If the brain is a network of neurons and the Internet is a network of nodes, can we develop the Internet to be a brain? Well, evidence suggests the Internet is already a brain and we're in the process of developing it into something larger and more useful.
At least that's basic precept of a book I've been reading this past week, Wired for Thought, written by Jeffrey Stibel, in which he discusses the implications of the evolution of the Internet as a brain -- not as an evil overlord that will one day replace humans, but as a sympathetic, predictive, and well intentioned network designed around the concepts that we carry around in our own brains.
Stibel's premise is that, in the same way that your child's brain drops memories and replaces them with adolescent -- and eventually adult -- ideas, the Internet also creates content and links that it knows it will one day destroy.
And like the brain, Stibel suggests that the Internet must eventually sleep (read: crash), but it will perform better each time it wakes up again. (Guess he's never spent any time in our server room.)
"The Internet may never be 'conscious' in the human sense (and who needs it?), but it will be (and already is) capable of creating a collective consciousness," Stibel says. "This, to a great extent, accounts for the success of the Internet."
I'm fascinated by this and struck by the fact that more work needs to be done to flesh out Stibel's theories. The semantic Web is the next phase of search. Sensor networks help moderate node information. Distributed computing software and parallel processing allow the Internet to pat its head and rub its belly at the same time -- all critical to mimicking the human brain.
So where is this all leading? For CIOs and big-brain thinkers, Stibel's book focuses on business applications and how companies are using their understanding of the Internet's brain-like powers to create competitive advantage -- such as building more effective Websites that predict consumer behavior, leverage social media, and create an even larger, collective consciousness.
Stibel used his own brain power to get prominent CEOs from Nabisco, Bausch & Lomb, Mattel, Pepsi, and EarthLink Inc. (Nasdaq: ELNK) to write gushy blurbs for the book jacket. And it probably doesn't hurt that Stibel himself is president of Web.com and chairman of BrainGate, a brain implant company that allows people to use their thoughts to control electrical devices.
But I think the true lesson in Stibel's book may be a new way for executives to look at their own organizations by treating content, projects, and other internal work product as so much collective thought. We don't really know what happens when an organization "thinks" about itself, at least as Stibel describes that it might. But there would appear to be only benefits there in terms of more efficient processes, improvements in quality, and fewer redundancies -- really no downsides, near as I can tell.
"An intelligent Internet is imminent. It will not resemble a brain, I'm certain, any more than the first airplane flapped its wings like a bird" Stibel writes. "But like an airplane, the intelligence behind the Internet will go faster and farther than what has preceded it on Earth. If we consider that only 66 years after the first flight of the Wright brothers, astronauts set foot on the moon, what does that say for the future of the Internet? The Internet has already given us opportunities that far exceed the impact of flight, but that is nothing compared with what is coming. It's a bit scary, I admit. And if you think that the idea of an intelligent Internet is unsettling, what about one that is self-aware?"
Certainly, all good food for thought.
— Michael Singer, Executive Clan Editor, Internet Evolution. His focus includes executive issues... What's top of mind for CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs?
There are plenty of science fiction stories dating back 20 years or so that involve the analogy of network as brain. Personally, I think it's fitting, and like Mary, believe its completely viable to think the technology we create ourside ourselves mirrors, in some way, our own mental constructs and patterns.
Tim O'Reilly recently had a related article on The 'Web Squared' Era, where he talks about the network having its own sense of sight, hearing, touch, etc. and also makes use of the brain analogy:
Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.
Agreed. Human brains are way superior to any computer brains when it comes to decision making, control, and image process/recognition - that's why we still drive cars ourselves and not using some sort of autopilot. But we don't always base our decisions on logic alone, while computer software would optimize any decision making based precisely on probability or numerical/logical evalution. That's why when there involves a lot of feedback control systems for precision and high reliability, humans would still need assistance from computer logical brains. Intelligent Internet should assist businesses with data analysis, control, optimization, and predictability, but at the end of the day, it'll still be decisions for the businesses (humans) to make.
Nonetheless, there's at least one thing that a bio-based brain and a semiconductor-based brain have in common: they both use electricity signals.
