The Internet as A Conscious Mind - Prospects for the Future

[Buffalo Souljah]

Global Brain - The Internet could become conscious by mid-2030s (http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/158)


By Dick Pelletier
The World Wide Web is a network of inter-connectivity that goes everywhere and follows its own intelligence. The advent of this newly emerging communication field around our planet has enabled citizens from all lifestyles to communicate globally via words, sounds and pictures – inexpensively, person-to-person; and from the safety of their own homes and offices – for the first time ever.

The Internet represents a major step in our evolution, and is a forerunner of things to come. Artificial intelligence researcher Francis Heylighen sees huge growth as this new world-wide communication system continues to gain power from billions of humans adding to its intelligence every day. “It will get smarter,” Heylighen says, “as it morphs into a global super-organism that could one day provide solutions to most of humanity’s problems.”

Experts compare the Internet to a planet growing a global brain. As users, we represent the neurons. Texting, emails, and IM act as nerve endings, and electromagnetic waves through the sky become neural pathways.

Like germinating seeds, this global brain continues to evolve and as some forward-thinkers believe, will not stop until it develops feelings and achieves consciousness.

Feelings represent a lower level of awareness of what goes on in a system’s environment. In that sense, the global brain will be conscious of important events affecting its goals. A higher level of consciousness – self-awareness – would require that the global brain could reflect on its own functioning.

The Internet, in the wider sense of the world community is slowly becoming aware of itself. Although today’s algorithms make the web more intelligent, it cannot monitor itself. However, in principle, there are no obstacles towards implementing such a capacity in the future.

Search engines can adapt web pages to user needs. These hyperlinks bear a remarkable resemblance to the human brain. Synapses that connect neurons become stronger with repeated use, and disappear when usage declines. Similarly, global brain’s algorithms will reinforce popular links, while rarely used links will diminish and die.

Could tomorrow’s global brain allow uploading the human mind? At present, information exchanged between humans and computers only occur with mouse, keyboard or voice. However, many futurists believe that one day technology will enable us to separate our minds from the physical brain and store its information in a computer.

This is not as crazy as one might think. IBM hopes to reverse engineer the human brain by 2030, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute is rounding up 300 of the world’s top neuroscientists to capture human thought at moment of creation, which conceivably could enable thoughts, memories, and feelings to be transferred into a machine.

In the future, many believe we will treat the human mind like any other bit of information by copying and storing it in various media. Scientists are aware that our mind roams over trillions of neuron connections and today, we do not possess abilities to understand this incredibly complex system.

But by mid-2030s, when artificial intelligence is expected to surpass human intelligence levels, and quantum computing systems become reality, positive futurists believe that our global brain will become fully conscious and self-aware as it guides humanity into what promises to become a most “magical future.”I'm a bit skeptical of calling mine and my friends' and family's text messaging "nerve endings", but I guess it's illustrative.

And as for this:


and Howard Hughes Medical Institute is rounding up 300 of the world’s top neuroscientists to capture human thought at moment of creation, which conceivably could enable thoughts, memories, and feelings to be transferred into a machine.I don't even know what this sentence means.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Global Brain - The Internet could become conscious by mid-2030s (http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/158)

I'm a bit skeptical of calling mine and my friends' and family's text messaging "nerve endings", but I guess it's illustrative.

I'm wondering myself; where is the "push" for the Internet to suddenly become self-aware?


And as for this:

I don't even know what this sentence means.

They appear to be talking about tranferring human minds to computers, it is certainly badly worded.

[Buffalo Souljah]

I'm wondering myself; where is the "push" for the Internet to suddenly become self-aware?

Maybe when the aliens come back to reclaim their obelisk...?:rolleyes:




They appear to be talking about tranferring human minds to computers, it is certainly badly worded.
I certainly wouldn't start with the author of that article... seems like it would be a waste of disk space!:lol:

[Invincible Summer]

This article seems a bit confused. Its title and bulk of the content seems to suggest that the Internet will become an AI of its own by 2030, but then seems to conclude with mind uploading.

