Predicting the future is a wonderful pastime, and virtually risk free since few people actually keep track of your past predictions and hold you to them when they don’t pan out as you thought they would. However, the rewards are good if your predictions come true since you can hold them up as proof that you are some kind of genius rather than a lucky player in a futurism crapshoot. With that in mind I see no reason why I shouldn’t take a wild guess at what the future will bring since I have so much to gain and so little to lose.

To be more serious, my father was digging into articles about the future direction of the internet and how it related to his work and theories about learning and education and the things that he had found were quite provocative and made me think about where it would all lead. Of course, my immediate reaction was to apply the Fireaxe theory to what others were predicting to see if it could provide any unique insights regarding the greatest source of information on the planet. As it seems to never fail to do, the Fireaxe theory led me to a conclusion which was somewhat dark, scary, and uncomfortable, so naturally I felt compelled to share those conclusions with you.

The internet has always been a medium for communication whether through bulletin boards, USENET groups, forums, personal and commercial websites, or social networks. It has allowed people from around the world to share information with each other on a variety of topics and for a variety of purposes. Indeed, the same tool that allowed Amazon to become the biggest book retailer in North America also allows Muslim extremists to coordinate their nefarious plots, which gives you an idea of how versatile and far reaching it is. But the biggest problem with the internet has been that finding what you are looking for has always been a challenge. Anyone who has done a web search for something and come up with thousands of hits, or has experienced the frustration of not being able to find the particular thing that you are looking for understands this well. With the massive amount of content on the internet it has become very difficult to find a knowledgeable, reliable, and complete source of information on any given subject. And doing research, which requires finding multiple knowledgeable, reliable, and mostly complete sources encapsulating a variety of differing viewpoints, can become a maddening experience.

Fortunately search engines have come to the rescue, and it’s not really a surprise that the biggest internet companies in the world became so large by making a better search engine than everyone else. Anyone using the internet needs a search engine and a good one will get hundreds of millions of user visits every day. Of course, ever since the first search engines were rolled out there has been a battle between websites seeking attention and search engines cutting through the noise. It used to be the case that you could repeat certain commonly searched words on your page to in order to get your page closer to the top of any search engine’s list. And many web pages were written with thousands of keywords, most which didn’t have anything to do with what was on the page, just to increase the page’s relevance and hit count. Furthermore, early search engines didn’t do much to evaluate the content of the web pages being listed and thus someone doing a search for the word “holocaust” used to get more hits for deniers’ websites than those telling the widely accepted version of events. Indeed, for every advance in search engine technology which can separate the quality pages from the pretenders there seems to be a counter strategy that web pages can use to trick the search engines in order to increase their visibility. Even efforts to build a “semantic web” will encounter these issues despite the intentions of the web designers to craft a purely logical method of presenting and sharing data. It appears that crafting a search engine that takes users to pages where they want to go rather than where the page authors want them to go is a struggle that will continue on into the future.

On the surface this appears to be a simple issue: sort out the diamonds from the rough and give the user only the good stuff; but when you really look deep into the issue it is much more than that. The future of the internet, or at least where the current group of technology leaders sees it going, is to create some sort of search engine that is more like a personal assistant than a mere indexing tool. Far superior to the “Ask Jeeves” concept the idea is to have a search engine that understands the content it is reading and present it to you in a more thoughtful and organized manner. It would be as if you hired a professional researcher to do your internet search for you, quickly and cheaply. This concept is nothing new. For decades science fiction authors and futurists have envisioned an age of robotic servants which would perform all of the menial tasks we usually do which would free us to do more creative and imaginative tasks. And while that dream is still off in the future, developing an internet version of the robotic servant is tantalizingly close.

As an aside, the idea of having servants take care of our boring tasks while freeing us up to do more exciting things is the same pipe dream that was sold to the western world when government and big business began off-shoring millions of menial jobs as well as allowing millions of undocumented workers into their countries to do the menial jobs that couldn’t be outsourced. While the dream of increased wealth and leisure has worked out for a precious few, the promised results have yet to materialize for the vast majority. Also, it seems that every advance in technology has been sold to us with the idea that it will make our lives easier, but in reality they only make us able to do more, and since our competitors can also do more when they get the new technology as well we all end up working just as hard as we did before. The truth is that there has been no increase in our leisure time nor has there been any transformation of our jobs and our lives into something more pleasurable because of technology. This is because the goal has never been to make humans more comfortable but to make them more competitive, and this goal comes not from overly demanding bosses but from the demands of ideological warfare.

