The Machine is You

What better segue from my earlier article on Cellular Automata than the following video [youtube.com]? It isn't about video games per-se, but it certainly illustrates a point as well as alludes to some of my ambitions as a writer and provider to my currently few readers.

This site is definitely not web 2.0 and the Internet is not the second coming. But what the Internet is, is powerful stuff, and that's what brings me here to you today. The video definitely illustrates how this has become so easy now that the ball is rolling. In a short time, look at the technology available. Everything in this video is current and surprisingly pervasive technology. I'd like to draw some conclusions about this pervasiveness and tell you what I have in mind for this site.

What if New Age crystal-huggers aren't that far off? What if we are all just the product of a New Kind of Science [wolframscience.com]? At first it seems ridiculous, but suppose we are nothing more than a complex series of base chemical reactions and algorithms. And here and now, the results of an unimaginable number of iterations we find ourselves reading someonestolemydomain.com. Every time I write an article, I program the machine. Every time you read an article (be it my own or someone else's) you also program the machine with knowledge (or "intel").

This machine, as the video implies, knows everything (or at least it will as fast as we can tell it). It knows everything about every person, animal, thing or idea there ever was. Hypertext acts as a neural pathway between a massive collection of human, no- universal thought. From this, the machine may not be alive but it needn't be in order to be classified as the most powerful Artificial Intelligence known to man. We humans, dumping information into the collective consciousness of the machine, are providing its sensory input. My next logical thought is Marvin Minsky [wikipedia.org] couldn't have been more right in his social A.I theories.

Let's imagine for a second that A.I routines can be represented as social behavioral models (Minsky) and that it is much easier to think of real-time simulated decision making as an electoral process (Freud, HolmesIV???). Information (or "intel") is subject to a single game-loop, in which an electoral process is executed on the current state of the system. The decision is subject to the electorate is based on a queue of basic needs and desires, which are selected from a list of defined values at run-time. This queue and game state is updated with every iteration of the game loop.

The electorate, meanwhile makes decisions based on their "intel" (or available information) and returns this to the parent node (or secretary/minister if you will). This is represented at the next level of the electorate and so forth, until the final decision is made by an Arbitrator node based on its own available "intel".

At the Arbitrator level, personality is applied where micro decisions are collected and disregarded based on its queue. These micro decisions influence the ultimate outcome provided by the Arbitrator based on its overall needs. What I've described here is how a single collective of people (or at the singular level, neurons) can arrive to a single accepted conclusion. This happens on the Internet every day and diffuses the noisy input into relevant information. It just so happens this is analogous to our human thought processes. So what happens when this task is perpetuated?

The more we automate this task, the more the Internet demonstrates the product of reason: The more popular (and presumably more correct) pieces of information are linked more often, and bubble up to the top, while the noise is doomed to the fringes where it may never be used or validated again. Is this reason? Perhaps not. But I submit that any sufficiently advanced technology appears to perform as if by magic, perhaps even our own intelligence.

So why don't we generally consider the Internet intelligent? Well, as my good friend Spoonman pointed out, it really comes down to how you define intelligence. I think the mistake a lot of people make here is assuming that life and intelligence are mutually inclusive. "Life" is something else altogether and shouldn't confused with intelligence- whether it be natural or artificial. When talking about natural intelligence, it's easy to equate it to life since natural life provides the only empirical example to observers in our everyday surroundings (nature). Artificial Intelligence does not denote life, it only implies the simulation of a natural system we call intelligence. We have A.I now, the problem is it's clunky and doesn't always produce consistently realistic results. The Internet is the answer to this.

Over 6 billion computers (I made this up but it's easily more than one for every human being on this planet), all networked in some form or another. With every hardware and software improvement we make we tell the Internet machine whats most important. We reinforce every connection with hypertext and bandwidth. We contribute to this reinforcement by choosing to read, or not choosing to read- writing to the memory of the Internet.

What people perhaps rightly refer to as Web 2.0- (API mashups, rss feeds, community blogs) is the first step to giving the Internet an ability to "think" and provide automated unique and consistently reliable output. Web 2.0 seems to allow multiple pools of information to be related in such a way that the information becomes greater than the original sum of its parts. It offers the Internet a short-term memory snap-shot, which of course can be further abstracted.

Just imagine what is possible, when we can teach the Internet to modify its own APIs. This of course is a long way off, but paralell processing, and high level scripting languages can be used to do this more efficiently. One thing is for certain, is that our relationship with Artificial Intelligence will remain symbiotic for some time.

Is what we are creating today, by spending hours online a day- communicating, learning, seeing, hearing, simply constructing the future consciousness of the Internet? Will future automation use this consciousness and memory to make intelligent and informed decisions about the universe around it? Let's just say I'm an optimist.

Have you seen this boy?