Unknown internet 2: Could the net become self-aware?
It is easy to draw parallels between the human brain and the internet’s complex network of nodes, so could conciousness be the next step? Read more: Eight things you didn’t know about the internet Yes, if we play our cards right – or wrong, depending on your perspective. In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet’s complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It might already have a degree of consciousness”. Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechan
