Joi Ito on the Web at 25: 'it's a living, evolving organism'

This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Early in the history of the web, the MTV VJ Adam Curry put up a website. I downloaded a video from it and went to the chairman of NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, and showed it to him. He said, "Who owns this network?" And I said, "No one." And he said, "Does Murdoch own it?" And I said, "No, he doesn't." He said, "Can I own it?" and I said, "No, you can't." He just didn't get it. But that, to me, was the big "Aha!" moment: this is a completely new paradigm.

If you look at the number of hosts connected to the internet and all the megatrends, they're all very smooth. Some things could have happened earlier or later than I expected but, fundamentally, the philosophy of the internet pre-web - the idea of permission-less innovation and distributed responsibility -- offers us a new architecture for thinking. The web's impact is still in its infancy and it's been relatively predictable. There are obstacles and the future is harder because we're reaching certain limits -- I'm not like the Singularitarians who believe that these curves go on forever.

There's massive complexity, which will continue to increase. If we look at it from an evolutionary-biology perspective, we're at the point where we're becoming a true multicellular organism with a nervous system -- and we need to develop an immune system. It worked really well up until now, with relatively simple dogmatic, pure principles; but we're getting to a level of complexity where we're going beyond it. The Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Vancouver last January was focused on hardening the internet -- making it more resilient to attacks. And you can have security without centralisation -- the immune system is a pretty good model.

You get sick occasionally and people die, but it somehow manages to evolve.

In terms of big, disruptive influences, synthetic molecular biologists are now able to make cells that are computational devices. I think that the man/machine computer interface is going to be completed relatively soon. At the MIT Media Lab we're working on a centre for extreme bionics to create a mind/computer interface. The web will enter our body in other ways, for instance through synthetic molecular biology: bacteria that go into the body, scan for things and send information.

We talk about the internet of things; we're going to have the internet of microbes and people and biology. We're going to create networks of biological things. Add nanotech and little micro machines, and the way those things communicate with each other will be influenced by the way that we're architecting the internet.

We're making robots that create biology; biology that creates robots; and hybrids of all of them -- and they need to communicate.

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We can learn about how networks might work from how cells communicate. Cancer research, inter-cellular communication, synthetic molecular biology and network security will come together. Again, the immune system is a good metaphor. It's how we identify terrorists -- we look for patterns, just as our immune system looks for patterns to identify pathogens. We'll never be fully secure and we'll have different levels of sickness: people will die and markets collapse, but we'll stumble through.

Elsewhere, we're witnessing a new kind of innovation. When people come online they get access to information and start communicating. We know that once people are connected, they teach each other, and peer learning is very important. Alternative innovation and learning networks will be created. Once everybody gets connected, the way in which the developed world performs research in science and technology, the way that higher education works -- the kind of monopoly on a certain level of research that we have in established institutions -- this may change. The question is whether that innovation can help pull some of these countries out of poverty, and what the relationship between those new systems of learning and those in the developed world are going to be. Also, manufacturing technology is becoming easier and cheaper, so once the supply chain and the manufacturing of technology become democratised, along with the networks, then you have an interesting shift in power.

I'm quite optimistic. There will be pain as well as growth, and we'll end up with a vibrant, organic and healthier system. The way we think about media and democracy will change -- hopefully for the better -- but we need to look at emergence more than control when we think about how these things will work.

Joi Ito is director of the MIT Media Lab.

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