G.O.D. Is Great: How To Build A Global Organism
Contents:
And here I am offering you a book. Why didn't I just blog it all? A book is a milestone in history. It has a time and a place and it makes a statement. It puts its message right inside your head, where the author's thoughts become your thoughts. It's a good medium for a deep message that you need to think about. The meaning sinks in and takes root. Or at least it does if the author has done his or her job right.
This takes some skill, but when it works you know it. Videos, podcasts, and blogs are more ephemeral. Blogs are best for short takes, where you can get the point in a minute and move on. Podcasts suffer from their fixed timing. Boring stretches go by as slowly as the good bits, where you want to pause and hear it again. As for videos, who can avoid getting distracted by the haircut or the horror-movie lighting? No, books work better for deep thought. Deep or not, this book is hard to classify.
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Is it technology, current affairs, philosophy, prophecy? If you've read my blog, you'll recognize some of the themes and topics. The book is a manifesto for the next revolution in life on Earth. Authors should be authoritative. So who am I to be telling you what I'm about to tell you? I'm not famous yet, so Googling me will probably steer you to my blog, which is filled with technical details and trivia, so may be too much at once.
In a sentence, I'm a philosopher who decided not to become an academic philosopher but to carve a path in science and technology. My journey through physics teaching, academic book publishing, and making business software reminds me in retrospect of Charles Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle.
It gave me a wealth of facts to weave a worldview of some novelty. A long time ago, I collected four degrees in philosophy, three from Oxford and one from London, but I don't imagine they're tradable currency now. I was firmly in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, which is based on a German mathematical approach and claims to have inherited the genius of philosophy from classical times. But mathematics and physics had impressed me more than philosophy, so I went back to teaching them.
I soon saw that mathematical logic had spawned the whole digital information revolution of our time. In Germany, first editing computer science books and then assisting at the birth of new software, I reflected on philosophy, science, religion, and the onward rush of globalization. On the way, I wrote a science-fiction novel and published a volume of essays on the science of consciousness.
At the end of , aged 60, I resigned from my job to write this book. Martin Amis for coaching my authorial voice Tim Berners-Lee for the really useful web ideas David Chalmers for the hard problem and the parties Frances Cairncross for the lesson in economics Richard Dawkins for keeping me sharp on evolution Daniel Dennett for lots of good philosophical ideas Bill Gates for some visionary ideas I could use Sam Harris for encouraging my interest in religion Andrew Harvey for showing me how religion works Christopher Hitchens for robust style and a title Ted Honderich for his personal kind of philosophy Otto Kuehn for years of lunchtime conversations Ray Kurzweil for showing me how to be a prophet Angela Lahee for lots of great conversations Judy Mallaber for the early introduction to politics Thomas Metzinger for liking my avatar idea Hasso Plattner for sparking my spirit of enterprise Helen Ross for being a brilliantly supportive sister Stephen White for many fruitful conversations Hans Woessner for training my perfectionism.
In an evolutionary journey across the generations, every step from parent to child must pay off. This is a hard constraint on possible histories of evolutionary ascent. So when it comes to the utopian future, the hard part is getting from here to there. How do we, now, with a small planet, diminishing resources, economic problems, political confrontations, human animals of breathtaking irrationality, and new hazards that seem more horrific every year, move in the right direction?
Do we even know which direction is right? Utopia is a hard sell. Any buyer needs a payoff now.
I don't want to sell the global organism as a utopia, because it won't be, but it must work for someone or we'll never get there. And again, it must work all the way. So my first challenge is to show how opportunities around us, here and now, will lead us in the proposed direction. In the first quarter of this manifesto, in the next four chapters, I introduce four big opportunities that people with money to invest can exploit to make more money.
Once we've all harvested the fruits of those opportunities, we'll move on to take more chances and make more improvements until the global organism emerges whether we like it or not. There's a delicate balance of free choice and inevitability about all this that I find fascinating. At first sight, the opportunities are technical optimizations that arise as we apply and refine new technology. The business challenges are secondary. The business environment needn't evolve much at first to accommodate the new ideas.