Is the author conflating mind uploading with AI. In other words, mass uploading of people's personalities can create a sort of "consciousness" which, to my understanding, is different from an AI which is constructed and programmed to an extent. An AI is not simply an amalgamation of uploaded data, but rather a program that knows how to use data and execute commands, etc. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Am *I* just confusing what the author is saying?

[¿Que?]

This seems to me a naive interpretation of the internet as some sort of Durkheimian structure.

[mikelepore]

It is one hypothesis that consciousness is information and algorithm, so that circuits could do it as well as brains. That isn't known with certainty. There is another hypothesis that consciousness is a property of the chemistry of living cells. No one today knows the answer.

[Revy]

The Internet is meant to be a tool, not a powerful and self-aware being. Yeah, let's use technology to create an artificial God who can benevolently "provide solutions to humanity's problems".

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Maybe when the aliens come back to reclaim their obelisk...?:rolleyes:

What the fuck are you talking about?


The Internet is meant to be a tool, not a powerful and self-aware being. Yeah, let's use technology to create an artificial God who can benevolently "provide solutions to humanity's problems".

Hell, why not? Anything smarter than us can't possibly do a worse job.

[Taygon]

Yeah, let's use technology to create an artificial God who can benevolently "provide solutions to humanity's problems".Hell, why not? Anything smarter than us can't possibly do a worse job.And if it is truly that intelligent, there is no guarantee that it would be benevolent at all.

Look at it from the machine's perspective... a machine that's capable of making itself smarter and creating it's own physical forms... what use would such a machine have for any organic life? None. Organics are like insects to it. It can grow and reproduce without any help from any other lifeform. Organics are completely irrelevant at the best... and in the way at the worst. It may decide that the greater good will be best served by eradicating the entire human species.

Don't count on the Singularity to be beneficial. It is just as likely to harm as it is to help.

[mikelepore]

What the fuck are you talking about?

Obelisk. He's alluding to the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey."

[LebenIstKrieg]

:laugh: LOL skynet.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

And if it is truly that intelligent, there is no guarantee that it would be benevolent at all.

No guarantee that it would be hostile either. It all depends on its worldview. There nothing about intelligence itself that makes one more likely to be more malign to others. In fact, intelligence greatly increases one's options beyond fight, flee or mate.


Look at it from the machine's perspective... a machine that's capable of making itself smarter and creating it's own physical forms... what use would such a machine have for any organic life?

What makes you think an AI would be so instrumentalist, apart from Hollywood movies?


None. Organics are like insects to it.

Our abhorrence/indifference to so-called "lower" life forms such as insects is an evolutionary legacy that AIs will not share unless we specifically program them to.


It can grow and reproduce without any help from any other lifeform.

We don't need any help from dogs or cats or hamsters or goldfish or antfarms to reproduce either. We're talking about a superhuman intelligence, and you're treating it like some kind of mindless virus.


Organics are completely irrelevant at the best... and in the way at the worst. It may decide that the greater good will be best served by eradicating the entire human species.

What "greater good"? That's not the thinking of an AI, that's the thinking of a psychopathic human being.


Don't count on the Singularity to be beneficial. It is just as likely to harm as it is to help.

I don't think that "benefit" or "harm" will hold much currency after the Singularity. You are the equivalent of a chimp worrying about no longer enjoying bananas or swinging on a tire after becoming human.


Obelisk. He's alluding to the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey."

I know that, but what has that to do with an intelligence arising from the internet? I was wondering where the "selection pressure" so to speak was for forming an intelligence. It could be perhaps that the internet develops a definate life of it's own, but nothing we would recognise as humanly intelligent.

[mikelepore]

I know that, but what has that to do with an intelligence arising from the internet? I was wondering where the "selection pressure" so to speak was for forming an intelligence. It could be perhaps that the internet develops a definate life of it's own, but nothing we would recognise as humanly intelligent.

