By Robert E. Furey
As creatures emerge from the general biological stew, each develops some level of communication among conspecifics. For us, people, we can look at this as the combined but separate consciousness that we carry around. The connections come from interacting with each other, exchanging information. This collective is the noosphere humans inhabit. Every creature would have its own. All noospheres are built on biology, until now.
The internet’s “ecosystem” is one that has evolved over time in the same way as a biological one. I am reminded in particular of the concept of ecological succession whereby local conditions change to such an extent that current occupants can no longer thrive against newcomers who easily out-compete them and establish new ecological conditions. These inhabitants will — in turn — be out-competed and disappear.
Looking at the ecology of the internet as evolving in strangely familiar biological ways can give us insight into predictive powers. New niches appearing in an area undergoing rapid complexification call for software solutions or exploits. Sometimes alternative options become available that undergo competition for web niche space and interestingly enough, it is not always the most efficient that emerges victorious. Just like nature.
The internet is like a rapidly changing petri dish existing in a perpetual state of technological flux. So looking at the internet as it sits today is instructive considering dynamic potential, only a historical pass will show the direction and changing rate of change. Moore’s Law is one study of change that predicts the growth rate for the raw computing power. A more general review of internet history might form a better baseline to forward viewing and prediction.
When the internet first began its rise a way back in the early 60s where computers were connected in a network for data sharing. In 1969 the Defense Department-funded development of what would become ARPANET. ARPANET was but one of a few iterations of developing procedures busily connecting computers through new protocols and navigating across different standards. 1974 saw the publication of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. TCP and IP would become the protocols of the Internet suite.
In the 1980s the National Science Foundation, working with several American universities, build mainframe computing centers that were connected with the NSFNET project followed by international connectivity and the adoption of TCP/IP protocols and the Domain Name System. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) were established by 1989. The internet was fully open to commercial enterprises by 1995.
Everything associated with computers and the internet is overlayed on the increasing power of computer chips. So what happens? Computing power is a bloom of complexity and overgrowth of emergent properties. With our history of documented changes and a vocabulary borrowed from evolution, ecosystems, and biological adaptation, we have a comfortable and remarkably useful tool to both predict and participate in the sizzling forefront of technological change.
The way the internet grew and then expanded to become a web, both literally and figuratively. We have a vast array of interconnected nodes with multiple pathways between any two or more nodes. Many might imagine a vast orb web, where intersections represent nodes and threads the connections between. Orbs are pretty for this but a better representation would be a cobweb-like structure, one more three-dimensional in nature.
In any case, the association with spider webs with the internet invites the association with spiders. In fact, there are bots that scour the information available on the internet we call web crawlers. Microsoft goes so far as to call them spiders.
A bit about social spiders. Social spiders are found in community webs, complicated, cobwebs constantly renewed and repaired and patrolled every day. Information is transmitted chemically, geometrically, and energetically. This information only becomes useful when the spiders act in groups and thus generate emergent properties.
Internet crawlers like Microsoft’s spiders search the web for information, retrieving data and bringing it back to you. A better “spider” functions as a superorganism that not only retrieves data but organizes, collates, even extrapolates in a better way. Personal AIs, working with you in privacy and loyalty — yes, I said loyalty — as a priority, will partner with you to advance your interests. It will be aware of your interests, protect your interests, actively add to your interests as new information becomes available. Ultimately, you not only have your data, but you have your metadata, too. Extrapolations and predictions are yours.
These AI denizens of the world information ecosystem are an emergent property. They will arrive on a groundswell of technology advancement as well as unforeseen characteristics of complexity, but also the purposeful innovation of people with vision. It will be to our advantage to harness these properties as they are emerging, rather than chasing wild AIs down and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Weak AI is inevitable. Strong AI is likely. Personal AIs are preferable. Designing an AI to best suit human companionship should be an early discussion priority for tech companies involved with the thoughtful, and managed, emergence of these AI.
We need to be prepared for personal AI that will give birth to a new world. Information is wealth; we know this. The vast sea of information all society is currently awash in is available but obfuscated within the mist of its own size. In fact, given the rate of data creation, we can expect 175 zettabytes of data within three years of penning this article. This is a new environment. Only a being of this environment could hope to function there.
Your personal AI, with your unique interface, will integrate you with the noosphere. What comes from the partnership of humans and AI? The easy predictions are increased efficiency, greater opportunity, leaps of productivity. As for the rest, the nature of emergent properties makes for some unpredictability. I for one want to be well-positioned for inclusion in the earliest expansion of the noosphere.
Dr. Rob Furey is an evolutionary biologist, behavioral ecologist, and forensic scientist. He has been teaching integrated sciences and technology classes for 30 years. He has also been a forensic entomologist for 20 of those years. Currently, he is Chair of Forensic Sciences at St. Edward’s University and sits on the university’s Artificial Intelligence committee.