Futurism / Belgian Researcher Contract: The Internet will in the future develop into a global mind with an independent consciousness
Illustration: "Principia Cybernetics" website of the University of Brussels
From a human brain to a world-wide superbrain - a new stage in evolution?
When we use the Internet today, we owe it to a large extent to Tim Burns-Lee, the man who invented the WEB in 1990 with the WWW address system, the "links", the HTTP technique and all the good things known to every surfer. Burns-Lee once said that he read a lot of science fiction stories and was particularly impressed by a short story by Arthur Clarke from 1963 - "Dial P and you get Frankenstein". The story described how the worldwide communication network, with all its interconnected computers, passes a certain critical threshold and begins to function like a brain with an independent consciousness.
The idea, which has evolved in many different forms into many other science fiction stories, stems from the certain similarity between a biological brain (billions of interconnected neurons) and a modern computer communication network (a huge amount of interconnected computers, including an astronomical number of information items linked to each other by the " links"). When a biological brain reaches the necessary number of interconnected neurons, it develops the ability to think independently. The idea that this is what might also happen to the global communication network intrigued not only science fiction writers, but also computer scientists and technological thinkers.
For example, Dr. Francis Heiligen, an artificial intelligence researcher from the Free University of Brussels, speaks in all seriousness about the evolution of a "global brain", the "embryonic" form of which is the Internet (presumably he also read Clark's story, in which the World Wide Web The one that comes to life initially behaves like a small child, gaining experience while doing pranks). "The more I work on it, I am convinced that this will happen much sooner than people think," Heiligan said recently in an interview with the magazine "Scientist New". The network will become more and more intelligent - and will eventually become the nerve center of a world-wide super-organism, in which man will be a small component. How will this happen? Following the unceasing process of the growth of information in the network and the improvement of the means for "smart" organization of the information.
Heiligen and his student Johann Bolen are involved in a large project of the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, called "Distributed Information Systems"; Its purpose is to make a leap forward in the efficiency of information organization and the ability to intelligently locate any necessary information. For this purpose, they established a website called "Principia Cybernetica Web" - a pretentious name, not coincidentally reminiscent of the title of Newton's book "Principia Mathematica", one of the important landmarks of modern science.
The idea is that the links between different pieces of information in the billions of pages on the web (those blue "links" we click on to browse from page to page) will not be permanent, but will change all the time while constantly adapting to the needs of the users, in order to provide the most relevant information. This will be done through the automatic "strengthening" of requested links, the automatic creation of new links (according to the analysis of the information "demands" of the surfers) and the "weakening" or disconnection of links that are not in demand. The result - a dynamic system disturbingly reminiscent of the wonderful dynamic system called "brain", also in which there are constantly strengthening or decaying of the signals transmitted between trillions of neurons - "internet pages of the brain".
Heiligan estimates that within five years internet technology will indeed reach such a level that the network will organize itself all the time, like the brain, while constantly adapting to user expectations, so that everyone can get a satisfactory answer to every question without drowning in a sea of unnecessary information. According to him, the technological infrastructure for this already exists (for example, special software tools called "autonomous agents"), you just need to convince the appropriate parties to invest in it and implement it.
But Heiligan goes further: in his opinion, the independent dynamic change process of the interconnections in the network is actually equivalent to thinking. Are we really facing a world-embracing mind coming to life, with real consciousness? The artificial intelligence researcher, Ben Goertzel of the "Intelligence" company in New York, believes so. The Internet today is likened to the brain of a fetus or a baby. In a generation's time it will develop into a global network brain, which may merge human minds into it. A wild idea that smells strongly of science fiction? Indeed yes, but it is based on a serious assessment by respected scientists (such as robotics researcher Hans Moraback or computerized speech scientist Ray Kurzweil), that in the distant future it will be possible to "download" the mental content of a human brain into a computer. And imagine what such a future hybrid entity, which perfectly unites human and computer ability, could do.
Those who are anxious at the thought of a "global network brain" with independent thinking and what it might do to us can be reassured by the fact that it will always be possible to "take out the stalker". On the other hand, Clark's old story ends with the fact that the first thing the worldwide network does upon reaching "maturity" is to prevent exactly this possibility by disconnecting from the terrestrial energy sources - with the help of a satellite network that relies directly on solar energy.
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 4/12/2000}
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