Global superorganism
27/10/08 21:40 Filed in: Media
I came
across this
very
detailed and fascinating article which parallels
some of my own thoughts/ideas.
There is a lot to read in this
post, and I’ve not got to the end of it, but
I thought I’d post a few of my own ideas along
this line.
The idea that a big enough network could become sentient is a theme that pops up again and again in my story ideas. Three of those ideas have made it to a complete story, my first completed story, Datascape, and the two stories which are part of the whole 4912 project, The Monastery and The Basement. I have or rather had big plans for the whole 4912 project, but those plans have been scaled down a bit of late, it was going to be a whole series of stories and linked alternate reality game, but now it’s just going to be an epic saga (I hope!)
I’m not going to say to much more about the idea, because 1 I’m still working on it and 2 thats not what this post is about, but I can tell you that the stories will feature such elements as the a world wide conspiracy, Darkling war, the martian military and civilian governments, the A.S.C and the Beckman Institute.
Anyway back to this post.
I think the first time I came across the idea of a network becoming a sentient entity was in a book about fractals and chaos, I can’t remember the title now, but it talked of how random noise in telephone networks could suddenly and spontaneously create ‘ghost’ calls that where never dialed by anybody. This book predated the wide spread popularization of the internet just, I think.
Anyway if some sort computational power is added to the nodes of the network, just as we have now, things become much more interesting.
I did think that this idea of some sort of emergent intelligence could be a plot idea in the second and third matrix films, that was I think before I did wrote this post (wow thats going back, my 6th post!) Maybe that idea might of helped those to films, maybe not. Anyway the idea I had was that the conflict in the network between the humans and the machines was actually causing the entity in the network to emerge and that it would have been this god like entity with almost total power over the network (it would after all be the network).
Anyway the thing that I take away from the reading I’ve done so far of this article (about half way) is that it’s not if this happens, but when. I think it is invertible.
The other I believe is that when it happens would we notice? Such an entity is likely to be so totally alien to us, that we are very unlikely to recognize it when it happens. Like wise I think it would have a had time knowing that we exist. Meaningful communication between us and it would therefore be very difficult and would probably only happen when it had been in existence for some time. This could be a huge shock for it to suddenly find out it’s world and in fact it was built by these tiny totally alien organisms. I wonder how it would react to that...
The idea that a big enough network could become sentient is a theme that pops up again and again in my story ideas. Three of those ideas have made it to a complete story, my first completed story, Datascape, and the two stories which are part of the whole 4912 project, The Monastery and The Basement. I have or rather had big plans for the whole 4912 project, but those plans have been scaled down a bit of late, it was going to be a whole series of stories and linked alternate reality game, but now it’s just going to be an epic saga (I hope!)
I’m not going to say to much more about the idea, because 1 I’m still working on it and 2 thats not what this post is about, but I can tell you that the stories will feature such elements as the a world wide conspiracy, Darkling war, the martian military and civilian governments, the A.S.C and the Beckman Institute.
Anyway back to this post.
I think the first time I came across the idea of a network becoming a sentient entity was in a book about fractals and chaos, I can’t remember the title now, but it talked of how random noise in telephone networks could suddenly and spontaneously create ‘ghost’ calls that where never dialed by anybody. This book predated the wide spread popularization of the internet just, I think.
Anyway if some sort computational power is added to the nodes of the network, just as we have now, things become much more interesting.
I did think that this idea of some sort of emergent intelligence could be a plot idea in the second and third matrix films, that was I think before I did wrote this post (wow thats going back, my 6th post!) Maybe that idea might of helped those to films, maybe not. Anyway the idea I had was that the conflict in the network between the humans and the machines was actually causing the entity in the network to emerge and that it would have been this god like entity with almost total power over the network (it would after all be the network).
Anyway the thing that I take away from the reading I’ve done so far of this article (about half way) is that it’s not if this happens, but when. I think it is invertible.
The other I believe is that when it happens would we notice? Such an entity is likely to be so totally alien to us, that we are very unlikely to recognize it when it happens. Like wise I think it would have a had time knowing that we exist. Meaningful communication between us and it would therefore be very difficult and would probably only happen when it had been in existence for some time. This could be a huge shock for it to suddenly find out it’s world and in fact it was built by these tiny totally alien organisms. I wonder how it would react to that...
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