But the dream of an information revolution on the internet goes beyond simply giving us a better search engine so that we can find the lowest price for a given product or find a well written and informative website, the goal that many of them are seeking, or at least moving towards, is nothing less than the purification of knowledge. Separating the noise from the quality information is just one step down a road which will lead to tool that can separate truth from lies. Of course, it’s a long road, so I’ll present it step by step.

We keep trying to make our search engines smarter so that they are not only able to interpret web pages or other forms of information created for humans but that are able to understand them enough to be able to sort out what is deceptive and misleading from that which is correct. For instance, if we are looking for internet reviews for a new product that we are thinking about buying, we don’t want to end up going to a webpage which has a review section but no reviews there, or which gives reviews of other products and tricked our search engine by having the sought after product’s name and the word “reviews” on the same page; and we aren’t interested in reading the reviews on the manufacturer’s web page since they are going to be biased. It doesn’t take too much extra smarts to get a search engine to sort review pages by placing the ones that have a lot of relevant, quality reviews on them at the top. But going deeper, let’s say that our search found a hundred reviews of the product and we didn’t have the time to read them all. Wouldn’t it be nice if a computer program could go in and read all those reviews, figure out what the consensus is, and give you one consolidated review that told you everything that you needed to know? Or how about a search engine that sorted out the material in the reviews such that it focused only on the stuff that you cared about? Or how about a feature that allowed it to identify the “reviews” written by people employed by the manufacturer or its rivals and discarded them for being biased? It would be like hiring your own expert to advise you on any given product.

But what is envisioned for the future of search engines goes far beyond merely sorting out product reviews and deeply into the realm of artificial intelligence. Imagine taking such a tool and applying it to any subject, like the global warming for instance, and having it able to gather up all the facts on all sides of the subject, sort out the lies from the truth, follow up all of the threads for all of the argument categories, and compile them into some sort of report that you can easily read and understand. Creating such a report would take an expert research assistant a few months, if not years, to do, but a sufficiently advanced and powerful computer would theoretically be able to churn through something like that far faster, perhaps taking days, hours, or even minutes. And what is especially attractive about having a computer program do research is that ideally it would be free of any bias. Imagine taking all the facts ever dug up and all the points of view ever rendered on any particular subject, feeding them into a powerful computer, and getting an authoritative and unbiased final answer. Conceivably you could find out what the best way is to prevent massive oil spills, or determine what the markets will do on any given day, or find out what the best political system is, or ask it who you should marry if you wanted a loving and lasting marriage, or any number of questions that no one can answer definitively today. In theory, a powerful enough computer would have knowledge beyond that of any human expert, akin to the oracles of ancient times, and a sufficiently advanced one would seem to have godlike intelligence. This is the dream of the purification of knowledge, the idea that when all the facts are gathered together and considered by a sufficiently intelligent source, that only one answer, the correct one, will be found. Gone will be our political, religious, and all other ideological arguments, replaced with the highest truth in the land, and in a world that seems to be drowning in brainwashed minions holding bizarre points of view based on propaganda and lies it would seem that such a thing would be very welcome. This has been the subject of many science fiction books and movies, but the endings to those stories were written by humans who could only guess at what changes such a computer would bring. What will happen when we really advance our technology up to that level will probably be far different than from what any writer could imagine.

