This is precisely, I suggest, what those of us who are alive and young today are going to have the opportunity to experience: the birth of an entirely new kind of intelligent organism, a global Web mind. The Internet as it exists today is merely the larval form of something immensely more original and exciting.
The Net as it exists today is comparable, I suggest, to the mind of a very young child—a child who has not yet learned to think for herself, or even to distinguish herself from the outside world. What we will see over the next couple decades is the growth and maturity of this infantile mind into a full-fledged, largely autonomous, globally distributed intelligent system.
The Net itself will become a global intelligent system—a World Wide Brain.
Most if not all humans will be drawn into the Web mind itself, and the Web mind will become a kind of collective human/digital entity.
We will be incorporating ourselves into an “alien” intelligence of our own creation; and we will be partially synthesizing ourselves with other humans, rather than merely downloading our individual human selves into a digital world.
The idea of a global Web mind is well grounded in contemporary complexity science cybernetics and cognitive science. And furthermore, it is a natural extension of current Web technology.
The change which is about to come upon us as a consequence of the emergence of the global Web mind will be a very large one—comparable in scope, I believe, to the emergence of tools, or language, or civilization. What will distinguish this change from these past ones, however, is its speed. In this sense, those of us who are alive and young today are very fortunate. We will be the first human generation ever to witness a major change in collective humanity with a time span the order of magnitude of a single human lifetime.
The global Web mind may be only part of a move toward a “global brain” that literally incorporates all of humanity. This is a fascinating question, which gives rise to fascinating questions such as “Will the global brain be sane or insane?”, and which ultimately leads on to the spiritual implications of global intelligence.
The emergence of the global Web mind will, I believe, mark a significant turning-point in the history of intelligence on Earth. On a less cosmic level, it will obviously also play an important role in the specific area of computing. It will bring together two strands in computer science that have hitherto been mostly separate: artificial intelligence and networking. As we watch the initial stages of the global Web mind emerge, the interplay between the Net and AI will be intricate, subtle and beautiful. In the global Web mind, both networking and artificial intelligence reach their ultimate goals.
The WWW will be transformed from a “global book” into a massively parallel, self-organizing software program of unprecented size and complexity.
The global Web mind is what happens when the diverse population of programs and agents making up the Active Web locks into an overall, self-organizing pattern—into a structured strange attractor, displaying emergent memory and thought-oriented structures and dynamics not directly programmed into any of its parts.
The WWW has the potential to transform the world’s collective computer power into a massive, distributed AI supercomputer.
What one needs in order to understand the incipient global Web mind, I suggest, is a good, solid general theory of mind—a theory of mind that goes beyond the specifics of human brains and serial computers, and explains the fundamental structures and dynamics of mind in a way that does not depend on any particular physical substrate.
By what mathematical and conceptual principles are minds, in general, structured? How, if one were given a sufficiently powerful computer, would one go about programming a highly intelligent mind?
Mind is mathematical. The stuff of mind, in other words, is abstract pattern. Mind is not made of matter, it is made of abstract forms, or, considered dynamically, abstract processes. Forms and processes can be realized by physical systems, such as brains or computers, but that doesn’t make these brains or computers minds. This implies that a virtual mind is just as good as a physical mind. Psychology, in the abstract, should apply just as well to digital systems as to biological systems.
The patterns of the mind form from the synergetic activities of a group of inter-transforming, pattern-recognizing agents.
What appears to be definitely there is actually a dynamic process, dying and then regenerating itself every instant. Being is generated out of Becoming.
When we focus our attention on something, attaining a peak of consciousness, we are sending information rapidly around in circuits from our cognitive centers to our perceptual centers. In the process we are making vaguely constructed percepts or concepts more definite, more crisp, more concrete—more real.
In a mind, there is no room for “deadwood”; everything must be allowed to act, to contribute its own localized intelligence and subjective perspective to the emergent parallel intelligence of the whole.
The question of whether digital systems can be conscious is a useless one. One can, however, talk about different systems deploying their consciousness in different ways; and one of the ways intelligent systems deploy their consciousness is by focusing it on specific things, i.e. by attention.
Randomness and creativity conspire to create rigid structures: consciousness creates subjective reality!
