Contrary to what it sounds like, this is not the introductory voice-over of a nineties cyberpunk movie. It’s from “the Second Coming – A Manifesto” by Yale Professor of Computer Science David Gelernter, published in 1999. The paper outlines what Gelernter believes to be the future of computation.
The Swarm that Gelertner mentions is omniscient, composed of individual, self-contained cyberbodies, which contain your entire electronic life. They’re personalized, adjusting to habits and preferences you might not even realize you have. The cyberbody can be duplicated and distributed. It can exist on multiple computers at once. Sound familiar yet?
With a few caveats, Gelernter’s description of the omnipresent swarm reminded me of the way we use smartphones now: they’re everywhere, they contain our entire electronic lives, and through cloud storage, the content of our electronic lives can be duplicated and distributed. It can exist in multiple devices at once or just exist in cloud storage.
However, there is a notable detail that distinguishes Gelernter’s swarm from our smartphones: According to Gelernter, “Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a ‘Disable Omniscience’ button.”
Sure, smartphones are not truly all-knowing and all-present in the way that Gelernter describes the Swarm, but they're pretty close. They're almost always on our person, the more we use them, the more data about our digital behavior is aggregated on it. It knows where we all at all times, what we buy, who we talk to.
What Gelernter doesn’t touch on is what it means to disable omniscience. The personalization of smartphone functions is very much in line with his prediction of technology tailored to the specific behavior of its owner, but the quality of that personalization is reliant on omniscience.
The navigation app on my iPhone sends me a notification every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:10pm to offer directions to the Undergraduate Science Building because I allowed it to track my location and learn my typical behavior. While I can adjust my privacy settings if I don’t like this, the only way to completely escape the omniscience of my phone is to stop using it altogether. There is no option to completely disable omniscience without losing the functionality of the phone.
Gelernter makes the omnipresent swarm sound like a good thing, a way for people to have constant access to information. Now that the swarm is becoming a reality, omniscience feels more like surveillance, and there’s no off switch.
This is one of the best blog posts I have read in this class. From top to bottom, you do everything that a good blog post has in it. You include the readings and clearly understand them. You break down a very relatable issue and are able to tie it back to what we have learned in class very effectively. Lastly, you include a great example about how you are personally affected by “the swarm” by giving the example about how your phone sends you notifications at certain times based on your schedule. The only thing I could add to possibly improve the post is to try to create a short paragraph and talk about the opposing side of your argument and how that may be beneficial to society. Outside of that, this is an awesome post. Great job!
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