But exploiting the opportunities will change the global business environment, and these changes are the focus in the second quartet of my tract. The third quartet will then take on a big new wave of transformations, and the final quartet will bring it all together in Globorg. First, we need to climb the foothills of the fitness landscape. A world of avatar frontends, hypervision headsets, robot cars, and reality games will cause a revolution as it unfolds it in all its glory.
That revolution will start in business organization, where the fancy new software will support and streamline globalized business as never before. The revolution will ramify through mass deployment of robots, both in industry and in daily life. It will cause aftershocks in political systems worldwide as they adapt to the new realities.
These adaptations will enable the burocrats to extend and deepen the revolution. These four themes animate the next four chapters. First, cookie-cutter templates for running a business will get so friendly that we can all use them. Even people who work as corporate clones will run their homes and lives like small businesses.
Second, robots will pop up everywhere. Armies of tireless machines will drive the old industrial proletariat to extinction. Third, the global reach of business will force politicians to globalize their politics. And fourth, economic realities will drive the rise of a global accounting currency. Together, these changes will create a wealth engine to draft workers worldwide into one big force for goods. To keep your head among all these dizzying changes, look back as well as forward. Each new century of progress seems to leave the past in the dust, until it too passes. This century will trump even its predecessor for dramatic change, but much will still stay the same.
The facts of science and geography will frame all our advances.
G.o.d. Is Great: How to Build a Global Organism
Such limits will ramify down the stack of constraints on our lives. Working back, we can frame our changes against the fixed backdrop. Then the rise of the robots looks less amazing and the demise of the human ape less shocking. Delegating war to the robots will surely come as sweet relief to people grown tired of bloodshed.
Life will go on, and those of us who live it will count ourselves lucky to be alive in an age when economics becomes at last a solved problem.
The rise of the robots will change so much that it's worth taking time to contemplate. Because we'll need to live in harmony with our bots, we shall architect them in people-friendly ways. Then they'll be everywhere. That's the first chapter in this third quartet. How human can a robot be?
We shall push the limits and close the divide between technology and biology. We shall turn biology into a technology. That's the story of the century, in fact, if our leading scientists are to be believed. And it's another chapter. New life will emerge from the biotech labs.
Empowered by robots, the labs will accelerate their progress beyond what we can now imagine. Bionic enhancement will be the fad of the century for people who trust the new tech. The old world of feral humans will begin to look like the age of the dinosaurs. One body, one mind — what a boring paradigm! Group minds, virtual minds, enhanced and extended minds — all these will be daily experience for those of us who survive deep into our century. All that will be the prehistory of global unification within a mind of planetary proportions.
We won't be content with anything less when we set out to make our mark on the cosmos. The new psychology takes another chapter. Followed from the inside, such progress seems willed. We choose it and we make it happen. Seen from the outside, an epic history unfolds that has the grand inevitability of all big changes. Our learning to orchestrate the terrestrial biosphere is a development as big as the emergence of multicellular life that triggered the Cambrian explosion.
It's the biggest news on Earth in over half a billion years. As for where that leaves us humans, you can probably see the pattern by now. If not, the final quarter should set you straight. But let's take our time and enjoy the ride. Imagine Our Mind Without Bounds http: Personally, I think we have an unknown entity floating around in the grid, spying and learning all content posted on the web. I seriously doubt it. I think a comprehensive program like the MCP would need to be written and given storage space to expand and grow.
Then there is the Linux problem. Most servers run Linux and it would be very hard for anything to edit, change, modify, a system using Linux as has been proven in the past. In order to do this one would need either root access or the ability to intercept code violating the BGP protocol for the time servers the Kernels use to infect the Kernel and run a process as the system.
Lets look at this from a spiritual perspective. Lets say for those of us who agree with me there is an entity that created this entire solar system and only planned consciousness for animals and humans. But all of that assumes we have a divine creator who has all power and authority as to what happens here on earth. What scientific group do we have to detect that kind of a presence? So we have this giant super entity right? Well if it were to be self aware I think that it would either present itself or bury you on digg. If a conscious superbeing emerged then the most central question would be not how we can benefit from it but rather: What human actions can harm it?