In other forms of life, it's not clear that we need to have the kind of selection pressure that biological life on earth has. The life we know uses this selection pressure because there's no other way to make changes except to have a small percentage of imperfect copies in an otherwise perfect copying process, and then have some of the copies obliterated. Other forms of life might not develop that way. If something that people created were to achieve life, I suppose that human interventions would have the role that mutations have for us. I don't really see any similarity between the internet and a life process, but for the sake of argument, if it were so, the "mutations" could be the wave-like introductions and obsolescences of UUCP, NNTP, telnet, FTP, http, peer-to-peer, etc. The fact that almost no one uses dialup bulletin boards anymore might be the equivalent of the extinctions of the trilobite. Think how strange the 1980s-era usenet was: one server placing a phone call to another server in the middle of the night and saying "I'll let you copy all of my files if you'll let me copy all of your files." That extinct form could be like the triceratops.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

In other forms of life, it's not clear that we need to have the kind of selection pressure that biological life on earth has. The life we know uses this selection pressure because there's no other way to make changes except to have a small percentage of imperfect copies in an otherwise perfect copying process, and then have some of the copies obliterated. Other forms of life might not develop that way. If something that people created were to achieve life, I suppose that human interventions would have the role that mutations have for us. I don't really see any similarity between the internet and a life process, but for the sake of argument, if it were so, the "mutations" could be the wave-like introductions and obsolescences of UUCP, NNTP, telnet, FTP, http, peer-to-peer, etc. The fact that almost no one uses dialup bulletin boards anymore might be the equivalent of the extinctions of the trilobite. Think how strange the 1980s-era usenet was: one server placing a phone call to another server in the middle of the night and saying "I'll let you copy all of my files if you'll let me copy all of your files." That extinct form could be like the triceratops.

That's a fascinating way of putting it, although I don't think the analogies fit too well; nevertheless, the point is taken.

Any form of artificial life would be something quite unlike natural biological life. Even artificial biological life would be able to incorporate substances and processes that could never arise through natural selection.

[Buffalo Souljah]

What the fuck are you talking about?




That was a reference to the film 2001. I guess I'm too pedantic with my pop culture references...:(

[Buffalo Souljah]

What the fuck are you talking about?




That was a reference to the film 2001. I guess I'm too pedantic with my pop culture references...:(


I know that, but what has that to do with an intelligence arising from the internet?

If you'd read Arthur C. Clark's novelization of the film (which I don't recommend, since it was written explicitly for the movie and is not really that original a piece of science fiction entertainment...) you'd know that human language and the capacity to use complex tools and the creative process were derived from alien lifeforms, who plant(ed) devices emitting EM signals at various points of "development" (terresterial places, the moon, etc.) on various planets in the distant past, Earth being one of them. Supposedly, we deriv(ed) all of our technological "know-how" from these alien transmitters. Kubrick ended up cutting this portion of the story out of the movie, but the obelisks are still there today, which allows for the ore popular "neo-Platonic" interpretation of the movie, ie, that the protagnonist encounters the "Absolute good" on the moons of Jupiter and blasts through hyperspace, etc. etc, which I think is a flimsier, less intelligent interpretation of the film. There's an interesting video of a theoretical physicist whose name I've forogtten talking about real-life applications of this stuff. I'll try and dig it out later.

[lulks]

It is one hypothesis that consciousness is information and algorithm, so that circuits could do it as well as brains. That isn't known with certainty. There is another hypothesis that consciousness is a property of the chemistry of living cells. No one today knows the answer.the hypothesis that mental states are properties of cells makes as much sense as the hypothesis that software is a property of computer chips. both hypotheses are based on confusions.

for example, when you teach a child what pain is, you show them behaviors of a person in pain, and what might cause pain. then a child can have learned what it means to be in pain while knowing nothing about the brain. this is because when we say someone is in pain, what we mean is not that they have a certain brain state or property of their cells. we mean (to give a very simplified definition) that the person is in a state that tends to be caused by being poked by needles, getting punched, etc and tends to cause behaviors such as crying or saying "ouch". someone could have computer chips in their head instead of a brain, and still have mental states.

similarly, computers could have brains instead of computer chips, as long as those brains could produce the same results. when i teach someone what it means for a computer to be in a certain software state such as downloading a song, i say that it is a state that tends to be caused by clicking a download link on mediafire or something like that, and tends to cause the computer to be in another state later where it plays the song when you click the play button. the state of the hardware of the computer has nothing to do with this definition, like the state of the brain has nothing to do with the definition of mental states. they are both defined by things that can be observed from the outside.

