Is a 'global superorganism' in our future?

I'm catching up after a week's vacation to places which, I'm happy to report, still don't speak Internet. So pardon for being late to comment, but Kevin Kelly's latest piece, "Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism" is a must read.

(Credit: CNET News)

Kelly's post is nuanced and complex and I hesitate to reduce his thesis to a simple (and simplistic) summary. Suffice it to say, though, he posits the ultimate emergence of a global digital superorganism. His point of departure is the uncontroversial assumption that the sum of the world's connected computational devices creates what essentially is a "superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors."

"I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of subcomputers. The subcomputers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.

But this transformation remains a work in progress. Kelly suggests that the One Machine will pass through four developmental levels, en route from its beginnings as a "plain superorganism" into something approaching consciousness. These phases include:

•  I. A manufactured superorganism

•  II. An autonomous superorganism

•  III. An autonomous smart superorganism

•  IV. An autonomous conscious superorganism

In one respect, his argument reminded me of Ray Kurzweil's writings on how machine intelligence, represented by the totality of information-based technologies, will eventually outnumber human intelligence. The idea being a merger of our biological existence with technology. Here is how Kurzweil puts it in The Singularity is Near:

It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that the human life will be irreversibly transformed...Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains."

"We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence."

There's obviously no small amount of disagreement about the likely direction this will take. Letting your imagination go entirely, one might even construct a science fiction outcome in which the machines take control and snuff out the human race. The apocalyptic finish makes for the flashier headline but I thought Nova Spivack had as good an idea as any I've seen about where this is heading.

"Because humans are the actual witnesses and knowers of what the OM does and thinks, the function of the OM will very likely be to serve and amplify humans, rather than to replace them. It will be a system that is comprised of humans and machines working together, for human benefit, not for machine benefit. This is a very different future outlook than that of people who predict a kind of "Terminator-esque" future in which machines get smart enough to exterminate the human race. It won't happen that way. Machines will very likely not get that smart for a long time, if ever, because they are not going to be conscious. I think we should be much more afraid of humans exterminating humanity than of machines doing it."

Your take?

[Iamkar33m]

Sounds like something out of Terminator. Skynet emerges.

[droid137]

I have had a similar thought. We are making the superorganism smarter by uploading our digital personas via social software and life information management. Digital ghosts of ourselves will be semi-sentient and act on our behalves in the digital organism, while also plugging into the superorganism.

[NewsReader_]

The Matrix has you...

This is not possible. He is basically implying that human beings, more specifically computer scientists, have the same power as God to create consciousness. Or if you do not believe such things, that computer networks will somehow 'evolve'. To both I say hogwash!

[masonx]

I see you offer no basis of support for your decree of impossibility. I suggest the limitations of possibility, reside in your ability or more likely your choice not to imagine how it might happen. It's hard to deny the evolution of our digital memory resources over the last 30 years. If we can find a way not to drown in spam and unsupported and frequently erroneous blog information, it's already possible to see human bionics at work today. We rely more every day on the web for searched information. Paper knowledge is already becoming an archaic artifact. Basic artificial intelligence and consciousness is merely a programing formality at this point.

[micahsb]

Thread is too machine focused. Take humans out of the picture and this superO would be essentially hybernating or dead. It is symbiotic at best.

[Dr_Zinj]

The difference is that biologically, single cellular organisms are self-reproducing. They join together and new properties emerge from the joining that influence them to modify to further support the niches created by the joining.

This doesn't work the same way for computers. No computer is self-reproducing, and they do not modify their hardware on their own. Now there is an argument that humans are computers means of reproduction. Consciousness is unlikely to spontaneously arise in the global internet. On the other hand, we just about have the capability to design the system to create consciousness.

TIme will tell.

[masonx]

You might want to look into 3-D printing technology. I just read recently that it's now possible to have 3-D printers that can print... a functional 3-D printer - and that is mechanical reproduction. Join this technology with an artificial intelligence and you have a mechanical organism also capable of reproduction. The technology has far great significance than this for other purposes, but it gives you an idea of how much further along technology is than we tend to think about.

[smiller987]

Ridiculously bad science fiction. Kelly needs to take some coursework in both biology and computer science, not to mention logic and critical thinking. "Emergent properties" does not mean magic; there are logical connections between the underlying components of a system and the property that emerges. A tornado is an emergent property that arises from particular atmospheric conditions. Other "emergent properties", such as intelligence, cannot arise from a mass of cold air sliding over a mass of warm air. Every aspect of the Internet, including all of the computers that have been attached to it, have been engineered for specific purposes. They will not spontaneously change their behavior to allow for something even vaguely similar to consciousness to arise on the Internet. Yes, the Internet is a large, complex system; but the only possible properties that can, and indeed do, emerge from it, involve the ways in which data flows. The Internet has much more in common with a tornado than a brain.

[masonx]

While the logic of your assertion is clearly correct, you do leave a an interesting exception open to at least low probabilities. If capable enough artificial intelligence is purposely developed by someone and that AI has access to the internet, isn't an expansion of that intelligence like to occur? Wouldn't that be evolution? Isn't intellectual evolution the very likely form to occur by access to the very kinds of technical data stored within the reach of the internet?

[JoeDuck1]

My bet is on the IBM Blue Brain project to bring us the first conscious machine, though I think it's completely reasonable to assert that emergent properties may come from the internet. Note that the human neocortex is not all that complex - rather just massive in terms of connectivity.

Last year I had a chance to ask Marissa Mayer about her predictions and she told me that the algorithmic output to certain questions has an almost human quality, though she did not think that indicated any sort of current intelligence. However she thought that we'd have one within another 15 years or so.