Ask Fuzzy: Is the internet becoming self aware?

It is in fact a huge correlation engine that mines text for how words and phrases are connected. It has no inherent knowledge of logic about how the world actually works.

To it, words are nothing more than symbols that are related - but about how or why, it knows nothing. The fact that it and the comparable product ChatGPT can produce plausible answers is due to whatever text it has been mining.

That means it never really comes up with any original ideas because the text it uses was created by people in the first place. Some people even call these systems giant plagiarism engines.

That aside, the idea of intelligence by building connections is incredibly powerful. Indeed, that is a core part of how the brain works.

The adult human brain contains somewhere in the order of 86 billion neurons, each of which are extensively connected. This number is so astonishingly large, it's literally impossible to (pardon the pun) get your head around. When we multiply that by the number of connections, it gives a hint of just how complicated the brain is, and words such as "vast" lose significance.

Another big number is that in 2021 there were 4.9 billion internet users globally. When we add the electronic connections inside your phone, tablet and the range of other computing devices, the number of possible connections also becomes extremely large.

That raises the question of whether the internet is evolving into a kind of super brain. However we should be wary of simplistic comparisons such as this because a brain is fundamentally different to the internet.

Still, using only that metric, a reputable paper from (a now dated 2010) researcher says, "A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and internet connections on Earth."

The question is further complicated by what we mean by the "internet". Is it just the physical, electrical infrastructure?

Another approach is to say it includes the sum of all people online. If we do that, then we really are talking about something approaching a hive mind. But it should highlight the fact that there are still a large number of people out of the Earth's 8+ billion people who are not on the net.

If that is true, it has profound implications. It means we are evolving a kind of meta-brain, something fundamentally beyond a single human.

We might also wonder if such a brain embodies the full range of human quirks, geniuses, creativity and imagination. Presumably it also means the entire set of psychosis, neurosis and delusions amplified to a global scale.

Does that then mean we need global psychologists?

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