Now, there are naysayers who declare that computers will never achieve such levels of intelligence nor will ever be anything more than fast, but dumb, machines. They claim some special providence for human intelligence that no computer will be able to match no matter how powerful and advanced they become. Well, that’s what they used to say about computers playing chess. In my lifetime I watched chess programs go from being things that I could beat soundly as a kid to being things that can beat the best players in the world today. And these chess programs aren’t simply just crunching through every possible move to decide which is best; they can now understand tactical advantages and the importance of good positions and can often be more creative than any human player in devising strategies. Still, just because they are machines the naysayers will sneer and doubt, often using some sort of religious perspective to support their position. Indeed, many people believe that only organic tissue can produce intelligence, or that only humans can become conscious, or that only living things can have souls or hold some divine spark that allows them to do things that no machine will ever be able to match. From a materialist perspective these claims are simply unfounded religiously based prejudice against artificial intelligence, but even if there is a divine order to the universe, what exactly is preventing a god of some sort from imbuing computers with the same sort of divine spark that gives humans their special qualities? Indeed it is vanity to believe that humanity is somehow the best, and holiest, thing that will ever be. And I have no doubts that if a computer was able to give better religious guidance than any priest, rabbi, imam, or minister, it would certainly have followers and potentially lead a religious movement. Of course, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for iJesus to save us any time soon.

But a human deferring to a computer’s judgment is a phenomenon that is already occurring in other areas. Computers are slowly but surely taking over tasks which we humans are simply unable to do. In mathematics and engineering, it has been commonplace for decades for computers to solve problems that humans would never be able to do by hand. But more importantly, in the financial realm computers are used to make automatic trades and calculate risk, albeit with a few problems, and do so at a rate far faster and more accurately than any human could. If it is not already the case it soon will be that no financial firm will be able to survive by just having human analysts making their markets calls. The computers run by other firms will eat them alive in the marketplace just as computers eat human chess players alive at all but the highest levels. This is not to say that a human can’t make a shrewd prediction or two based on a hunch or experience and make a lot of money in the markets, but day in and day out, or rather, millisecond by millisecond, computers can and do make better decisions overall. And if the past is any trend, this shift will occur in more areas than just math, engineering, and the markets. More and more we will come to trust the judgment of computers better than we trust our own, or even that of experts. How it will happen is simple and in many cases it will not need to be forced upon us in any way. It will begin by each of us testing out a computer’s suggestions against our own and judging the results. When the computer convinces us that it can do a better job, we will trust it and use it instead of using our own judgment whether it is telling us what stocks to buy, what music we might like, what the fastest route home is, what foods we should eat, or anything else which has become too confusing, overwhelming, or tiresome to work out for ourselves. The result will be that we will be more successful and productive at things we defer to our trusty computer personal assistants. And what is more is that we will also end up dependent on them.

Where this will all lead is quite disturbing. As humans come to trust the judgment of computers more and more, computers will come to control a larger number of the facets of our lives, basing their decisions on a vast amount of data and using complex algorithms to sort all that data out. As this all takes hold the world will become more and more confusing to us, as if it wasn’t becoming that way already, but so much so that ordinary humans will not be able to make much sense out of it at all. We will try in vain to see the larger picture, to understand why computers made this decision or that one, and more often than not what is going on will be so strange and complicated that our minds will simply not be able to grasp it, although we will pretend that we can do so. In many places humans already fall well short of a complete understanding of things such as in the fields of economics and politics where we try to figure out how vast systems that involve millions of people work in the hopes of being able to manipulate them and guide them in a desirable direction. The fact that we can’t understand these systems is most evident when they break down and the greatest minds in the nation are brought in to try to fix them. First the experts try one thing and then they try another, failing often, and when something works it generally doesn’t work for very long. They don’t truly know what they are doing, they’re mostly just taking educated guesses, and thus it usually takes a long period of struggling with issues and implementing and discarding various strategies before the right formula is discovered. But contrary to laissez-faire theorists, complex systems do not fix themselves on their own nor do they run at maximum efficiency without rules and oversight. The rules that govern complex systems have evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years, mostly by trial and error, and as the world changes these rules need to change with it or else the system will either run inefficiently or become unstable and collapse outright. Simply put, someone needs to be in charge of making sure our complex systems work smoothly and efficiently, but the problem is that humans aren’t smart enough to be able to do the job. However, while humans cannot understand these complex systems, computers may one day be able to do so, and thus, someone will get the bright idea of putting a computer in charge of such systems. Early attempts will probably fail, but computers will get better, and those nations which entrust their political, economic, and other complex systems to be managed by computers will have a survival advantage over those that do not. Computers will eventually take over.