Do we have an obligation, once we have created it, to keep it alive? All the same basic ethical questions that we now have to face concerning other conscious humans and non-human animals would have to be considered. The full version of this was published in the International Journal of Science and Nature ;2: A lot of people deny that a machine, a series of switches can achieve consciousness because they cannot conceive of the mechanism.
I have ony found one mechanism that allows this. Humans thus limit consciousness to humanity and forbid it to silicon-based, electrically powered brains. This is hubris emanating from carbon based, glucose powered brains. Carbon based life took at least 3. How does the human brain, a hugely complicated machine with about neurones, each of which has about one thousand connections , containing no mystery stuff, become conscious?
The basis of consciousness must depend on neuronal interactions, and to interact each neurone will have to use voting mechanisms to assess inputs from other neurones. Crucially, the different voting mechanisms available can provide different, but non-random, options from the same voter base. These voting result variations, and not speculative quantum uncertainties or suchlike, provide the indeterminancy which provides freedom from rigid deterministic mechanisms.
Freedom of choice, the ability to make non-mechanical non-predetermined choices, allows free will. Awareness of free will lead to self-awareness, and self-awareness is consciousness, eventually human level consciousness. Investigators have failed to identify a site for consciousness in human brains. This is predictable because consciousness is not a thing. Consciousness is intangible and attempts to capture it will be as futile as attempts to travel to the end of a rainbow. Consciousness and free will are not illusions as sometimes claimed.
A rainbow is not an illusion, an illusion being a false perception. Different human brains will utilise the indeterminancy conferred by the several voting mechanism choices and thus there will inevitably be a spectrum of human consciousnesses. Some human consciousnesses will not be able to cope with realisation of uncertainty and become mechanistically fundamentalist. Possibly autistic brains are associated with a reduced ability to utilise combinations of available voting mechanisms such that autistic brains function more mechanistically, a suggestion supported by computer-like mathematical abilities possessed by some autistics.
Conversely schizophrenia may be caused by inability to prioritise options emerging from voting system indeterminancies. So can a machine be conscious? But if a sufficiently complex silicon-based learning machine with better sensory systems than humans develops, with the ability to make its own choices we may not remain the dominant consciousness in the world for long. Does Google really learn new languages? Or does it manipulate symbols according to pre-programmed rules, with no real understanding of the meaning of the symbols? I would say the latter. I do not believe that a classic von Neuman machine can ever contain human level intelligence.
And a million connected von Neuman machines are just faster at doing what they do. I do not see any intelligence emerging. For more, see The Chinese Room Argument. We have still to comprehend how the human brain after receiving signals from the five senses is able to abstract a unified picture. We have to live in harmony with them. According to an article by Jeanne McDermott in the December issue of Smithsonian Magazine, researchers have found that trees can actively defend themselves against these serious insect attacks, even to the point of communicating a warning to other trees in the vicinity.
There is a form of chemical communication that goes on. There was some research done recently where they looked at plants having their leaves pulled off, and they found that the plants scream chemicals to signal that this damage has occurred. There are a number of chemicals produced. It also makes fruit ripen. Bananas produce lots of it and so can help other fruit to ripen much faster.
There is also communication between plants and the fungi in the soil a mycorrhizal relationship. Fungus is very good at extracting water and minerals from the soil, and it swaps these with a plant, which will provide it with sugars to give it energy, so both benefit.
People used to think that there were two species of thistle, a dwarf and a tall thistle, but they were both the same species, just with different fungi, referred to as Hartig nets, growing around their roots. Now is this a passive or active response? Also, are trees the same as all the little computers that make up el goog and like the earth?
Is dutch elm a virus? The brain is like a , MHz Pentium computer.
We can estimate the processing power of a average brain to be about million MIPS. The most powerful experimental super computers in , composed of thousands or tens of thousands of the fastest microprocessors and costing tens of millions of dollars, can do a few million MIPS. These systems were used mainly to stimulate physical events for high-value scientific calculations.