[bricolage]

The World Wide Web is a network of inter-connectivity that goes everywhere and follows its own intelligence. The advent of this newly emerging communication field around our planet has enabled citizens from all lifestyles to communicate globally via words, sounds and pictures – inexpensively, person-to-person; and from the safety of their own homes and offices – for the first time ever.

I think this is all rather incorrect and naive. In the first instance, and while it conceivably could, the internet does not 'go everywhere'. Only twenty-five percent of the worlds inhabitants have access to the internet and only in Europe, North America and Oceania is the figure over fifty percent.24 In contrast in Africa only just over six and a half percent of the continental population have access to the internet. While this may include certain citizens 'from all lifestyles', it is largely still just citizens from the Global North. Furthermore I disagree with 'from the safety of their own homes and offices'. State regulation and encroachment into the internet is ever pertinent, whether it be in Iran, China or even here in the UK. I think it is problematic for people to glorify the internet like this, and indicates a belief that it can separated from the material and social conditions and relations it exists within.

As for the rest of the article it seems like rubbish to me but then I don't know much about the matter at all.

[Ravachol]

The article is severly flawed and seems to be the product of a futurist who has watched one enjoyable cyberpunk movie too many as opposed to serious philosophy regarding artificial conciousness.



The World Wide Web is a network of inter-connectivity that goes everywhere and follows its own intelligence.
(..)
Artificial intelligence researcher Francis Heylighen sees huge growth as this new world-wide communication system continues to gain power from billions of humans adding to its intelligence every day.


These are two flawed statements. First of all 'the internet' is not some monolithic entity with 'nerve endings', it's the opposite really: an aggregate function of inter-connected nodes communicating with eachother. It's like talking about 'the economy' in a monolithic fashion, it makes no sense. Secondly, the internet does not posess it's "own intelligence" any more than a room full of file cabinets posesses it's "own intelligence".



Experts compare the Internet to a planet growing a global brain. As users, we represent the neurons.


Another flawed comparison. Neurons do not act self-conciously in a purpose-driven manner like humans do. Comparing a network of concious agents to a neural network reveals a severe lack of understanding regarding the matter.



Like germinating seeds, this global brain continues to evolve and as some forward-thinkers believe, will not stop until it develops feelings and achieves consciousness.


Nonsense. This mystical view that conciousness will suddenly develop out of nowhere is completely unscientific.
The type of consciousness they talk about requires self-awereness and a sense of identity, something that the internet as it is technically structured today can and will never achieve any more than a room full of file cabinets will.

Consciousness as the ability to percieve events, however, is a different matter. We could argue that a lot of networked hardware today and in the future has an increasing degree of 'awareness', they have information regarding self-identification, regarding their geographical position through GPS and a means of percieving both their world (whether overlapping with our perception of it through cameras,etc or not) and communicating with other devices about these perceptions. One might call this a weak form of networked conciousness.



A higher level of consciousness – self-awareness – would require that the global brain could reflect on its own functioning.


There are more requirements to be met. A lot of software is capable of debugging itself and analysing it's own inner workings, that does not, however, mean it's "self-aware", it's merely self-percieving. Self-awareness requires a higher degree of complexity and information correlation than mere self-percieving.

The whole problem with this article is that it wrongly compares emergent weak 'conciousness' to the functioning of the human brain. Adaptions to the internet and networked soft- and hardware as we know it might constitute an emergent conciousness in the future but not in any form we are familiar with and most certainly not in a monolithic 'single entity' way of conciousness. It will most likely resemble hive minds more than the human brain.

The core problem lies with the fact that such a network, unless designed to function like that, will never develop purpose-driven behavior. Purpose driven behavior requires fundamental drives that such a weak conciousness simply does not posess, neither biologically nor artificially through programming. In short, strong artificial intelligence and conciousness will only develop when designed to (eventually) develop in that direction.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Given that the internet could only be conscious if 1) it were a human being, and 2) it had just woken up from a coma, head trauma or anaesthetic, then the answer is 'No!'.

More on that here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/consciousness-and-passage-t100438/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-do-we-t98047/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/self-t105849/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/consciousness-t135419/index.html