Okay, I admit I may be straying a bit from small business news to use, however, as most of you know, I find neuroscience and its business use evolution to be fascinating, especially for skills and learning in leadership and management. What caught my eye on this one, “Are you saying the Internet could become conscious” ……. whoa, is this a science fiction movie in the making? No, at least not yet. What he does — sort of reminds me of one of my Logic classes many years ago — is use the basic formula to prove his statement. This is a Friday read if you have time or find such topics interesting.
Excerpt:
Are you saying the Internet could become conscious, or maybe already is conscious?
Koch:
That’s possible. It’s a working hypothesis that comes out of artificial intelligence. It doesn’t matter so much that you’re made out of neurons and bones and muscles. Obviously, if we lose neurons in a stroke or in a degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, we lose consciousness. But in principle, what matters for consciousness is the fact that you have these incredibly complicated little machines, these little switching devices called nerve cells and synapses, and they’re wired together in amazingly complicated ways. The Internet now already has a couple of billion nodes. Each node is a computer. Each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors, so it is in principle possible that the complexity of the Internet is such that it feels like something to be conscious. I mean, that’s what it would be if the Internet as a whole has consciousness. Depending on the exact state of the transistors in the Internet, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, or whatever the equivalent is in Internet space.
Read full article via The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel – Steve Paulson – The Atlantic.