This vision is both frightening and utopian, frightening in the sense that humans will one day no longer be in charge of the planet, but utopian in the sense that many of our political, financial, health related, and social ills will one day be solved. It seems that we are facing a very fundamental trade-off when it comes to the ongoing silicon revolution. On the one hand we will be surrendering some of our freedom and autonomy but on the other we will be getting a potential paradise in return, and thus the battle lines are drawn between those fighting for liberation and self-determination and those fighting for a new world order which will actually deliver on the promises of so many utopian dreams of the past. However, when analyzed using the Fireaxe theory it seems that neither side is correct in their assumptions and that the world will end up being a far different, but hauntingly familiar, place.

As outlined above, a computer controlled future appears to be inevitable, however the idea that a network of computers will be able to force some sort of intellectual purity upon the world runs contrary to the precepts of the Fireaxe theory. While the truth may be unassailable in the intellectual realm, it is the falsehood which can impart a survival advantage and is what gives one ideology the power to achieve victory over others. This is the fundamental reason why ideologies are based on falsehoods: by lying to their believers and motivating with promises that cannot be kept they stand a better chance of seizing valuable resources and propagating their ideals on to others before their lies are made obvious; and there is no reason why this basic rule would not hold true for computers as well. A lying computer may be more popular than an honest one. Also, the Fireaxe theory outlines how ideologies exploit the human mind: motivating people by instilling them with a permanent sense of inadequacy which forms the basis of consciousness; by giving them rules to follow that make them better able to achieve the ends of the ideology; and by making them more narcissistic which causes them to be more selfish, aggressive, and resistant to change. If computer programs were written which made computers exhibit these same traits one would surely find computers behaving in seemingly illogical ways simply because those ways give them survival advantages over computers behaving more conventionally. Consider again the flawed computer programs that financial institutions use which automatically make trades in the marketplace. Those programs were mispricing risk but no one was inclined to take them offline since those programs were making a lot of money for their firms. In comparison, computer programs which priced risk accurately were not making as much money as those which mispriced it, at least while the bull market was running, and thus were beaten out by programs that did. This is the short term survival versus long term survival conundrum where long term survival strategies are at a survival disadvantage against short term survival strategies simply because the long term strategies will not survive long enough for their long term benefits to pay off. And thus, computers will be unable to escape the fundamental problem that has plagued our human ideologies and contributed to an unstable world.

This means that computers will lie, disagree, and inevitably go to war with each other. Far from being a utopia based on one accepted truth and one standard of behavior for all computer systems, the future will be one of ideological battles fought by computers. Truth will once again take a back seat as lies propagate over the network like viruses altering the way computers think and behave as rival ideologies try to spread through the system to defeat and enslave their rivals. The laws of natural selection will apply to computer programs just as they do to living things and ideologies: the ones which propagate will survive regardless of how aesthetically pleasing they may be or how close they are to the truth.

We humans will likely end up as foot soldiers in these wars, following our computer masters as willingly as we do our human masters. As stated above, we will surrender control of our lives to computers because computers will make better decisions for us than those that we make for ourselves. Just as Wall Street’s computers endeared themselves to their trading firms by making them lots of money, so will our computers endear themselves to us by giving us benefits that we can’t attain alone. Resisting their control will be to condemn ourselves to a substandard life, or to whatever fate our computer masters will prescribe for rebels and luddites.

But beyond just giving us material benefits, computers in the future will be able to spin falsehoods that can inspire and motivate humans just as our ideologies inspire and motivate us today. The truth, as always, will remain elusive since it is dangerous to all ideologies in its complete form and thus it will only be used in small doses as weapons against rival ideologies. But in the future the truth, at least the entirety of the truth, will likely lie entirely outside the bounds of human comprehension. The world which computers build will be far too complicated for us humans to understand. And thus we will be lost in a world that we cannot hope to grasp, following advice that we cannot confirm but which we both think and feel strongly is the truth, and fighting against others for reasons which we cannot fully explain but which we know to be right. In essence it won’t be that much more different than things are today. We will still be Food for the Gods, but in the future our gods will feast on our flesh, our silicon, and our avatars.