The Internet as it exists today is just a little baby. But it’s on the verge of a fundamental transition. Today it’s a distributed network of content and software, serving diverse people diverse functions. Soon enough it will be a self-organizing intelligent system, with its own high-level coherent patterns, serving not only as a mind but as a world inhabited by a diversity of digital life forms.
Our understanding of the collective dynamics of the human race will be greatly enhanced by interaction with AI systems linked in to the collective data resources of the Internet.
The Internet today contains all the computational firepower needed to create a global distributed intelligent system, surpassing human intelligence in many ways, serving as both a mind and a world for digital organisms.
The Internet will become a mind in itself.
The Internet, and the computing environment in general, is poised for the advent of real artificial intelligence. What is needed to make it happen is understanding on the part of the technical community—understanding of how the network of mind emerges from the underlying network of computers.
We will see this Internet AI network gradually wend itself further and further into human affairs, yielding, eventually, another Metasystem Transition, involving the emergence of a synergetic, symbiotic global intelligent system, incorporating machine and human intelligence into a single continuum of thought—a human–digital (and hopefully a human–digital–ecological) global brain.
The evolution of humanity will fuse with the evolution of the global Web.
The sequence of changes which is about to come upon us as a consequence of the emergence of the intelligence Internet will be a very large one—comparable in scope, I believe, to the emergence of tools, or language, or civilization. Ultimately, the emergence of the global brain will transcend any of these past transitions in significance, because it will lead to the obsolescence of the human race as we know it, and indeed of life as we know it, in favor of a new and more flexible and powerful order of being.
We will be the first human generation ever to witness a major change in collective humanity with a time span the order of magnitude of a single human lifetime.
An advanced, self-organizing AI system, spanning tens of thousands of intranets and tens of millions of home computers worldwide. An independent intelligent entity on its own, interacting with humans, and incorporating human workflow and question-asking and -answering behavior into its own intelligent dynamics, weaving the process of collective social inquiry and individual human inquiry into a digital fabric of a texture guided by its own processes of intelligent self-organization.