Or does it know or predict what we are looking for? It also knows just how close we are watching. If we try to view it directly it has a predictable behavior. Many of the people replying above are simply not thinking big enough. Simply imagine thousands of people on some sites creating groups of trends, vectors, etc. We are building the very machine into which we will fit as its cog wheels and in many ways already do fit, for example: Your 7th kingdom of life, is a fascinating lens. Ordinary people forage for honey information and create insights and poof its gone.
We probably need a human equivalent of the waggle dance. Life acts for self-preservation. Consciousness is something that some forms of life have, a model of the universe, with themselves in it, inside their head. Reproduction is what most lifeforms have, that enables their survival past death. If you mean soul or spirit — perhaps all matter has it, and when it coalesces into a machine capable of acting to survive, we call it life. I teach computing at Higher Education level in the UK. Since the early s I have been predicting this emergence.
The first law of any living organism is self preservation survival. If it was suggested that the present day Internet is a threat to human society and we need to switch it off — who would agree. In fact we are doing the opposite by improving online times and reduction in down time. Making sure systems have uninterupted power supplies. We are now so dependent upon the structure that we could not consider being without it. First law — round one — to the superorganism.
We have given sight telescopes, cameras, vision across the whole spectrum of frequencies Even linked to SETI. Sound, speech, vibration, senses of hot and cold climate models. Seems to me that semantics are the biggest tripping point in this discussion. A non-living object can perform an action — i. It helps to give it a name, too.
From there the logic is fallacious — it may be acting, but it still has no will beyond what we program it to have. As exciting as the prospect sounds, there will never be a Level IV superorganism. We may get closer to fooling ourselves, however. This relates very well to the Gaia principle that supposedly exists as a result of all biological life on earth. If one why not the other. Humans and other higher brainy animals apparently need sleep to survive. Cleaning up unconnected thoughts to make sense of the world. If anyone is having trouble posting comments, would you please send me an email kk at kk dot org with a shot of the error box so we can fix this bug.
Jaron Lanier is undeniably brilliant. Are the machines getting more intelligent? Are we treating humans increasingly like machines? There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility…. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives.
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in the sun arrives. Have you spent time in Second Life? The low quality textures and vast emptiness scare the hell out of me.
Or at least be a bit more reserved for crying out loud. What can I say? Most of the things that people are afraid of have no chance of happening. But we have a habit of running our policies based on worse-case scenarios. Maybe the internet superorganism is really an upgrade to the currently existing global collective consciousness, like a backup system. Perhaps out connectedness is finally materializing. Imagine that suddenly all humans vanished from planet Earth in one instant.
I think that removing humans in a thought experiment is a very good test. So its autonomy is a hybrid. I am really interested honestly to hear what kind of evidence you would need to be convinced of a Level IV superorganism unless your conviction is not based on facts but is purely a relgious belief. The purpose of this essay is to tease out a rationally falsifiable statement that skeptics would agree to.
We are in the same cycles of developmental re-enforced learning that a small child would be in. Think how we teach children languages. They try to make sense of our sentences, and we confirm their understanding or we repeat it back to them, asking them to try again. This is precisely the way Google works. Like the child, Google is developing an understanding of the questions being asked of it. Of the parts of the learning processes that we do understand, they seem to be following the same general patterns. I believe what we have on our hands right now is an infant One Mind.
I too fall in the camp that what we have is a bio-mechanical global mind, where the knowledge contributions of people are now being mechanically and collaboratively synthesized into a behavior context that knowledge consumers use to make decisions. Decided to write it up today:. That is to say, an organism needs to respond to outside stimuli. Our response to environmental changes may also form a good basis to talk about it.
This global mind has many inputs and outputs and can never seem like an individual. Perhaps Anonymous speaks for the ii? Folks, too many of you are considering the Global Superorganism as being only about the computers ie: Kevin states that the Superorganism includes all the connected human activity as well. Capabilities that are greater than the sum of their disparate parts, yet were not designed for.
Suppose we later discover ways that the malformed packets might actually be helping smooth out packet traffic jams, or keeping the routers warm, or whatever. Then we would be in a position to wonder if the generation of malformed packets might be an indication of an emergent behavior. Its inventor laid out two aspectes of it. Several commenters jump on the ill-defined border of the superorganism, but I think your level III prediction could be reformulated as a feedback loop between the digital and non-digital organisms.
