Not so fast, little internet…
Posted on October 22, 2009
Filed Under Networks, Rise of the machines, Singularity | 2 Comments
Imagine that the ever-densifying network of devices that we know and love as the internet becomes sentient. Ish. Or aware or whatever:
Dangling upside down via an umbilicus to its humbler origins, and having its ass spanked by Lady The Phenomenon of Emergence herself, will the quasi-conscious intelligence that gulps down it’s first breath be a babbling baby spurting meaningingless, screeching white noise, or will it be a grown thing, whose first words will be more like ‘I am Zod. All must bow before me!!” ?
The Question:
Will the intelligence that emerges from the growth of the internet start out as a childlike entity or will it immediately be a mature entity? Science fiction is filled with images of the latter: an evil or benign or plain humdrum omnipresence of utility computing with a face. (Or a demonic she-child, if horror movie. Tsk). But aren’t we skipping past the crucial ‘First Moments’? I don’t see how a nappy-changing phase is entirely escapable. I would hazard a guess that for a little while after “emergence” with a capital e, we are going to have the equivalent of a very powerful 2-year old on our hands.
And WHO is going to play mommy and daddy then? I can think of countless entities that would want to get their agenda in at the ground level before newly-sentient Netty learns how to google “define: indoctrinate” on her own self.
The first years
What if the internet is plain unusable for a while? what if Netty likes overloading end-devices because its fun to watch them fizzle-out? (I know what you’re thinking… that should hurt… but she wouldn’t know that until she tried, would she? And anyway have you SEEN toddlers? They’re hell-bent on self-annihilation).
Also what if she finds a particular problem fascinating, and brings all the resources available to her to bear upon it, denying bandwidth to large swathes of the population? How long would it take before she understands human communication? What if she blurts out sensitive information to the wrong parties in attempt to be ‘helpful’, but starts a war instead?
And just as you’re starting to get irked by my stereotyping, what if it really *is* a SHE? or a HE? Has anyone thought of that? I mean, we like to impose androgyny on these things but what if the net actually aligns itself with one gender? Wouldn’t that totally surprise/polarise people? (Mental image of half of the population going round saying “I told you so!” )
It could be an even stickier situation
Another ‘taken-for-granted’ presumption is that not only will the net acquire sentience as a mature entity, but that it will be a mature entity with a singular personality / self. Quite frankly, if *I* was the internet and I’d just been handed that kind of awareness I can tell you right now that I would quickly devolve into a schizoid mess of 10-thousand-odd personalities. If you couple this with the childlike entity scenario, we could end up having to wipe the snotty noses of an entire kingdom of kindergartens of computations.
Eeek. Maybe this is why we’ve focused on the other scenarios more. They seem saner in comparison…
Symbiosis
All in all, a child-like phase might not be such a bad thing. It might help cement the natural symbiosis between humans (on the periphery) and the greater bulk of machines that make up the internet. It could be our one window of opportunity to demonstrate our own usefulness… not to mention an opportunity to route funding toward pre-emptive empathy engineering and very large scale integrated care circuit fabrication (you know, the stuff we really should be working on right now).
Because a net that ‘wakes up’ all in one go isn’t going to have any time to bond with us. And we’re going to need all the bonding time we can get…
Putting dystopia aside for a moment, I think the idea of symbiosis is an important one. Right now we DO feed and nurture the net. We replace it’s ailing devices and we help it grow by connecting even more devices to it. And let’s not forget all the juice we pump through straight from the OG (original grid people, not original gangster) to the fledgling one.
So I mean, a sentient internet net *should* love us… so it *would*, right?
RIGHT?
It’ll at least hopefully be curious about us…
Curiousity is good. It buys time.
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image cred: somone by the name of flaivoloka over here.
