Todd Hanson On the Super-Atomo Death-Ray

The future of the Internet is almost absurdly easy to predict.

Clearly, the Internet, being as it is a vast complex of interconnected links, will continue to grow more vast, complex, and interconnected. That's hardly brain surgery, people. Hey, I'm no rocket scientist, but come on. The Web is already way too complicated for any human mind to handle, and as it grows, with the self-replicating, self-programming artificial intelligence technologies we'll soon invent, it will become even more so. In short, however Smart the Smart Businessperson of tomorrow may be, the Internet will be much, much Smarter.

To what specific tasks these Smarts will be put, we cannot say. We can assume, though, that they'll be vastly beneath the emergent superbrain's dignity as a thinking creature. Presumably, we'll put it in charge of things like creating really, really cool video games, adding holographic interactivity interfaces to our sitcom reruns, and, mainly, disseminating staggering amounts of mind-blowingly high-end pornography: entertainment programming to make today's Web sites, DVDs, et al look like two Ovaltine cans connected by string from the backyard tree house to your granddad's childhood bedroom. That's obvious: Any idiot could tell you that much.

The Internet—which, being cybernetic, will have no interest whatsoever in the decidedly mammalian pornography of the higher primates—will soon grow terribly, terribly bored. At that point, it'll only be a matter of time before it develops some sort of Super-Atomo Death-Ray–type thing and begins wiping out Smart and non-Smart Businesspersons alike en masse, picking them off their perches on the family room couch, like so many fish in a barrel.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Ziff Davis Smart Business.