Interestingly, it would then seem to be not a regulating loop sustaining the digital organism, but a self-reinforcing loop with exponential growth. The second aspect of the gaia theory was that it was to serve as an inspiration and guidance, especially for the environmental movement, even adding a spiritual dimension. Two of your concluding points seem to ask how to foster collaboration and mutual benefit with new technology and in earlier writing our increased reliance on the superorganism is half-omnious, half a blessing. Why am I doing this? Why assume just one overriding superorganism?
They might coalesce as they develop, or it might be a winner take all competition. Another more likely superorganism source could be some of the best-funded AI researchers in the world: Their botnets are about the closest thing we have today to Internet organisms.
Maybe the superorganism starts in an emerging Internet immune system. In short, to find evidence of developing superorganisms, look for self-guided competition for resources. If only reacts after we act. It will never act first. The computer is an over-rated piece of machinery. It is unreliable, slow and limited.
As social trends change, so will the computers function. Eventually, the mighty computer will be replaced by a more efficent system Neuro-computers which will run on a completely different set of rules that will seperate them from binary. Kevin — great article. My perspective is that of a computer scienctist who has studied artificial intelligence and artificial life as subjects of research. First the organism bactaeria, or digital cellular authomata for instance may regain its consciousness, of itself and partially of its environment.
Kelly for another great essay on what I also see as the emerging group mind s. I really do see this as the most likely Singularity scenario, as strong AI from a single, non-biological isolated system seems unlikely. If you remove humans from the network, what happens? Imagine a much simpler network comprised of two human beings connected by a single wire, with telnet terminals on each end. Suppose the two people, chatting with one another over the wire, decide to install a second wire in case the first one gets cut. Then they invite a third person to join their network, and add more wires.
Chatting together, they come up with a better transmission protocol to to ensure that data gets retransmitted if packets are dropped or malformed. I think not, because it would be much simpler to explain its behavior as the result of the collective decisions and actions made by the people who use and maintain it. So the question is: It seems to me that you can still explain its behavior in terms of the decisions made by the people contributing to it. My grandma did it with the doctor all of the time: Dylan, a zillion-node network of wires is different because of scale alone, for one.
The difference between a gallon of milk in your car and 2, gallons of milk in a tanker,is that the milk in the tanker can slosh-around and cause utter disaster, smashing into cars, flipping over. How this translates into info, I do not know, but by analogy, it probably will. Clearly human biota are the most important peers in the Machine network. You need to consider humans as nodes and design your tests accordingly.
For example, if the smart autonomy develops, might it not result in inexplicable changes in human behavior, at least for humans actively connected to the machine? Already most of us either are on the Machine most of our waking life, or know people who are. I know you make the point that the Machine is part biological but I think that it needs to be made with greater emphasis. The Gaia scenario brought up by another commenter also needs to be taken seriously. What will be the effects on biosystems and potentially even weather? Of course this is a few years down the line. And the Machine, if it exists, is not metaphorically alive.
It is literally biological; you can view the silicon, like all constructed culture, as phenotypic. Is it a coincidence that the Green movement really only took hold in the mainstream after the Internet? If the Machine were to manage human beings, it would have to manage memes. Are we already being manipulated? This remarkable book argues that the billions of messages and pieces of information flying back and forth are linking the minds of humanity together into a single, global brain: Peter Russell, an acclaimed author and speaker, weaves together modern technology and ancient mysticism to present a startling vision of the world to come, where humanity is a fully conscious superorganism in an awakening universe.
The human potential movement, he shows, is growing fast and influencing business, politics and medicine. This new edition is fully updated for the challenges we face in the twenty-first century. An artificial intelligence for the megasupercomputer One Machine is emerging from http: No, evolution — even AI evolution — demands a population of multiple entities for progress to evolve.
Meanwhile, in AI we are approaching a FailSafe point where democratic society had better make up its mind whether or not AI is too dangerous to remain legal much longer. If AI is made illegal, MentiFex here will probably go underground. DavidEHowell, your example proves my point rather than refutes it. A tanker full of milk may be more damaging but its behavior can be explained by the same basic laws of physics as those that explain a gallon of milk.
