Will the Internet Evolve Into a Life Form?

Some think that sentience could emerge from any sufficiently complicated system. By the way, you're reading this on a massively-crosslinked network built from millions of routers, allowing any of a billion individual units to access, modify and reply to the others. Interested?

Computer programs are already exhibiting many of the characteristics of organic lifeforms, up to and including evolution - hilarious, since they're the only things that really are "Intelligently Designed" - and there's no reason to believe that life or awareness are exclusively organic attributes. You could say we've only ever seen chemical-based constructs which are alive, but in the past the same argument could have been applied to things moving under their own power, flight or the ability to count - and it turns out we've built machines that are sort of far better at all those things than the fleshy equivalents. If there is a magic "life-chemical" mixed in with all the blood and guts, we haven't found it.

"Computer viruses are some form of evolution," said evolutionary dynamicist Martin Nowak of Harvard University, developer of a mathematical model of evolution’s origins, in an interview last year with Wired. Irene Chen, a Harvard systems biologist who specializes in early biomolecules observed that "Viruses fulfill replication, mutation and selection — but people don’t consider them to be alive, because they think life has to be made of chemicals. We can definitely make things in a computer that fulfill the criteria for life that NASA uses, except it’s not chemical."

Others would object that only beings with souls can ever be truly alive, but such people rarely have anything useful (or even sensible) to say on the subjects of evolution or technology and so can be safely ignored.

The question is now what form this life would take. While the movies teach us that evil cybernetic intelligences are created in military research labs, with the occasional time-traveling component mixed in, the most likely environment is wherever has the greatest connectivity, diversity and sheer quantity of data flow. That's right, the Internet.

One route is the evolution of electronic intelligences in situations like the internet-arms race between spammers and shielders. It might sound silly, the idea that new life could be created in an attempt to offer you a great deal on C1@Lis!!, but have you tried registering for a forum recently? Even gaining access to the lowest level of interaction online now requires elementary Turing tests to tell the humans from the robots.

Another option is the idea of the net itself becoming sentient, a vast self-modifying array of connections and information storage with limited connections to the outside world (kind of like that glob of grey goo you carry around in your skull). If that happens then Gibson help us all - remember that the net is made of about 90% spam, 9% porn, and quite a lot of whining blogs. If that mixture ever becomes self-aware we're not quite sure what it'll do, but the odds are against it being anything good.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Comments

In a way the late Arthur C. Clarke predicted something like this years ago (only with telephones) in "Dial F for Frankenstein"

Posted by: Shakatany | June 11, 2009 at 08:51 AM

knock knock
If people that believe in souls can be safely ignored,
then we should ignore all newtonian and darwinian discoveries?

Posted by: Jonathan Ainsley Bain | June 11, 2009 at 03:38 PM

I read this when it was 1st released. ( Classic, remember ? )

It seems like there would have to be a program, or series of programs - Call it a " Dr. Frankenstein program " - that could somehow unify all these random blog files, Second Life avatars, text files, html codes, .wav files, mpg's, etc., & knit them together into an Internet entity. The program ( s ) would have to be designed for that purpose.

Somebody's been watching " The Terminator " movie ( the 1st one ) too many times, or maybe " Ghost in The Shell " the movie, where the Internet suddenly became sentient or an entity came out of the moirasse of information on the 'net.

EVERYBODY PANIC ( ? )

Posted by: EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville | June 13, 2009 at 01:14 AM

Internet Virus are not alive since they didn't developpe naturaly but man who created them!

Posted by: chronon | June 13, 2009 at 06:45 AM

Isn't it already sentient? How many reactions do we see from posts like this, the news, world reports and so on? Besides, my computer only becomes sentient when I TURN THE POWER ON. This is not news; it is a continuing 'soap opera/love story' that will be argued and debated on until...'the sun finally goes white dwarf'.

Posted by: Marty Ferguson | June 14, 2009 at 06:28 PM