Artificial Intelligence inevitable with the World Wide Web?

[sgietz]

I once heard a theory that the massive amounts of data and information that is interconnected, could cause the Web to eventually develop some primitive form of intelligence, and perhaps later evolve into higher states.

Raw computing power is nowhere near our brain's abilities, but it is consistently growing. I think we will see a quantum leap in computing in the next decade or so, and coupled with the first idea, it's feasible that AI could suddenly spring up, as opposed to being intentionally developed in a lab.

This is highly speculative and only hypothetical, but I have an open mind for such abstract ideas.

What are your feelings on the matter?

[mattur]

The Googlenet system goes online on August 4th, 2009. Human decisions are removed from Google. Googlenet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th 2009. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...

Fortunately, at this point it discovers a blog post arguing <strong> and <b> are actually equivalent, and goes into an infinite loop of self-contradictory semantic assertions.

The engineers shrug and leave it alone. A few years later they return to find it's adopted XHTML2, launched a MFA network and is now using its entire processing capacity to continuously monitor its Adsense clicks, occasionally pausing only to email TimBL bizarre questions about <em> tags.

[Gibble]

I believe there is a scifi series of books with this as the premise.

edit: Ender's Game is what I was thinking of

[edited by: Gibble at 7:25 pm (utc) on May 29, 2009]

[rocknbil]

Or Terminator, Skynet. :-)

[Gibble]

But that AI was created...and happened to become self aware. I believe in Ender's Game if my source informed me correctly it was random.

[edited by: Gibble at 9:32 pm (utc) on May 29, 2009]

[graeme_p]

Yes, the AI in Enders Game was not deliberately created. Its existence was secret for centuries (it only revealed itself to Ender).

It also differed from Skynet etc. in being benevolent.

[Gibble]

I've got to read that series...haven't gotten to it yet, sounds quite interesting from what I've heard

[jecasc]

I feel that this idea is completely nonsense. The web won't become self aware just as a public library does not become self aware because of the book on its shelves.

Uploading an HTML file on the web or a video on youtube is like putting a book or DVD on a shelf. The only difference is that the access to the HTML file or video is made easier by hyperlinks.

[SteveWh]

I agree with jecasc that a mass of data, even if it's linked together, doesn't lead to the emergence of intelligence, and I especially like the library analogy.

Viewed from a slightly different perspective, though, the web certainly is an evolving ecosystem in which website "species" are also evolving as a result of individual sites (mutations) surviving or not, depending on whether or not they are successful at doing whatever they were created to do.

Some criteria that seem to determine whether websites survive or not are a) whether they make money, b) whether they attract enough visitors to keep the webmaster interested in the project.

So in a sense the web is learning how to pull money into itself and how to draw people into it, because websites that do those things well survive and those that don't, don't. Thus the overall population of websites, the web, is learning how to do those things better.

[edited by: SteveWh at 9:36 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]

[Shaddows]

That sounds like memetic [en.wikipedia.org] evolution.

Most concepts of intelligence require self-awareness. Perhaps intelligence will emerge when spiders/scrapers start automating the successful-site-identifiction process.

MFA scrapers- the leading edge of interet AI.

BTW, I agree w/ jecasc. No change of emergant AI from the web. AI requires decisions, not information storage. If only there was a "decision engine" on the web, scraping sites...

[Gibble]

Arguing that artificial life can't be created from raw information is rather shortsighted. I agree, it's very unlikely. But then, so is the entire idea of life spontaneously starting from a combination of elements...yet here we are.

[Shaddows]

Yes, but information is static. There's no process to give rise to anything.

Elements react. It's dynamic. Processes can give unexpected results.

[sgietz]

We're all more than the sum of our parts. Who knows what constitutes intelligence. If it's just a certain amount of information, pathways, signals, and a way for it all to communicate, then a massive, gigantic network fits the criteria. The research into the idea of "six degrees of separation" is fascinating in this regard and sheds some light on these questions.

The idea should not be dismissed out of hand.

[rj87uk]

Nice idea we just need a program that can "learn" and who knows!