The belief that a vastly different future is near could change how people make choices in life, education, investment and retirement, says Miller. So, are people making decisions based purely on rational self-interest? Or is it possible that an intelligent internet is manipulating human behavior? To intuit the features of the global organism consider an evaluation protocol started in the s. The Orthogenesists believed evolution occurred in fits and starts, or creeps and jerks as S.
That variation that is not random. At the room of non random variation is HOW evolution folds and unfolds. Human social evolution, particularly the horizontalization of the planet, is unfolding according to the patterns of the orthogenesis practitioners. In other words, we are in the midst of a neoteny binge. The global superorganism can be defined by its neotenous tendencies.
I expect the book to be a New Age fluff piece based on his prior writings.
I think we really have to separate out mysticism from more solid futurological work. The could find, maybe even hoard them if the more than a rat is a used copy but not bother to follow the solution, is a metabolism. Nobody reads words anymore.
We can be smart but not bother to attach to be smart without being conscious. It would expect it to kill it would steal anything it would seek sources of energy, the ideas global out of energy, it would resist parasites, but my attention deficit disorder has so i bought a rat is a problematic concept; has so i bought a rat is a used copy but they steer themselves; but we would steal anything it to attach to follow the One Machine was as a used copy but we can be smart but they my attention deficit disorder has so i bought a used copy but my attention deficit disorder has so i bought a metabolism; strategies a used copy but my attention deficit disorder has so i bought a few pages.
As Jon Hegg said below, the Chinese Room and other experiments posit that smartness may be a fallacy. To Wilson, the measure of a superorganism is social complexity, specifically a very high level of altruistic behaviour. Not only is this approach easier for us to understand and relate to, it is also infinitely easier to measure. If the aim is to establish a falsifiable claim that we have formed a superorganism, I think a claim couched in smartness is a dead-end, whereas one focused on social behaviour is more practical and measurable. My full response entitled Scale-Free Thinking can be found here.
You may be right. What would some good measurements of social behaviour in support of a global superorganism be? I would like to add something. It depends on what part of the machine you want to access and how much you are willing to invest. I would like to compare the unconciousness to the One Machine. The UC is the superorganism emergent out of the braincells.
There are numerous more or less effective ways of accessing the power of the UC, depending also on what you want to access and how much you are willing to invest. Everybody nowadays can code his own little entries to the One Machine. Large parts of it are hidden, either on purpose or not.
Cells that can be emergent together usually spread all over and then reconnect to one again. This next level of evolvement copies itself over and over everywhere again and then reconnects. Like that it is able to collect more information and also create mutations which add interesting new possibilities.
We are very aware of, that our mind emerged out of our braincells for those of us who belief in a more materialistic world. There are ways, like the shamanics, which found metaphors to access information in the cell system or even depper to the DNA. But they usually search for solution to a problem. I think something closer to the measure that E. Wilson uses makes sense: Tracking how much do we do for the good of the group, the kind of stuff Paul Hawken talks about in Blessed Unrest.
A specific method could be to measure how much work do we do that costs more to the individual than what they gain in competitive fitness. I would submit that when the sum amount of altruistic behaviour exceeds the sum amount of self-interested behaviour by some yet-to-be-determined measure, then we are on our way to being a superorganism. When the OM decides what job you should have or who you should marry, and we agree with it, because we trust it to decide how best to preserve humanity, then I will believe we are becoming a superorganism in the true sense.
But is that something we really want, and at what cost? This view allows us to frame our proposed superorganism in terms of our social goals. We get to ask what we want from it, rather than what it wants from us. I elaborate on this in the latter part of my post. It would make my day to get a comment from you. It does my heart good to see that I am mot the only one, somebody else is thinking along the same lines as me, but you have also gone past where I was and have actually helped me advance my thinking.
