Total Information Awareness will consign Google to the Stone Age.
By Howard Bloom
VIEW I Want My TIA How is the glut of communications devices affecting communication? The Fight to Control Your Mind The Secret War Machine Profits of Doom
Scott Menchin
By now, you've heard all about Total Information Awareness, the Darpa program designed to jump-start new methods of knowledge gathering, integration, and prediction. It's one of our high tech answers to the terrorist menace of bin Laden and his many Osama wannabes. But if you know the simple facts about Total Information Awareness, you've also heard that the system itself is the real enemy.TIA is at the center of a media storm that started last summer, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation's online newsletter headlined an alert about the program: "how to build a police state." The EFF analysis became the standard line, and by November, even The New York Times had agreed that it was "a vast electronic dragnet." In February, Congress put the Pentagon on notice that it would not tolerate the surveillance of US citizens. Last I checked, there were 28,000 Web sites opining on TIA. The vibe? Overwhelmingly negative.
Frankly, the critics are missing the point.
TIA promises search engines that will consign Google to the Stone Age. TIA's dialog technology will listen to your words, then link you to a trove of data that makes today's Web look like the library of an illiterate.
Can't think of the perfect search term to dig up what you want? No problem. One of TIA's component programs, Genisys, aims to totally reinvent the database, increasing its usefulness and its contents by an order of magnitude. It will be the database of databases, with an add-on Babblefish able to parse and cross-reference every possible information stream. The most ambitious TIA initiative, Genoa II, is working to produce cognitive amplifiers - a symbiotic thinking system that weaves together human and machine intelligences more tightly than ever before.
Have an important meeting coming up and don't know the first thing about the topic? Did you meet someone on an airplane last year named Jim or John, and then lose his business card?
Well, on your commute, flip the switch to your TIA-developed Communicator platform and initiate a search. It's being designed to knit together all kinds of disparate data: travel documents, phone records, credit card and banking statements, even server logs.
Tracking terrorists is just a pretext for getting the best computer scientists at Darpa to create what we all really want: a general-purpose IQ expansion pack capable of plowing through the built-in barriers of central nervous system-based software. It will show us whole new ways to look at what we're up against - whether it's bin Laden, a demanding boss, or that damn lost phone number.
For a paltry $200 million a year - the cost of a B-1 bomber - we finally get a national technology initiative worth pursuing. And if it accomplishes only a fraction of its goals, so what? Even that will dramatically expand the powers of our forgetful brains.
Of course, I'm assuming that the government will let us have the technology. And I'm right - it will. History proves that nearly every American military invention smaller than a house eventually made its way to the general public. From 1795 to 1851, the government's Springfield Armory first perfected mass production. The Great War gave us commercial aviation, World War II the computers and the tubes that power our microwave ovens. And the Cold War produced NASA, GPS locators, and, oh yeah, the Internet.
Total Information Awareness is in the hands of one of the few government bureaus a technophile can love - Darpa. The agency has long been a Santa Claus for civilian tech junkies. It's given us the very large-scale integrated circuit, packet-switching, X-ray lithography, advanced semiconductors, hybrid cars, supercapacitors, advanced fuel cells, telesurgery, and a bonanza of other technodelights.
Public scrutiny of ominous-sounding government plans is a good thing. If people are being abused by Big Brother, it's vital to drag the atrocities out of hiding and stop them. The misuse of technology is a social evil, and it's essential to fight against this sort of crime. But let's remember that the evil resides in the crime, not in the technology.
Frankly, I want my TIA. And if given the choice, I'd have it today.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard Bloom ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is a paleopsychologist and the author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/view.html
