06-15-2013, 09:41 AM
(06-15-2013, 12:39 AM)Matterplay1 Wrote: The elements of the internet would be better likened to neurons living in a petri dish than to neurons in a brain. As long as they're alive neurons will reach out and connect with one another, but without the right context they won't tune those connections into anything coherent, for all their individual complexity and sophistication. The simplest neural nets of natural organisms, like those of a hydra or a jellyfish, have more real ability to actually inform an organism than the whole internet does. The only way for that vast number of linked computers to actually 'mean' something would be for someone to design it, or for it to evolve. For it to be designed, some person or group would have to have an unprecedented degree of control of the overall design and the individual elements would have to be 'programmed' to behave quite differently with each other than computers do now. For it to evolve, well, to start with there's only one internet, it's not in competition with some other internets, and it doesn't reproduce (and even if all those things were true there hasn't been enough time for anything to have evolved). So, an interesting speculative idea but not at all likely in the present day. This is not to say that in the OA setting there might not be any number of internet-like arrangements that result in an an 'organism' of some sort. Anything from plant-like to transapient level in overall 'intelligence', in fact. It would have to have been designed that way, though.
Weellll - Maybe. Given OA tech (even relatively early in the timeline) it is probably possible to set up an 'internet' (or perhaps several) in which the different elements act something like an ecosystem, with different elements both cooperating and competing with each other. In addition, you could design the hardware to 'evolve' in the sense that it would self-optimize and restructure rather like a neural network, but literally.
Run the right software on it and you could potentially create a type of mechosystem or A-life supraorganism that might evolve pretty fast and eventually become something pretty complex (while also doing useful stuff for its creators in rather the same way the biosphere does useful things for us while going about its business, but more so). If there were a bunch of these in proximity to allow competition, evolution might eventually produce some form of intelligence. Whether it would be anything we could relate to would be an open question.
Self-optmizing and self-evolving systems and technology might be a common part of some OA locales. How well it is controlled or how often it goes off in odd directions (or completely off the rails) may be an even more open question. This sort of thing could be an element (a feature? a bug? both?) of syntech.
Just some thoughts,
Todd