...imagine the brain calculations going on in the outfield as your everyday Little Leaguer tries to catch a ball: you have the ball’s distance, its initial velocity, projection angle, ball spin, air resistance, and wind turbulence, not to mention the uneven terrain in left field—and any other thoughts migrating through the outfielder’s mind (pizza, girls, texting)—to contend with and possibly gum up the works. How in the world can the brain make all these calculations simultaneously and speedily? There is no assemblage of computers—not even the hundreds of thousands of computers linked in parallel in a thunder cloud of mechanical intelligence—that could maneuver the mitt to capture that sphere of torn horsehide.
If businesses are going to understand and give customers what they want, it might do them good to design the Internet into a predictive, esoteric computatoin system.
Besides, does the Internet collective need to act exactly like the human brain? No. But using intelligent designs, predictive software, and a dash of crowd-sourcing, and you might not need a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
"And like the brain, Stibel suggests that the Internet must eventually sleep..." - Must it dream too?, cuz that's how a human brain rearranges memories...
Any computer (CPU+memory+software) is a brain, a semiconductor-based brain. Even a calculator is some sort of brain. Obviously, it's not the same as a human or animal brain that's bio-based. They just work differently. Although a calculator CPU is no where near as complex and sophisticated as a human brain, it can process a computation of large numbers much more accurately and quickly than a brain of a normal person can. Yet, there're supercomputers at petaflops speed that can run simulations to predict the behavior of complex bio systems or model the evolution of the universe, but they can't "think" for themselves, "grow" as they learn, or "manage" their momeries like human brains can.
The Internet is a network of computers or a network of semiconductor-based brains, and so technically it's also a brain. Will the Internet ever become human-like intelligent? Probably not, but it will certainly continue to give us certain smart capabilities to better process/manage a massive amount of information.
Hi hounhosp. This is a subject we addressed in a previous blog piece. the Cagle article you reference is very long and explores all different angles, positive, negative, and neutral. It ends on quite a positive note:
A final thought in an overlong essay - psychologists, especially those that have developed a fairly conservative model of the brain, have pushed the notion of information overload - we are pushing our brains to accept too much information too quickly, and these stresses are affecting all of us. Much of this is due to the fact that for many people over the age of forty, the coping mechanisms of the brain to this stress can only erect a fairly crude barrier. Children, with far more malleable brains, are essentially developing their own mechanisms for handling information management, mechanisms that are still largely hidden to those of us who are older.
The greatest danger that these children face is that well meaning psychologists and educators will label these mechanisms as aberrations, and will try to "correct" them back to a model that no longer really works. We must, we must, accept the fact that we are undergoing a decades long transition that is in its own way as profound to the human psyche as the introduction of writing was five thousand years ago, and rather than condemning the new waves of media we should accept that these represent our own future and make the effort to become proficient in them as fully as possible.
"if the Internet is indeed a pathway to a collective consciousness, we've got to ensure that it proceeds constructively."
Mary, some think that when the internet is getting smarter, in contrary it is having a negative effect on human brain. In his post As the Internet Rewires our BrainKurt Cagle rather said that "the Internet itself is stunting our mental growth, is turning us into idiot savants, Aspergers and reverting our brains to a more primitive state." With the internet our brain is being rewired negatively.
I don't read books about the Internet because the terms "book" and "Internet" seem sort of counter-intuitive to me. But this one appears to be vaguely interesting.
However, it sounds like the author ends up really doing back flips to justify his point. I’m not sure he needs to, or that the brain analogy is really accurate.
He's missing a lot of technologies which will make the Internet "smarter" in the human sense of the word (or maybe he isn't, but you just didn't mention them in your review?).
A likely future could well comprise a whole bunch of really “out there” future techs, such as predictive analytics, neural networks, collective intelligence, AI, all sitting out on a cloud complex (made by IBM, natch!) somewhere, sucking in huge volumes of info about everyone on the internet and everything that they are up to.
Such an Internet would start to attain a level of intelligence in terms of interpreting data about people are doing online that requires no human level of intervention. And the end result of that would be… well, no-one knows what the ramifications could be.
In other words, the network knows. And the network is smarter than we are. And that’s a little scary.
But it’s not really like a brain.
Thinks: maybe I should write my own book about this stuff.
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