The FusionThreshold
■ This line prints at 10 characters per second, the speed of the TeleType Model 33 the author first used in 1968. Your keyboard isn't much faster. That is the problem this book is about.
The book in under three minutes
A video overview of The Fusion Threshold, generated with Gemini Notebook from the text of the book.
The Last Great Bottleneck
Computers got millions of times faster. Storage, memory, networks: all exploded. One thing barely moved since 1873: the way a human mind gets information into a machine.
In 1984 a software developer with sixteen years in the computer industry asked the obvious next question. What happens when that bottleneck breaks? Not for one person at one terminal, but for millions of people linked through one network, in both directions, at the speed of thought?
His answers struck him as so strange that he went to the Library of Congress to check whether anyone else had thought the same. Almost no one had. He wrote the book anyway, after hours, on his employer's new word processor.
5,000 cps by satellite. 1,920 on a leased line. About 1 for most of us. Machines kept accelerating; people stayed at the keyboard.
What he saw in 1984, and when it arrived
The book prints its original 1984 text in one typeface and the later revisions in another, so you can watch the predictions age in real time. This page does the same.
"Computer systems now routinely communicate, and communication systems routinely compute." Every telephone is connected to every other. Connect computers to those links and the potential grows with each connection.
The Internet, then the smartphone: a telephone that is a computer. The 2009 revision only had to add one line: the vision "has largely come to fruition."
IRIS, launched 1981, promised to deliver the news you needed without your asking. It folded fifteen months later without a single client. The author argued the idea was sound; only the business failed.
Every feed, alert and recommendation engine you use. IRIS asked $100,000 to $500,000 a year. The same idea now comes free on your phone.
"I believe that the first steps toward the true linking of conscious minds will occur within twenty years."
In 2004 a paralyzed man moved a computer cursor through a brain implant, the first person to do so with the BrainGate system. By 2023, implants were turning attempted speech into text at dozens of words a minute.
What if we could transmit information directly from our minds into computers through some kind of radio frequency link?
Monkeys fed themselves with a robotic arm moved by thought alone (University of Pittsburgh). The same year, a computer learned to identify words people were thinking of from their brain scans (Carnegie Mellon). Both appear in the book's Afterword.
Demonstrating the ELIZA program in the early 1970s, he watched people tell a simple pattern-matcher things they would never say to a person, while he stood behind them reading.
Millions of people now confide in AI chatbots about work, relationships and health. He had already named the reason: the machine never judges.
Many people, linked to the network and to each other, two-way and at high speed. Not a better telephone. A new form of human society.
This is the threshold the book is named for, and the part most readers resist. The last chapters ask what becomes of work, government, privacy, family and love on the other side of it.
The program that made people confess
Back in the early 1970's I had occasion to give demonstrations of a timesharing computer system with which I worked at the time. One of the favorite demonstrations for people seeing such a system for the first time was the ELIZA program. This was a program that appeared to be able to carry on a conversation with you in the style of a psychiatrist.
Very often, when I would have people try out this program, just for fun, they would do something which, at the time, shocked me. After interacting with the program for only a few minutes, the users would start typing in personal information, very personal information. They would express complaints about their employers or their lovers. They would tell some of their very personal fantasies or ambitions. They would tell of their desires for revenge.
Usually they didn't mind if I watched over their shoulders as they typed. … Why? I think it's because no matter how outrageously personal the information given to the computer, even with me quietly watching, the computer, like the good psychiatrist it was designed to mimic, would never react in a judgmental manner.
I believe that whatever it was, the network of the future will provide the same encouragement, only orders of magnitude stronger.
Forty years before anyone typed a secret into a chatbot, he had already watched it happen, and followed the thought to where it leads: a network that makes people want to drop the walls between their minds. Where that ends up is the subject of the rest of the book.
Three questions the book won't let go of
Can information find you?
Not search, but delivery: a system that watches everything and hands you exactly what you need, before you ask. Imagined in 1983, built in your lifetime.
Can thought skip the keyboard?
From mind to machine, then from mind to mind. What happens to a civilization when its slowest link suddenly becomes its fastest?
Cooperation, or collapse?
Secrecy makes war possible. The book follows the logic of total information exchange from Cold War hot lines to its strange, unsettling end.
Fifteen steps to the threshold
- —Introduction to the 2009 Revision
- —Introduction to the 1984 Manuscript
- 01Straight Ahead Is Not Straight Forward
- 02Speed vs. Acceleration of the Future
- 03Can Information Find You?
- 04Information Acceleration
- 05Information Vehicles
- 06Information Bottleneck
- 07Breaking the Bottleneck
- 08Incentive for Improvement
- 09Accelerating Toward the Singularity
- 10Technology Chain Reaction
- 11Lead Up to the Singularity
- 12The Singularity Begetting Fusion
- 13Once Fusion Happens
- 14Old Dream Becomes New Reality
- 15Approaching Another Beginning
- —Afterword
Read it before it reads you.
Written before the Internet. Read now, it feels like a field report.