital world. One day we will all wake up and see that most of our daily activities happen online. On this day we will know that we have become digital beings. Think about how privileged we are to live in this era where we are able to view this evolution from DOS to HOS, from cold windows to warm, emotional, social platforms.

It is certain that Facebook will invest enormous efforts in improving navigation capabilities between the different applications and information sources it offers as well as the communication and semantic capabilities between them.  These capabilities will improve over time and develop into the first platform which will allow me to create the Digital Me.

Just like in Lego, we will build the digital us out of hundreds of “small applications” which consist of our way of life. As we build the digital us through what seem to be “innocent” actions and games, hidden sophisticated algorithms of artificial intelligence will gradually learn who we are, as well as possible semantics with other applications, and will allow these applications to communicate with each other, draw conclusions, and handle tasks for us automatically. 

The management of my life through my digital world in combination with the collective intelligence of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence create exciting possibilities for the future. The combination of all these capabilites will allow us to  break through the information barriers and limitations we have today and allow us to better process the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to. In the future we will be able to handle a few tasks at once without damaging the quality of our actions and without wasting precious time. We will then find it very hard to perform in a world without digital technology. Yet more than this, in the basis of our thoughts there will be virtual terms and underlying digital metaphors, and perhaps we will even feel in a technological format. To many of us this future world may seem quite scary, however ironically, as we become more digital, we will also become more social and emotional with a larger number of people. 

Thanks to Jeff Swearengin for the pic.