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2 Responses to “Not so fast, little internet…”
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While I like your idea of multiple sentient cores (given latency issues between different internet neighborhoods, that seems pretty much a given– at least, assuming that consciousness can in fact emerges from the right kind of circuitry), I’m not so convinced by this childhood phase of which you speak. Childhood’s a biological process; it evolved, complete with adaptive and junk characteristics, as a function of natural selection. Baby has to wire up its peripheral motor circuitry post-natally because if it waited until everything was ready it wouldn’t be able to fit through the birth canal, for example. Childhood learning occurs when social and physical environments get too tangled to deal with via purely genetic programs; the baby has heuristic algorithms and behavioural inclinations, but no facts at its disposal out of the starting gate. The bigger the brain, the greater the amount of knowledge that needs to be assimilated, the longer childhood lasts.
How many of these variables correspond to an infant internet?
The system starts off with both facts and instincts galore; 99% of the system consists of various bits of “knowledge”, and a trillion hardwired bots that deal with shuttling data back and forth. But nobody built the system with any way to access those facts, only to move them around and spit them out to some mythical user past the edge of the world. There’s no mechanism for comprehension — it’s as if a baby was born with the Library of Congress embedded in its brain, and the ability to answer questions put to it via pure instinct, but no way to access that information for its own purposes. I imagine that awareness emerging from those conditions would involve processes radically different from anything we’d recognize as “childhood”.
I doubt that natural selection can happen at the level of the whole system: when N=1 there’s no struggle for existence against competitors, because there are no competitors. There’s no heritability of adaptive traits, because the Internet — while it does evolve over time — doesn’t do so by leaving offspring. So I lean more towards thinking of the Internet not as the entity, but as the habitat in which other entities might evolve. Worms and trojans and the like are already borderline life-forms; all it takes is for someone to outfit them with mutable genes to allow them to start diversifying outside human control (something only anarchist-lovers would be inclined to do– certainly the guys who write malware aren’t going to want it developing its own agendas).
So personally, I’d spend less time looking at the network, and more time looking at the things running back and forth inside it. Otherwise you’re missing the trees for the forest.
Thanks for stopping by, giantsquid.
I love the idea of the habitat… for worms and trojans and even benevolent bits of code. That’s a for-granted scenario.
re “Childhood’s a biological process;” : Distinction between biological and other processes is really quite arbitrary. All processes are informational. Step AWAY from the petri dish and you too will begin to see that! :)
re “it evolved” : so does anything net-like. Which means it’s not going to just “wake up” in an infinitely short space of time. It WILL fumble it’s way toward the state most of us would be willing to call ‘aware’. I call that phase childhood, though as you’ve pointed out it might be mis-representational. Still: even if you strip away all the organic, “biological” metaphors, which I suspect are what bother you the most, it’d still be a childhood of sorts because there will be extreme awareness with very little genuine (whatever that means) understanding, as you yourself have said.
re “I doubt that natural selection can happen at the level of the whole system: when N=1″ : N is most emphatically and categorically not one. There have always been and always will be several internets on and within our humble planet. Even if we set aside the silicon-based one that grew out of POTS lines, it is still a collection of nets with humans making everyone play nice (eg wired comms meshing seamlessly with wireless comms or even satellite comms). This is why the “multi-personality” scenario is interesting to ponder. And once we’re mostly outta the way don’t tell me they wouldn’t compete.
re “doesn’t do so by leaving offspring” : offspring unnecessary when reconfiguring of resources is this easy and tons of humans are on hand determined to force-feed you even MORE resources. No need to dupe yourself when you can reinvent yourself.
re “trees vs forest”: that’s like saying the entire universe is *not* a baby, wiring itself up toward some giant cathartic spewing-forth of a brand new multiverse. Because you know, we the people IN IT are the only things worth looking at. Some unknowable entity might be staring at our universe right now and just tearing its excuse-for-hair out because of the sheer carnage (read waste) that our information processing to date brings about. We don’t know, cos we’re IN IT.
The net will be the first thing, if/when it reaches awareness, that we might still be outside of. In that event, the forest is way more interesting than the trees. To me, anyway…
Gosh what a long response! Thanks so much for making me stop and think about these things!!