Some ideas are so ahead of their time that they feel like science fiction—until they become reality. The Connection Machine was one of those ideas. Created in the 1980s by Danny Hillis, this supercomputer was designed to think like a brain: instead of processing information one step at a time, it worked in parallel, mimicking the vast, interconnected neural networks of human intelligence. It was more than just a machine—it was an experiment in emergent intelligence.
The Thinkers Behind the Network
But the Connection Machine wasn’t born in isolation. It emerged from a web of minds that were all exploring the future of intelligence, networks and human potential. Stewart Brand, the man behind the Whole Earth Catalog, championed Hillis and his vision, fascinated by the idea that intelligence could emerge from a system rather than a single mind. He wrote about it in The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, capturing a world where humans and machines were co-evolving.
Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee was weaving a different kind of web—one that would democratize access to information and turn the world into a planetary-scale brain. While the Connection Machine explored artificial intelligence, the World Wide Web became a new kind of distributed intelligence, built not from silicon but from human collaboration. Two different paths, but the same core idea: knowledge grows when it’s connected.
A Shared Vision: Intelligence as an Emergent Force
What ties all these figures together—Hillis, Brand, Berners-Lee, and even Richard Feynman, who worked at Thinking Machines—is a belief that intelligence isn’t something fixed. It emerges when you connect the right pieces together. Whether it’s a supercomputer, a decentralized web, or a global movement of creative minds, the magic happens between the nodes.
The Connection Machine may have been an early AI experiment, but in a way, YUGENING is its spiritual successor—an organic web of ideas, people, and possibilities. A network where sparks fly, perspectives collide, and something greater than the sum of its parts takes shape. In the end, intelligence—whether human, artificial, or something in between—has always been about connection.