Kevin Kelly is one of the minds inside Wired Magazine and a web superfan aficionado. He spoke in December at EG '08, a new meeting-of-the-minds conference about the web.

Kelly started out by explaining that the world wide web was only about 5,000 days old, and he wondered what was in store for the next 5,000 days.

Kelly has been pondering the forefront of technology for some time, and once coined the term the technium, what he calls the seventh kingdom.

There is only one machine:

the web itself is a machine, or the "one machine" (dimensions)

every peripheral device (phone, pda, laptop) is just a "window" into the machine

it is the most reliable machine ever made (it has operated uninterrupted since its inception)

The one machine is growing:

web (2008) = approximately one human brain (1 HB)

web capacity doubles each year

web (2038) = approximately 40 million human brains (40M HB)

web (2040) > the sum of all human brains (the total processing power of humanity)

How do we interact with the one:

'cloud' computing, or web-based computing, will be the norm

we will be (...are?) codependent on the web

we must give up certain elements of privacy for the web to be anticipatory/personalized

Random quotes:

"The person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot."

"If I can't remember my phone number, I just ask Google."

"We have to get good at believing in the impossible."

Other reminders:

In the web world, attention is currency.
(This is what makes kottke's "Just don't look" so important.)

Kelly reminds us that this machine is not to be feared:
"The one is us; we are in the one."

He cites our dependency on the alphabet and reminds us that no one is concerned about our reliance on written word. The web will be of this ilk.

The new conference, EG '08 in Monterrey, is curated by MIT's Michael Hawley. ["The name recalls ideal models (e.g. = exempli gratia/for example): EG is a conference of great explanations. It also stands for: the entertainment gathering.]