Anyone familiar with the architecture and dynamics of the human
nervous system cannot help but notice the striking similarity between
the brain and the Internet. But is this similarity more than a
coincidence - is the Internet really a brain in its own right - the
brain of our planet? And is its collective behavior intelligent - does
it constitute a global mind? How might this collective form of
intelligence compare to that of an individual human mind, or a group of
human minds?
I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into
a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software,
humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly
intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or
controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing
phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing
events comprised of billions of independent information processors.
As with other types of emergent computing systems, for example John
Conway’s familiar cellular automaton “The Game of Life,” on the
Internet large scale homeostatic systems and seemingly intentional or
guided information processes naturally emerge and interact within it.
The emergence of sophisticated information systems does not require
top-down design or control, it can happen in an evolutionary bottom-up
manner as well.
Like a human brain, the Internet is a vast distributed computing
network comprised of billions of interacting parallel processors. These
processors include individual human beings as well as software
programs, and systems of them such as organizations, which can all be
referred to as "agents" in this system. Just as the computational power
of the human brain as a whole is vastly greater than that of any of the
individual neurons or systems within it, the computational power of the
Internet is vastly beyond any of the individual agents it contains.
Just as the human brain is not merely the sum of its parts, the
Internet is more than the sum of its parts - like other types of
distributed emergent computing systems, it benefits from the network
effect. The power of the system grows exponentially as agents and
connections between them are added.
The human brain is enabled by an infrastructure comprised of
networks of organic neurons, dendrites, synapses and protocols for
processing chemical and electrical messages. The Internet is enabled by
an infrastructure of synthetic computers, communications networks,
interfaces, and protocols for processing digital information
structures. The Internet also interfaces with organic components
however – the human beings who are connected to it. In that sense the
Internet is not merely an inorganic system – it could not function
without help from humans, for the moment at least. The Internet may not
be organized in exactly the same form as the human brain, but it is at
least safe to say it is an extension of it.
The brain provides a memory system for storing, locating and
recalling information. The Internet also provides shared address spaces
and protocols for using them. This enables agents to participate in
collaborative cognition in a completely decentralized manner. It also
provides a standardized shared environment in which information may be
stored, addressed and retrieved by any agent of the system. This shared
information space functions as the collective memory of the global mind.
Just as no individual neuron in the human brain could be said to
have the same form or degree of intelligence as the brain as-a-whole -
we individual humans cannot possibly comprehend the distributed
intelligence that is evolving on the Internet. But we are part of it
nonetheless, whether we know it or not. The global mind is emerging
all around us, and via us, is our creation but it is already becoming
independent of us - truly it represents the evolution of a new form of
meta-level intelligence that has never before existed on our planet.
Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our
control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world -
it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us
together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and
the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we
will literally become part of this network - it will become an
extension of our nervous systems and eventually, via brain-computer
interfaces, it will be an extension of our senses and our minds.
Eventually the distinction between humans and machines, and the
individual and the collective, will gradually start to dissolve, along
with the distinction between human and artificial forms of intelligence.
