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When will the Internet become aware of itself?
Great site, Count. Wasn't aware of it.

'The growth of the Internet over the last several decades more closely resembles biological evolution than engineering.'

It may closely resemble it, but it's not biological evolution and to imagine that when it becomes complex enough, self awareness will just emerge is without any kind of basis. But I know people who think this will happen.

If we step for a moment into the realms of sci-fi, if the Net became aware, what kind of picture would it put together of humankind? With access to all of our glory and all our of scum. I am not so sure it would look upon us with benificence.

Blacknad.
Posted By: Anonymous Re: When will the Internet become aware of itself? - 01/04/06 03:12 AM
"How would we know if the Internet were to become aware of itself? The problem is that we don't even know if some of our fellow creatures on this planet are self aware. For all we know the Internet is already aware of itself."

Let us hope that in the eventuality that it does become aware of itself that it is benign and has a sense of humor.

"Amaranth"
A research team at Caltech discovered in 2005 that individual brain cells can fire in response to visual stimuli of individual people or places, which conflicted previous conjectures that visual recognition was an emergent phenomenon of large networks of neurons.

- In line with this, it would seem to me that thinking: 'When enough neurons are networked then self awareness (or indeed anything) emerges", is more akin to believing in magic than science.

Blacknad.
The internet is already aware of itself.

Just type 'internet' into google to see. wink
Never. Lightspeed time delay between nodes is too great. More accurately, maximum data transmission speed is lightspeed/refractive index in fiberoptic and lightspeed/sqrt(dielectric constant) in cable. Brains are compact and 3-D.

A light millisecond with refractive index 1.3 (or dielectric constant 2.7) is 143 miles. The Net is essentially 2-D and spread out over at least the area of the US. Too slow. Mind is cnfined to local resources.

How long did brains require to evolve the necessary wetware for intelligence?
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