trapped in the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office

I was discussing this morning with my colleague professor Ignasi Ribas about machine intelligence. We went over the usual stuff: IBM Deep Blue beating chess master Garry Kasparov, 2001’s HAL, brute force computing and robots dreaming of electronic sheep.

Finally we ended up where most of these discussions end (especially for those who have read “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”): the Earth is a big computer and we are part of it.

One could see internet as a big brain, with websites (or in general web apps) being the neurons and hyperlinks the synapses. Data storage devices would be the machine’s memory and any device such as cameras, phones, satellites or any sensor connected to the net, would act as the senses of this big planetary computer.

But unlike the human brain, this electronic brain grows everyday larger and thus increases its value according to Metcalfe’s law. So what will happen when the number of webpages (neurons) and synapses (hyperlinks) equal those of a human brain? Will the machine be aware of its existence? Will they develop a conscience?

Today, math is on our side; the synapses in the human brain is 1000 times the number of the estimated trillion (10¹²) hyperlinks on the web, but D day may not be too far away with computers doubling its capacity every 18 months.

When I got online later today I found a comment in one of my earlier posts by Xavier Vergés a former colleague from IBM (nothing to do with Deep Blue), and mysteriously enough he pointed to an awesome video by Michael Wesh called The Machine is Us/ing Us that illustrates this very idea. Coincidence?

We are teaching the machine everything we know and maybe the machine is learning faster than we think.

The making of The Machine is Us/ing Us: Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes.

• 00:42 WaybackMachine: Web archive. It keeps copies of websites (all?) by date. Try and search yours.
• 01:53 Netvibes.com: online AJAX based feed reader. A must use.
• 02:44 Flickr Maps: Flickr mash-up for geotagging pictures
• 02:55 Firefox de.icio.us extension: an extension for tagging websites and posting to delicious. Must have!
• 03:11 We Are The Web: Wired magazine article about web history, present and future. A must read. Print it. Engrave it. Keep it in a safe!

• About the author:Michael Welsh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Here’s his blog about Digital Ethnography
• More videos of Michael Welsh on YouTube