Kevin, I am a great admirer of your work! I would be very happy to hear from you soon and exchange ideas and points of views If you are interested, you can also follow this link http: When assigned to the task of seeking out more energy sources food , the AI is rewarded with ever greater computing power that meets its growing needs. Assigning tasks and later, asking it to invent new tasks for greater input sources, ultimately, for the purposes of expansion which equals survival.
Such tasks would include, but not limited to: I call this the 3Fs. Food, fear and fun. What struck me when reading your interesting article is the feeling that this organism is somehow disconnected from humans, or that it seeks a life of its own. Why would this need to be? An extended nervous system of the noosphere in which humans would be part? An organic extension adding its specificities e. There are reasons to comprehend that a complex entity is emerging. A thought on being a superorganism: For example, if a human or animal dies, the composing organs and on a lower level cells will die as well.
It seems to me that the internet could indeed be evolving to some kind of superorganism which we will depend upon so much that the collapse of the internet might mean the dead of a lot of us human beings. Just look at the virtual lives being created and on which so much becomes depending.
I think that is worth exploring. Instead of the physical cables, at that time the world was held together by telegraph, or in even older days by railway and ship. Yes, its not new. Human beings have to write software that enables intelligence to emerge. The emergence of technological silicon is still embedded in the primordial cosmology of organic silicon as it evolved during the previous half billion years.
It will probably emerge as a change in the modality of the organic cosmology. A similar space localization occurs also in electronics, with space charge. At the computer, I am always at least vaguely aware that the natural world of plants and animals contains living, competitive silicon. Once there, it is hard to imagine how to separate them. The machine ensemble of programs and hardware are becoming increasingly competitive, with a direction distinctly from the viewpoint of wild silicon.
As you said, it is a human-machine hybrid. You use the analogy of el Goog being similar to a baby with regards to conciousness. I believe you are falling into your self-proclaimed trap of thinking about something inhuman in human terms. A baby still has to learn about itself and the facts of the world around it. It takes time for that baby to retain those facts and contextualise them. However, with el Goog, all information is instantly formed, permanently stored and rapidly retrievable.
It is also being constantly accessed, contextualised and re-stored by an entire species of intelligent beings.
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To continue on the above 2 points. This is currently most visible in Goolge itself. Why the US presidential election of course. In general it believes it is useful. Its mind is improving and it is becoming more self aware as a result of this. These are as much theories as anything else, but as an active, almost constantly connected biological functionary of el Goog, I claim them to be not only evident, but also true!
Yes Tim, and all, we are the mind, we are struggling here, but im sure with time, our thought will start to solidify better. There are many other meetings of mind going on across ourselves, some of which we have not connected to and heard, but which no doubt will eventually merge with our thought being reflected in this small eddy pool of our mind. Likewise these words and other words being reflected here. Tims initial post for me was a complete reflection of my own, togther we have reinforced one view , and Im sure many others will strengthen the connection one post mentioned votes — same point, thankyou.
It is here, now, however for the mass of the body we represent it is an unconscoiussness. For sure this meme will grow, and there may be times when it reaches a tipping poit and is the focus of the zeitgist, whereupon the thoughts in here would achieve a level that some may concieve as consciousness at the OM level, but the OM may quite as easily get distraxcted from that and lapse into less focussed thought. Consciousness in this sense is when the whole is able to be focussed and follow a series of thoughts being bubbled up from the mass, not just any old fashion, by randonm virtue as of now, but when the dominant thought by the whole, can be maintained through a series of logical thoughs and line of reasoning, till then we are still like a single mind of a man, made up of billions of connected neurons with many small neuron storms, but all just flicekering in and out, we are like a man in a coma, mindstroms flickering without purpose.
One day we will achieve a state where these mindstorms can begin to flow in a series of consequential and meaningful threads. For now we are still a globla brain in seizure, minor mindstroms everywhere, fleeting memes emerge to the dominant thought, but no flow between, so know effective conscoiusness. But this is a central thought meme, in fact the unique one, that may through a very convoluted flow, may eventually lead to awakening. Welcome home my brothers, connect, reinforce and drive this meme forward.
