Sunday, November 20, 2016
Google and the emergence of the superbrain
Thoughts as of late take me to the ideas surrounding emergent artificial intelligence and the growth of information in the digital realm. One of the theorized ways for artificial intelligence to burst into existence is through an emergent process. Where a smart system is improved steadily until a tipping point where it displays sentience. It could be said that this process has already began through the growth of the internet. The back end of every search engine could be the processing element for a consciousness where the totality of the index-able content on the internet would make up the memories and experiences defining a self-hood for this entity,
What is interesting to me about this is the pervasiveness of the indexing ability of these engines. They are consistently able to discover new content and differentiate new unique content from repetition and copies. This is something that the human brain also excels at. We can readily recognize a new song that we have not heard before.
Generating new unique information is easy. Connect a random number generator to a website and you have an unending stream of unique information (and sometimes strange). What is difficult is to produce information that is meaningful and new. We only have a small number of expert systems that are capable of generating new information that is meaningful. IBM's Watson has the ability to synthesize large amounts of information and discover new possibilities that have not been explored yet; Google's deep dream is a powerful visual example of exploring new possibilities with a large starting data set.
The next step to connecting these three portions of the internet will be to grow these content producing networks to the point of ubiquitousness so that the whole internet's ability to produce new ideas is as vast as it's ability to catalog and evaluate them. When this point is reached the ability for the internet to grow by itself will be unending.
That is why I think it's very interesting to consider how small powerful seeds of information can have a larger impact on the whole of the entity. Historical facts and content serve as the foundation for large ideas today. This encourages me to build ideas to contribute to this mind in gestation. So that when borne it will have the largest and firmest foundation to stand on.
What is interesting to me about this is the pervasiveness of the indexing ability of these engines. They are consistently able to discover new content and differentiate new unique content from repetition and copies. This is something that the human brain also excels at. We can readily recognize a new song that we have not heard before.Generating new unique information is easy. Connect a random number generator to a website and you have an unending stream of unique information (and sometimes strange). What is difficult is to produce information that is meaningful and new. We only have a small number of expert systems that are capable of generating new information that is meaningful. IBM's Watson has the ability to synthesize large amounts of information and discover new possibilities that have not been explored yet; Google's deep dream is a powerful visual example of exploring new possibilities with a large starting data set.
The next step to connecting these three portions of the internet will be to grow these content producing networks to the point of ubiquitousness so that the whole internet's ability to produce new ideas is as vast as it's ability to catalog and evaluate them. When this point is reached the ability for the internet to grow by itself will be unending.
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