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That event, which took place on 29 October 1969, is celebrated today as the moment the Internet was born. It ushered in a technological revolution that requires us to understand and appreciate the changeable nature not just of technology but also of our brain, humanity and our society.
In the blink of an eye, we have changed our most basic ways of proceeding in the world.
Checking our Facebook page before making the morning coffee. Googling our symptoms to decide whether or not to call a doctor. Handing over our day's work to be completed by a colleague halfway around the globe. Using a computing device the size of a wallet to set up a meeting, guide us to a new restaurant, organise a political rally, locate a new church, or introduce us to the love of our lives. And then Tweeting a real-time account of it all to our followers.
Any twentieth-century expert viewing this future in a crystal ball would have declared it pure science fiction. And it isn't the technology that would have shocked them. It's our changed behaviour. Welcome, dear experts, to the twenty-first century, where our only constant is constant change.
If we feel disoriented, it's because we happen to be living in one of the most challenging and transformative eras in all human history. Work, play, communication, interpersonal relations, leisure activities, commerce, politics, economics, security, sources of information and disinformation - all the large and small reflexes of our lives - happen differently than they did just two or three decades ago.
If we feel that everything around us is changing faster than we can manage, it is because the ground has shifted beneath our feet and we have shifted.
Our twentieth-century paradigm for human nature was based on the assembly line model of human progress. Each person on the line has a task, there is a hierarchy of command assigning each task, you do your task, I do mine, the whole thing chugs along, and, in the end, we have a Model T.
You evaluate your success in terms of your ability to do your task -or your ability to get others to do it. You evaluate your company in terms of its ability to turn out Model T's cheaply and efficiently. You evaluate your society in terms of its ability to keep all of its members on task, in a role, producing a product.
The twentieth-century brain, too, is orderly, with a highly evolved prefrontal cortex passing down 'executive' decisions to the other parts of the brain, right down to the lowly, emotional, reflexive 'reptilian' amygdala hunkering below. Human abilities (and social classes) are arrayed on a similar hierarchy.
Of course, it never works that way in practice, but you contrive ways of testing, norms for evaluating, systems for educating, that reinforce the standards suited to making the best possible contributors to that assembly line. You chart abilities and the disabilities, promote according to the former, punish or prescribe according to the latter.
Huh?
I'm confused!
I thought Al Gore invented the Internet along the way to discovering AGW/ACC!
He wouldn't have lied to us, would he?