There are only 7 billion people on the planet, even if all of them gained internet access that would still be fewer than 13 billion. In this case, instead of looking at the exponential graph, consider where it needs to level off.
People are a lot more complicated than neurons, and it’s not just people that are connected to the internet—there are many devices acting autonomously with varying levels of sophistication, and both the number of people and the number of internet connected devices are increasing.
If the question is “are there points in superhuman mind-space that could be implemented on the infrastructure of the internet roughly as it exists” my guess would be, yes.
[T]here’s no selection pressure or other effect to cause people on the internet to self-organize into some sort of large brain.
This, I think, is key, and devastating. The chances that we’ve found any such point in mind-space without any means of searching are (I would guess) infinitesimal.
Maybe if everyone played a special game where you had to pretend to be a neuron and pass signals accordingly you could maybe get something like that.
Unless the game were carefully designed to simulate an existing brain (or one designed by other means) I don’t see why restricting the scope of interaction between nodes is likely to help.
People are a lot more complicated than neurons, and it’s not just people that are connected to the internet—there are many devices acting autonomously with varying levels of sophistication, and both the number of people and the number of internet connected devices are increasing.
FYI …A recent study by Cysco (I think) says something like:
The internet is currently around 5 million terabytes with 75 million servers world wide. On average, one billion people use the internet per week. Internet use consumes enough information per hour to fill 7 million DVDs and growing, so an internet AI would need the capabilities of handling 966 exabytes of information by 2015.
An Exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Every word ever spoken by human beings could be stored in 5 exabytes.
Counting smart phones, robotic arms, cameras, GPS systems, clocks, home security systems, personal computers, satellites, cars, parking meters, ATMs, and everything else, there are more things connected to the internet than there are human beings on the planet. In a few years there will be over 50 billion with enough possible internet connections for 100 connections for each atom comprising the surface of the earth.
Unless the game were carefully designed to simulate an existing brain (or one designed by other means) I don’t see why restricting the scope of interaction between nodes is likely to help.
That was essentially what I had in mind. Of course, getting that detailed a map of a brain would by itself already be way beyond what we have today.
People are a lot more complicated than neurons, and it’s not just people that are connected to the internet—there are many devices acting autonomously with varying levels of sophistication, and both the number of people and the number of internet connected devices are increasing.
If the question is “are there points in superhuman mind-space that could be implemented on the infrastructure of the internet roughly as it exists” my guess would be, yes.
This, I think, is key, and devastating. The chances that we’ve found any such point in mind-space without any means of searching are (I would guess) infinitesimal.
Unless the game were carefully designed to simulate an existing brain (or one designed by other means) I don’t see why restricting the scope of interaction between nodes is likely to help.
FYI …A recent study by Cysco (I think) says something like:
The internet is currently around 5 million terabytes with 75 million servers world wide. On average, one billion people use the internet per week. Internet use consumes enough information per hour to fill 7 million DVDs and growing, so an internet AI would need the capabilities of handling 966 exabytes of information by 2015.
An Exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Every word ever spoken by human beings could be stored in 5 exabytes.
Counting smart phones, robotic arms, cameras, GPS systems, clocks, home security systems, personal computers, satellites, cars, parking meters, ATMs, and everything else, there are more things connected to the internet than there are human beings on the planet. In a few years there will be over 50 billion with enough possible internet connections for 100 connections for each atom comprising the surface of the earth.
That was essentially what I had in mind. Of course, getting that detailed a map of a brain would by itself already be way beyond what we have today.