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Does the name Francis Heylighen ring a bell? Didn't think so. But the research professor at the Free University of Brussels has some interesting things to say about artificial intelligence and consciousness in regards to the Internet. Speaking with New Scientist, Heylighen says that "adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than [it is] a jump to a wholly different level," suggesting that consciousness is simply the brain's ability to prioritize mental resources on the fly. And if you think about it, he makes a good point.
Each and every day that we're online, we have some sort of general interaction with an artificial mind, however basic it may be. Even Googling a term brings up thousands of possible links related to a search query, all without direct human interaction (though the search algorithm is, of course, human-generated). Heylighen points to the challenge, though, of making the Internet truly self-aware and able to address its own needs and deficiencies -- learning, so to speak, autonomously. Heylighen notes that, if the effort to bring the Net to life progresses as has the development of social networks, we could see a baby Skynet within 10 years. [From: New Scientist]
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Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsSimonMay 27th 2010 9:03AM
I knew it!!! lol
scottbaltes7Jul 10th 2011 2:56PM
A soup of algorithms is much more efficient than a bathtub full of amino acids. The singularity is coming. When artificial intelligence surpasses our own intellect there's no telling what the outcome will be. There is no formula for predicting the probabilities. Were on a one way trip down the rabbit hole.
SkylerAug 13th 2011 12:35AM
Self awareness came to be as a result of natural selection. Billions of primates lived and died before some began to become aware of themselves and think bigger. The internet does not experience natural selection in the same way. It is not entirely replaced with several different competing small Internets, but instead people, organizations and websites compete for traffic, and all kinds of other human activities that have been happening for hundreds of years are simply taking place online. It will never face the kind of natural selection pre-human primates did. More and more software will be written and it will become increasingly automated, but it will never be a thinking being.