If the Web is to become a mind, the components of the Web must be made autonomous pattern-recognition agents, with the ability to transform one another.
What starts out with clever search engines and webservers, may end up with something truly cosmic and amazing—a new phase in the evolution of life and intelligence.
A WebMind system would be an independent intelligent entity on its own, interacting with humans, but fundamentally separate from them. This is what I call Phase One of the global Web mind; and it will be, in itself, an incredibly exciting development. It will be our first opportunity ever to interact with an highly intelligent nonhuman being. And it will be an opportunity to understand ourselves more deeply, by seeing the subtle patterns of our own collective mind come to life.
We humans are on a nearly irreversible course toward digital existence.
When there is enough total awareness in the overall system of humanity, humanity itself will lock into a new system of organization, and will become an autonomous, self-steering, brain-like system.
Perhaps the Web was simply the medium which society was using to re-mold itself as an intelligent, autonomous system.
If a global Web mind comes about, it will clearly link humans together in a new way, leading to some kind of different and more intelligently structured social order.
Humans eventually will fuse physically with the Web, bringing the Web mind and the societal mind together in a very powerful way.
Currently humans are whole systems, with their own autonomy and intelligence, and human societies display a far lesser degree of organization and self-steering behavior. But, according to Turchin, a transition is coming, and in the future there will be more and more intelligent memory, perception and action taking place on the level of society as a whole.
The Web will become more self-organizing, more complex, and eventually the greater intelligence of its parts will lead to a greater intelligence of the whole. Human beings will be drawn into the Web intelligence one way or another, either by mind-downloading or virtual reality, or simply by continual interaction with Web-brain-savvy technology. In this way, human society will begin to act in a more structured way.
The global brain will have deep, positive, profound human meaning, and will provide a way of bridging the gaps between human beings and fusing us into a collective awareness—something that spiritual traditions have been working on for a long time. From this point of view, direct brain-computer links should not be viewed as tools for escape from human reality, but rather as gateways to deeper connection with other human beings.
I have long been fascinated by the striking parallels between human society and cancer. Cancers have lost their relationship to the whole, and function at the expense of the organism—which is insane, since a successful cancer destroys its own host. This is what we appear to be doing, and very rapidly.
A major calamity will happen to humanity as a result of the militant individualism.
Saying that humans are “individualistic” is the same as saying that humans represent the “top level” of a hierarchy of systems. An individualistic system is just one that has more freedom than the systems within it, or the systems that it is contained in. Cells within individual organisms are individualistic only to a limited extent; they are behaving within the constraints of the organism. Cells that make up single-celled organisms, on the other hand, are far more individualistic: they have more freedom than the systems of which they are parts.
The interesting thing about the ambiguous value of technological innovations is how little it seems to matter, in practical terms. Progress, it seems, can never be resisted; and once it has been made, it can never be permanently retracted. These are heuristic laws of cultural development, to which we have seen no major exceptions in human history so far. There is an ebb and flow to human affairs, but there is also, in the long term, a powerful overall movement toward greater social complexity and greater technological and intellectual sophistication.
The intelligent mind is always striving out in all possible directions, and as soon as a new direction becomes apparent—be it computers, civilization or the global brain—the intelligent mind will seek it out.
What this philosophy is doing, I believe, is merely positing the universe itself as an intelligent system.
A collective, electric mental organism, transcending the boundaries between individuals and the boundary between mind and body.
The global Web mind will, I suggest, fulfill Jung’s philosophy in a striking and unexpected way: it will be a digital collective unconscious for the human race. For after all, the memory of the global Web mind is the vast body of humanly-created Web pages, which is a fair representation of the overall field of human thought, knowledge and feeling.
We are on the very wonderful course of using engineering and science to fulfill our deepest philosophical, spiritual longings.
The Web of today may seem a long way off from these wild futuristic projections. I believe, however, that the difference is no greater than the difference between a newborn baby and an adult, or the difference between a Model T Ford and a late-model Ferrari. What we are seeing today is not a perfected, stable system, but a sophisticated, incredibly intelligent system in the process of being born. And thus this is a time of incredible excitement and incredible opportunity.
Those of us who simply use the Web must understand its ceaseless changes and fluctuations for what they are: manifestations of the expansion and world-exploration of a living, growing organism.