Future Internet will gain human consciousness, experts say

By Dick Pelletier

      

    The World Wide Web is a network of interconnectivity that goes everywhere and follows its own intelligence. The advent of this emerging communication network circling our planet has enabled citizens from all lifestyles to communicate inexpensively to anyone in the world with a computer or cell phone.

    Nearly 25% of the world is now connected to the web, according to a UN State of the Future report. Of the nearly 5 billion mobile communication devices in the world, most can be used as a telephone, camera, music player, TV, library – and gateway to the Web.

    The Internet represents a major step in human evolution, and is a forerunner of things to come. Artificial intelligence researcher Francis Heylighen sees huge growth as this world-wide electronic marvel gains power from billions of humans adding to its intelligence every day.

    Experts compare the Internet to a planet growing a global brain. As users, we represent the neurons; our emails, IMs, and blogs act as synaptic actions; and electromagnetic waves through the sky become neural pathways. Like germinating seeds, this wonder-tech continues to evolve and as many futurists predict, will not stop until it achieves human-like consciousness.

    Feelings are a lower level of consciousness in a system's environment. In that sense, the Internet is just beginning to understand events that affect its goals. Although today's algorithms make the web more intelligent, it still cannot monitor itself; but future artificial intelligence expected later in this decade, will add enormous powers to this electronic thinking machine.

    Could tomorrow's Internet allow uploading the human mind? At present, information exchanged between humans and computers only occur with mouse, keyboard, camera, or voice. However, many futurists believe that one day technology will enable us to separate our minds from the physical brain and store its information in a computer.

    This is not as crazy as one might think. IBM hopes to reverse engineer the human brain by 2030, and Janelia Farms is rounding up top neuroscientists to capture human thought at moment of creation, which conceivably could enable thoughts, memories, and feelings to be transferred into a machine.

    In the future, many believe we will treat the human mind like any other bit of information by copying and storing it in various media. Scientists are aware that our mind roams over trillions of neuron connections and today, we do not possess abilities to understand this remarkable complex system.

    But by as early as the 2020s, with new artificial intelligence and faster computers, scientists expect to unravel the mysteries of consciousness and program this elusive human trait into machines, which some predict, will help define what makes us human.

    With video resolution four times sharper than today's HDTV and haptic technologies providing realistic touch sensations, by 2020, our wondernet will deliver holographic images of lifelike virtual interactions indiscernible from reality. We will organize meetings with friends or relatives with no travel involved. People can hug, kiss and reminisce as if everyone was actually together.

    Finally, by mid-2030s, when artificial intelligence is expected to surpass human intelligence, many positive futurists believe the Internet will become fully conscious as it guides humanity through this incredible “magical future" time.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.