Abstract
This chapter presents a future scenario where the Internet develops into an autonomous ‘brain.’ That brain could emerge as one of four types: (1) a globe-spanning encyclopedia, an otherwise inert collection of all of the world’s information that responds to our queries, (2) a network of the ‘best brains,’ allowing us to query a topic or problem and solving it through a kind of collective human intelligence, 3) a system driven by algorithms acting upon mountains of data that feeds back ideas and suggestions to us, the system being designed to ‘nudge’ us into action, and (4) a fully conscious and autonomous intelligence, possibly in competition with the biological brain.
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Notes
Nicholas Carr, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ The Atlantic, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/; The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
Carr discusses the vision of a global library, and also the legal and technical issues of building one, in ‘The Library of Utopia,’ MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/427628/the-library-of-utopia/
See also Peter Singer, ‘Whither the dream of the universal library?’ The Guardian, April 19, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/19/moral-imperative-create-universal-library On the long and problematic history of the idea of a Universal Library,
see Ken Hillis, Michael Petit and Kylie Jarrett, Google and the Culture of Search (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77–104.
H.G. Wells, World Brain (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1938), 69–70. ‘A world Encyclopedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. It would be in continual correspondence with every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialized editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. This Encyclopedia organization need not be concentrated in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically. Quite possibly it might to a large extent be duplicated. It is its files and its conference rooms which would be the core of its being, the essential Encyclopedia. It would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain.’
Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think,’ The Atlantic, July 1, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Caroline S. Wagner, The New Invisible College: Science for Development (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 2. ‘Self-organizing networks that span the globe are the most notable feature of science today. These networks constitute an invisible college of researchers who collaborate not because they are told to but because they want to, who work together not because they share a laboratory or even a discipline but because they can offer each other complementary insight, knowledge, or skills.’
Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 91.
Jeffrey Stibel, Wired for Thought: How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), ii–xiii.
Clive Thompson, ‘A Sense of Place,’ Wired, February 2013, 34.
On the idea of a kitchen with ‘ambient intelligence,’ see Donald Norman, The Design of Future Things (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 28–31.
On the implications of such networking for medicine and health care, see Eric Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi observes that, because we are able to capture more and more of the data that we collectively produce every day, we will very soon be able to uncover the underlying patterns in human behavior such that we will be able to predict (and control?) that behavior. See Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (New York: Dutton, 2010).
Brian David Johnson, ‘The Secret Life of Data in the Year 2020,’ The Futurist, July-August 2012, 21. ‘With the massive amount of sensors we have littering our lives and landscapes, we’ll have information spewing from everywhere. Our cars, our buildings, and even our bodies will expel an exhaust of data, information, and is and os at an incredible volume:
Jeffrey J. Selingo, College (Un) Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students (Boston: New Harvest, 2013), 82.
Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (New York: Random House, 2013), 44.
In 2002, Ben Goertzel wrote that ‘The Internet as it is today is just a little baby. But it’s on the verge of a fundamental transition. Today it’s a distributed network of content and software, serving diverse people diverse functions. Soon enough it will be a self-organizing intelligent system, with its own high-level coherent patterns, serving not only as a mind but as a world inhabited by a diversity of digital life forms.’ (ix) See Creating Internet Intelligence: Wild Computing, Distributed Digital Consciousness, and the Emerging Global Brain (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002).
Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking, 2012), 5–6.
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005), 8.
An interesting meditation on this idea is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
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Staley, D.J. (2014). Query. In: Brain, Mind and Internet: A Deep History and Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460950_3
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