The Theory of Connectivity

A prelude to the extract of timeline across history, the present and the clear future.

The Evolution 🐒 : From Written Post to Personal Bots

It has been the spine of human civilization. The evolution of communication—from early scratches on parchment to artificial intelligence (AI) fueling our conversations today—has been nothing short of breathtaking, changing society in ways that are still sometimes hard to believe. Connecting the dots — from old ways of communicating across time, to individual bots now, and what could be after this is were connectivity as a theory shines through in history.

Throughout The History of Humans Connected by, between us we created the idea of engagement.

1. Text Post: The “formal” communication. 📭

Written communication is perhaps the most ancient type of long-distance connectivity. Cuneiform tablets were used to pass literature, as well as texts to record events, emotions, and possibly even rumors. It took hundreds of years for us to arrive at the written letter, allowing messages sent by human beings on horseback (or later on ship) to be routed around until it arrived before someone who was part of a postal system. They were the very first of (what now seems like) countless formal, asynchronous messages to connect people across distance in a way that endured.

2. THE TELEGRAPH and TELEPHONE: ☎️ Real-time communications become entrenched

In the 19th century, the telegraph sparked a revolution in long-distance communication. That enabled messages to be sent instantly for the first time, which changed the pace at which societies could function. The telephone quickly led to real time voice communication therefore added an additional touch of personality through direct connection. This was the era in which rapid human-to-human interaction from city to city, country to country and continent to continent first dawned.

Somewhere between #2 and #3 was a shorter age where people carried something called a 'Pager' 📟

3. Email:I wonder how much time is wasted on the internet and email today?

A similar leap forward came at the end of the 20th century in the form of the internet and World Wide Web. In the 1970s, the creation of email allowed for fast and more effective correspondence compared to regular mail. This sharing of information, allowed for with merely a click of a button, shot across borders and time zones. The advent of connectivity went global, and with it emerged forums, chat rooms, and eventually social media that served as gateways for people to gather in cyberspace.

How Social Media, Chatbots, and the Rest of Connected Online Communication Grew

After the century turn we had another redefinition of connectivity through social media by enabling instant and always-on interaction. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all build a different web around personal life v/s professional life. This is when automation started to seep into communication, chatbots gaining prominence in customer service and marketing.

While before chatbots functioned on a basic level as scripts to answer FAQs, today the technology has matured into powerful AI-driven conversational agents that can fool us into thinking they are people. Dubbed Assist, these are bots that help automate a variety of tasks from booking appointments to personalizing recommendations, essentially the parts of our daily digital life we could live without.

Bots Talking To Bots: The Future of Personal AI Assistants

Personal digital assistants – like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant – have become ubiquitous headliners in daily connected life as AI developments continue. These bots, which can, in many cases be voice-activated, have the ability to pull information, emails, messages or control smart home devices among other tasks. And so now they are talking to each other, sharing data and tasks from across the interfaces, meaning that real soon you will have an opportunity for doing bot-to-bot conversation at scale without needing any human in the loop.

The Next Frontier — Bot-Centric Networks

It can also foresee a not-so-distant future in which personal AI bots talk among themselves to coordinate our lives by making appointments, decisions and settling disputes (exchanging information with one another to appropriately anticipate our wishes). These bot networks will create an additional layer of connectivity that is significantly more efficient and prolific in terms of machine-to-machine communications than was ever possible through human input.

Humans and Artificial Intelligence

If AI is the future of connectivity then it will be in our own hands and part of our personal communication. Bots of bots will anticipate and accomplish simple tasks that include composing messages or scheduling appointments without even having to have us do anything. Where connections will not only be between humans but also from human-to-AI to as well AI-to-AI and so on.

Picture your AI bot speaking with your colleague's bot to see when you are both available to meet, then that they would organize the meeting, together making it ubiquitous without human intervention. It is the bots that will be writing contracts, executing transactions and managing all of the social interactions, which will lead us to a much greater interconnected ecosystem.

Inherently, the concept of connectivity encompasses humans bridging distances (both physical and digital) —from handwritten texts delivered door-to-door to algorithms dutifully passing data between personal bots. In the age of artificial intelligence, machine language and human language become one. We are the first generation that shares autonomous technology with our tools; the next will inherit a world where we leverage not only people to link people, but also tool-to-tool relationships in order to fulfill them as citizens of an enlightened and widespread civilization.

Connectivity theory reflects this evolution — a modern testament to connectivity and a harbinger of what remains unseen in the future forms of connection.