Unknown internet 2: Could the net become self-aware?

• 30 April 2009 by Michael Brooks
• Magazine issue 2706. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

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 mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn't be something to fear, says Goertzel: "The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops."

Heylighen agrees, but warns that we might find it a little disappointing. "We probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially," he says.

And when might this begin? According to Heylighen, it all depends on internet fashion trends. If the effort that has gone into developing social networking sites goes into developing internet consciousness, it could happen within a decade, he says.