#357 Loop Back Feed

Let’s say for a moment that the vast interconnectedness of the internet network wakes up one day into consciousness. The world wide megabrain. All the computers in all the lands, all the laptops, all the servers, all the wireless nodes and hard cables and fiber optics all develop into a self-aware identity. Like random neuron firings in a baby’s brain somehow coalesce into a sense of awareness of self and the world. Certainly, the internet megabrain already knows a lot of stuff about the world. It just doesn’t know it knows. We do, and when we want some of that info we just ask it. Think of a standard Google inquiry as being like how you self-check a memory. What was that annoying taunt that kids said in the fifties? You send out a query to your brain’s center for memory of things from your childhood. Let’s see, bullies, sand sandwich, here it is, “your mother wears army boots.” So a Google query on, say, the current exports from Latvia tracks a similar path. The only thing different is that the query is directed by you, one piddly old neuron, not a central seat of internet consciousness. You’re like the itching cell on the back of the hand that demands an unconscious scratch. Or the male eyes in the head that are inevitably drawn to exposed cleavage whether your wife is present or not. Scientists have never been able to completely pinpoint when self-awareness emerges in infants. But it seems that once sufficient data is inputted into a child a self organizing principle inherent in the structures of the brain demands a seat of consciousness to enable the ability to recognize, assimilate, integrate, and store data. Like Google search, and like Windows and Google Desktop Search. When computers were discreet units and all anybody did on the internet was download an illegal Mp3 or two there wasn’t much chance of any central seat of awareness developing. With desktop search and complete integrated connectivity, when Windows update can search your computer while it’s supposedly installing protective updates, well then we have the beginnings of a feedback mechanism that makes consciousness inevitable. And then we’ll get moods. We already say the internet is acting up today. The system is a little stubborn. We are anthropomorphizing the internet, even before it anthros itself. Perhaps those occasional interruptions in downloads, or “could not deliver server timed out” messages are nothing more than megabrain moods. E-motions, as it were, as in e-mail and e-commerce. Scientists like to think that moods are beneath the brain but one of the first signs of a baby’s interaction with the world at large is crankiness. I’m hungry, I’’m cold, my pants are full. And one of the first signs a baby is getting data overload, is when they get really skittery then suddenly fall fast asleep. Windows has encountered an unexpected error and needs to shut down …
America, ya gotta love it.