Artificial Intelligence & The Web
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Overview
The Internet has been around for many decades but was not fully recognized by the public until the 1990s. Since, the realization of the Web from the early 90s, it has continuously grown in size, roughly doubling itself every couple of years. Some, like John Gage, believe that the Internet is only currently in a primitive form and that in the next decade it has the potential to evolve and become a “brain”.
Primitive Form
In the article, We Are the Web, the Web is coined off as the “Machine” in its primitive form. The article also gives many facts that compare the Web or Machine to an early PC. The article states that the Machine processes 1 million emails per second, which is the equivalent to the email network running at 1 megahertz. Using this comparison, IM runs at 100 kilohertz, and SMS at 1 kilohertz. Its RAM is approximately 200 terabytes, generates about 20 exabytes of data and is distributed over roughly 1 billion PCs, which is around the amount of transistors found in a PC.
The Brain Metaphor
"We Are the Web" also states that the Web is like the human brain. The various similarities include the Web and the brain having hundreds of billions of neurons (Web pages), each of these neurons are connected to one another by synaptic links to thousands of other neurons. This is reference back to Web pages having dozens of hyperlinks that lead you to other Web pages. It states that computes into a trillion “synapses” and while the brain has around 100 times more than that amount, it is not doubling itself in size every couple of years…the Machine is.
Visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet
What does this mean?
All of this comes down to artificial intelligence experts putting their money on the Net being the first computer to be able to think on its own. Through the Net constantly growing at an exceedingly fast rate from its primitive form and being more connected to everything like products with fiber optics, environmental sensors, satellites, etc. will this Machine begin to learn on its own. Experts suggest that within the next 10 years, the Machine will evolve into an Anticipation Machine predicting and avoiding disturbances in lines ahead of time, weeding out viruses, spam and the like right as they are launched and common things that we do today will become routine for the Machine to do. Experts say that this is possible because of one major factor that contributes to the Web being able to learn and that is that it has not been shut off for nearly 15 years. Most computers crash if they are left on for too long but the Internet has been constantly running without interruption for so long that it is only a matter of time before it starts to think on its own.
References
We Are the Web by Kevin Kelley, Wired, August 2005
The Internet Wikipedia