There will come a point when the Internet will reach its physical limit and hit what author Jeff Stibel calls ‘breakpoint’. But that is not necessarily as catastrophic as it sounds.
We could be forgiven for thinking that the Internet is infinite. In scale it is certainly the biggest thing humans have ever invented, and there is no doubt, at least not in Jeff Stibel’s mind, that it has grown to “epic proportions”.
We’re used to reading that if an alien arrived on Earth it would probably assume that the Internet was the largest living organism on the planet, and yet the author of ‘Breakpoint’ says that it has a long way to go before it becomes as sophisticated as a human brain. This is because, while computers are very good at storing information and making calculations, they have nothing like the brain’s power to communicate. In fact, when we hook up two computers together the result is only a “rudimentary brain”.
Original article appeared on Engineering and Technology Magazine. Read the full article.