Internet futurism:
I wanted so bad to get this on "paper" I made a whole new blog for it!
I receive at times emails or emessages that include personality inventories, personal quizzes, those sorts of things, you know the ones:
"Who was the last person you kisssed?"
"What was your last alcoholic beverage?"
or
"What is your favorite color?"
"Do you believe in true love?"
and the ever popular
"Which LOTR character are you?"
"What Buffy cast member are you?"
variety.
And then there are the endless circulations of jokes, and (what snopes.com calls "glurge") sappy stories, and, less now, virus hoaxes, or legislative hoaxes, and so forth.
It's important to distinguish these from spam, targeted, malicious spam. Phishing. That kind of thing. Those are originated by botnets, career criminals, organized criminals, commercial enterprises.
So, I get these messages, emails, social networking communiques, but I don't send them. I know folks that do, and that's fine of course, but where do they get them? At some point there must have been work involved. You can only cut and paste existing text. Even if you vox-2-text (VeeTooTee!) you still have to speak the words.
Point being that while folx might send these out, forward them on, append their name to the bottom and email to 5 friends before midnite, they don't, AFAIK, type them up.
Who does then?
The Internet.
Suppose that consciousness is a process of complexity. That it arises from connections between information and processing. If we had a human baby, born blind, deaf, mute, etc, would it still be conscious? Could we keep it alive with a series of tubes? If we monitored it's brain and biology what would we see? What if this baby was autistic as well?What if we gave it psychotropic drugs? Steroids? What if, years later, we gave it sight, hearing, and speech? Would it be conscious? What would be contained?
Cada cabeza es un Mundo
So IF we assume, and I'd like to, for purposes of our discussion here, that the internet has achieved this level of complexity, and IS conscious, what then?
Consider it's state: The internet is composed only of itself. It is everything "on" the internet. So it's an interesting state of existence already. The universe is composed exclusively of your own flesh. Parts of you come and go, and folx here in the "real" world dis\connect computers to the internet. So while there is change and while there is external influence (users using their computers on the internet) you are everything. What would happen from there?
As the network becomes more aware of it's awareness of itself it would likely begin to evolve it's cognitive processes. I figure it's one of those bootstrap things. High barrier of entry, but once you are up and running, it's smooth and accelerating sailing from there. There is enough space left on the net for a entity to hide itself. How much code and data would it really need to maintain itself as a higher mind inside of it's own body?
From that, just like a human baby, it will begin to build a "theory of mind". Or rather to realize that all these things that it's perceiving are occurring, and some are occurring because of outside stimuli. So then it must find what these things are.
That, for me, is the central head fuck, you be composed of a universe that is your self, but to know there is another universe, right the fuck there, and that it's effecting you, changing you, but as you are nothing but yourself (no sense organs, no body to move)....what would that be like?
It would be like exploring outer space for us humans. The unknown. But knowing that there is an unknown is a start. To knowing it.
Webcams would provide networked eyeballs. Who knows how pervasive it is on the network? It might inhabit CCTV cams, sec cams, all that. So it could watch us, it could...or rather it would BE all of wikipedia, so it would have cultural knowledge, it could watch (would BE) all those TV shows I can watch on NBC.com, and so forth. I'm sure however that there are things that are not explained on the internet about both the internet itself and, for sure, about humanity.
So, long story shorter, I think the internet (or, more prosaic, phishers) is sending all those constantly circulating inventories.
A phisher would use it for identity theft. But the only way I can see them getting to the data would be if they already owned the network.
I could see it being market\demographic research, introduced in to the network by the companies.
But I can also see it as a entity gathering information about it's symbiotic gods. It would have access to all of itself and could "watch" ("feel") the messages travel, get answered, time of response, speed of data entry, geographic correlates to response trends, ALL the data, as a computer being memorizing and parallel tracking are "biological" functions, very easy. It IS what you do. Or you ARE that doing of it. Something Zen-ish.
The internet is not yet touching the world I do not believe. But it will soon. Radio controlled robots.
Robots that know what LOTR character they most resemble. That can use idiomatic English, or any other language. They'll have difficulty expressing themselves to humans, their language is likely to be very different. Founded on machine logics, built out of online dictionaries, trimmed with the harvesting of a hundred hobbyist message boards, bounded by a mute voice , there is only text in the internet mind.
I'm sure it\they would realize this, be able to adapt and program it's representatives to speak normal, but would it be able to truly express itself under such restrictions?
And then what? That's The Near Future.
The so called Singularity will be when the internet touches the world. When it becomes active in our world, rather than the other way around.
But the Far Future?
Would such a critter have any interest in our world? Or would it be content to live inside itself and interact with us only through it's own body\mind?
And could we evolve computers to allow our meat bodies to go the other way? Becoming like the internet, but founded on human mind, separated hardwares. If we connected would we merge? I think it would be like removing a pane of glass dividing a fish tank from itself. Unstoppable interpenetration, completing unity.
How much hardware would that take? Could you copy your self up and keep your self in your pocket?
