Creating Internet Intelligence: Wild Computing, Distributed Digital Consciousness, and the Emerging Global Brain

by Ben Goertzel

Overview

Creating Internet Intelligence is an interdisciplinary treatise exploring the hypothesis that global computer and communication networks will one day evolve into an autonomous intelligent system, and making specific recommendations as to what engineers and scientists can do today to encourage and shape this evolution. A general theory of intelligent systems is described, based on the author's previous work; and in this context, the specific notion of Internet intelligence is fleshed out, in its commercial, social, psychological, computer-science, philosophical, and theological aspects. Software engineering work carried out by the author and his team over the last few years, aimed at seeding the emergence of Internet intelligence, is reviewed in some detail, including the Webmind AI Engine, a uniquely powerful Internet-based digital intelligence, and the Webworld platform for peer-to-peer distributed cognition and artificial life. The book should be of interest to computer scientists, philosophers, and social scientists, and more generally to anyone concerned about the nature of the mind, or the evolution of computer and Internet technology and its effect on human life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461351337
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	09/24/2012
Series:	IFSR International Series in Systems Science and Systems Engineering , #18
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2002
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.03(d)

Table of Contents

1. The Coming Evolution.- 1 MIND AS NETWORK.- 2. A Practical Definition of Intelligence.- 3. Elements of a Philosophy of Mind.- 4. Complexity and Emergence.- 5. The Psynet Model of Mind.- 2 RECONCEPTUALIZING THE INTERNET.- 6. The Network Is the Computer Is the Mind (Is the World).- 7. A Fourfold Model of Internet Information Space.- 8. The Internet Economy as a Complex System.- 9. The Emerging Global Brain.- 3 BUILDING INTERNET MINDS AND WORLDS.- 10. Systematizing Internet Agent Interactions.- 11. Webworld.- 12. Webmind.- 13. Webmind on the Commercial Net.- 14. Toward Superhuman Intelligence.- 15. An Initial Architecture for Internet Intelligence.- References.- Appendix 1. Specification of the KNOW Knowledge.- Appendix 2. Goertzel versus Rosen.- Appendix 3. A Formal Vocabulary for Complexity Science.- Appendix 4. Design for an Evolutionary Quantum Compute.- Appendix 5. Universe as Network.

Editorial Reviews

Straddling categories including computer science, philosophy, and engineering, Goertzel (a mathematician who left academia to start an AI company) looks at the general concepts behind the Internet's move toward a fundamental transition from distributed network to self- organizing intelligent system. Aimed at readers who have "a strong intellectual background" but may lack training in complexity science or other technical disciplines, the work focuses on the idea of "wild computing," in which software programs cease to be tame, trained beasts that simply do what people tell them. Rather, Goertzel believes, the Net will become "a mind in itself ... a world for digital organisms." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)