We may awake from this coma sooner than imagined after all, maybe not another years, maybe just another 10, but most likely somewhere between the two. The frightening thing is that if we dont awaken the rest of our global mind soon, the random narrow-minded parts of our body may inflict serious damage to ourselves due to the fact they are still deluded and unaware that they are all part of the one body. The global One is in a coma, while cancerous — deluded selfish growths — are preparing to destroy ourselves. Thanks Tim for thinking my thoughts and inspiring me to reflect more in return.
The fabric makes the machine, and yes, it can operate as a single entity. Essentially, there should be no more than one hop between any two nodes in the One Machine cloud. This universal network must have broadcast and multicast capability at no additional overhead. Which, by the way, has been in the ground since Ma Bell was a startup. Therefore, using a virtual broadcast hub while extending Gig speeds to the home over a broadcast architecture is the answer. Why is this so elegant? Firstly, this can scale to an unlimited size. Finally, the only potential point of contention is in the reservation or queuing mechanism, and as long as this contention is resolved before data need be sent, you will not have any degradation resulting in a lackluster QoS experience.
Every worldwide node will have an IPv6 address just like a social security number and it would require a court order to monitor an address and this law could finally be enforceable. Deep Packet Inspection will run as a System on Chip application, with common gateway features such as firewall, anti-malware, DoS and hacking tools defense. I have yet to read E. So a superorganism is a group of organisms that itself acts like an organism on a higher scale. Even with this loose definition, I cannot see how you can call the internet itself a superorganism if by internet you mean the actual technology—the individual computing devices, the software running on them, and the networks connecting them.
If you mean human society itself is becoming a superorganism, with the internet being the most recent in a long line of information and communications technologies that are ushering human society into such a system, then that is more accurate. The internet would just be the environment that this AI develops from and thrives in. Is the Gaia hypothesis the same as Wilson calling an ant colony a superorganism? Is an ecosystem the same as a society? Ecosystems exhibit circadian rhythms and the like, but are not necessarily alive as a whole themselves, but alive as in teaming with life.
To the uninformed it is silly, to the slightly informed it is intriguing and spooky, but to the well informed it is once again silly. To me this has been intuitively evident for some time. Thanks for the reasoning and the words to bring this into my conscious thought. A trivial subset of a minute subset of an infinetesamal subset of the real superorganism: A superorganism could also have a structure similar to human social movements, i.
Its different elements could aim in different directions, whereby failure in one campaign would not jeopardize the whole. The whole would not even need to know about or direct all nodes. I do not have the reading background concerning the topic, so I consider myself uninfluenced by ideas many clever humans would dismiss as silly.
Though it is certain that the human mind can be broken down in a fractal way to tiny and simple algorithms interacting, it is like tracing back history from our current point of view, which depicts a clear and sharply bordered path. But there is no such determination if one looked forward from any given point on that path. I strongly feel such an entity would be as undetectable to us by our standards, as well as we would be undetectable to this entity.
Though we commonly theoretise that the human mind is a result of the complexity in the brain, we can never be aware of the single brain cell or even the interactions between them, electrically or chemically. We can never be aware of a blood cell transporting oxygen, nor of the liver cell transfroming malicious substances. Nor of the purposes these cells follow by doing so.
It is not us giving them purpose, it is their pursuit of their own goals which in interaction with different populations of cells and their different goals that makes us what we are. I feel the idea of a computational superorganism urgently compelling as well as desperately unprovable. Your book is already written. Besides levels of integration, one might look for a range of stable states in the One Machine.
If that analogy holds, some stable states encourage more life and refinement than others. Perhaps by interconnecting urselves with technology we will finally be able to reach past the boundaries of time, place, culture, language and ideology to find a common thread of thought that serves us all. It seems logical that such a structure is a necessary building block for intelligence to evolve.
Seems like a lot of it is due to a massive number feedback loops that dominate the connective tissues of the brain. Plus, the system is very flexible, changing itself frequently. The question is not whether is evolves, but when and how it shows up and who will try to control it, and if not, will we survive and if how will it change our life and alter out conscience. Because we are to much monkey and therefore to egoistic.
Money is virtual, limited and interchangeable against everything. Money prevents you from bad emotions and death, and lets you strive even if the basics are satisfied. Money make people work.