Science mag warns: 'Could the Net become self-aware?'
"Excuse me, is Sarah Conner home?"
It sounds like an Astroturf campaign for the upcoming computers-gone-bad movie "Terminator: Salvation," but in fact New Scientist magazine is being completely serious when it asks if the Internet itself could soon become "self-aware." The article explains:
In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the Internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall, and transmit information.
Fortunately for anyone worrying about how to best serve our new robot overlords, the article points out that even if this does come to pass, it won't, "necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans," because consciousness can be described as, "a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources."
Quoted is University of Brussels researcher Francis Heylighen, who says, somewhat ominously, "We probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially," and adds that the principal task a self-aware network would undertake would be to identify where it has knowledge gaps and discover how to fill them.
Until it figures out how to send a killer robot back in time, that is.
(Via io9.com)
New York native Dan Ackerman, a former radio DJ turned journalist, has written about technology and music for publications including Spin, Blender, The Hollywood Reporter, and USA Today. He hosts the weekly Digital City podcast and the New York edition of Editors' Office Hours. Dan's new album, Tales Out of Night School, is available now. E-mail Dan.
Former radio DJ turned
journalist Dan Ackerman grew up in the Bronx and now lives in
Manhattan. He’s covered music, technology, and video games for
more than 10 years. His latest album, Tales Out of Night School
is available now. 
Joseph Kaminski,
when not juggling the dual demands of parenthood and HD gaming, is a
life-long Manhattanite and can be found testing the latest tech in
CNET’s Lab. 
Julie Rivera grew up
and currently resides in Brooklyn. When she's not deejaying,
bartending, or fixing gadgets for friends on the outside, you'll find
her testing, troubleshooting and developing benchmarks for laptops in
the "fish bowl" known as CNET Labs. 
Scott Stein, CNET's
newest laptops editor, was born in Queens and grew up a Long Islander -
and is now raising a kid in NYC. In addition to covering games and
tech, writing screenplays, and performing improv in seedy downtown
establishments, he's also a die-hard, season-ticket-holding Jets fan.
I have yet to see a neural network or evolutionary algorithm that can come close to human cognition. So how is a collection of unrelated nodes in a network that do not employ any sort of soft computing techniques are going to suddenly become "self aware"?
...just another wannabe "expert" commenting on stuff they know nothing about.
It's not science that's needed to discuss those concepts and I don't see how science could provide you with an understanding of them. Science has to start out with an understanding of concepts arrived at through other means in order to form any theories or test hypotheses.
...just another wannabe citing "science" as the end-all, be-all of every investigation.
Given science can't touch this. Not even scientists are qualified. Quite frankly it's not science since science can't get a grip on it.
Imagine if every computer linked to the internet was used as a neuron.
Well, they may in the future function differently, but that would require a radical change. We're nowhere near that. If something called 'the web' became aware, it would have to be something a lot different from the things we currently call 'the web'.
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by rnaoncfixd
May 4, 2009 10:37 AM PDT
- Oh, you mean like this?
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Like this
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