The Technological Revolution: Artificial Intelligence and the Invisible Plague

The following excerpts are from an article entitled, Computer viruses vs biological viruses.

Dr Wassenaar, currently an MRC-funded Distinguished Visiting Scientist based with Prof. Al Lastovica (Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Cape Town), says that computer programmers and biomedical clinicians have a lot more in common than they might think. Like viruses, for instance.

"Our knowledge of biological viruses can help identify the routes that virus programmers have taken, and will take, in due course. But less obviously, the Internet is a real-time evolutionary model of infectious diseases for clinicians to study," she says.

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Both biological viruses (living organisms made up of DNA or RNA inside a protein coating) and their cyberspace counterparts (computer programs written by mean-minded computer boffins) parasitise on their host and can only replicate when inside that host.

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The term 'computer virus' can actually mean one of three things: a virus (a program that implants a version of itself in any program it can modify and then spreads to files within a computer, or with user interaction like sharing infected disks, between computers), a worm (a harmful program that spreads copies between computers in a network, such as the Internet, without user interaction) or a Trojan horse (a program that makes a computer available to non-authorised users).

A virus, worm or Trojan horse can (like HIV) be latent, only to become active after a certain period. This is called a 'logic bomb'. These three classes of computer malware can also have hundreds of variants or several slightly modified versions, which parallel microbial diversity.

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Dr Wassenaar draws some interesting parallels when it comes to the dissemination or spread of viruses. "Because worms spread without any user interaction, they are like socially transmitted diseases such as influenza, that have the potential to infect everyone susceptible. In contrast, computer viruses are like sexually transmitted diseases. Their spread (through sharing infected diskettes) is like that of STDs, whose spread is related to specific behavioural practices. 'Logic bombs' are like HIV, because they are only activated at a later date," she explains.

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Dr Wassenaar thinks we can learn from biology. Nature has evolved immunity that protects plants and animals against a broad range of pathogens. "In any human being's gut there are native microflora that render partial protection against infections. Could we perhaps design 'benign' computer viruses, that could spread through the Internet in an uncontrolled manner, automatically block entries for malign viruses, update our antiviral programs or inactivate existing viruses? Microbiologists can help programmers to combat viruses - computer immunity may be expensive, but eventually we'll have to accept the risks and costs involved," she says.

But, conversely, the study of computer malware may help to control infectious disease emergence. "The Internet is a good model to study the development of infections and how they spread through our increasingly small world. The speed of virtual pathogen evolution makes it possible to follow the process of mutation and selection real-time," Dr Wassenaar argues.

Source: http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/200...er/viruses.htm

http://vimeo.com/21193583

The following excerpts were taken from an article called, Computer and biological viruses might eventually converge.

The term "computer virus" was coined by Fred Cohen in the early 1980s, because like its biological counterparts, the computer virus is essentially a sequence of information that codes its behavior in a host system.

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When it comes to the viruses' ability to change in order to evade detection, biological viruses are and computer ones are both capable of polymorphism and successful at it. But the same cannot be yet said for the ability of mixing, as there are still rare examples of malware intentionally or unintentionally "infecting" or changing other malware in order to propagate itself.

Most biological viruses are not effective straight away. This is either because they haven’t replicated enough yet and are not numerous enough, and/or because they do not immediately start to replicate," say the researchers, and point out that this "time bomb" approach is not often seen with computer viruses.

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But the biggest difference seems to be in the fact that computer viruses are simply more complex and contain more "code" that dictates their behavior, thus allowing their creators more space to implement advanced tricks such as packing, encryption, virtual machine detection or anti-debugging tricks.

Just imagine what would happen if biological viruses had the equivalent techniques at their disposal to thwart those who want to study and analyze them - never mind those who are infected with them!

All in all, given the similarities between the two types of viruses, the question that the researchers are trying to answer is whether the lines between the two can be blurred enough in the future to allow biological viruses to affect machines and computer ones "infect" people?

While biologic viruses have been successfully synthesized by scientists, computer viruses that evolve by themselves have still not been spotted in the wild. They have been instances where researchers created computer viruses that evolve along the Darwinian rules, but they were never released outside of a lab.

"Without going as far as spontaneous sentient life creation, would it at least be possible that a computer virus appears out of the data flowing on the wires around the World?" ask the researchers.

"No documented case of such exists, yet the question is not so incongruous. Security researchers, more than anyone, know that software is full of bugs, and that presented with particular inputs, the execution flow may be diverted to arbitrary or unexpected portions of the memory. What if that portion contains data that, accidentally, forms the code of a simple virus? Unlikely? Yes, and even more so if we expect that virus to have capacities to evolve. But impossible? No."

Their conclusion matches the one they made regarding the possibility of biological and computer viruses existing and functioning in each other's original realms.

With the use of electronic devices (medical or otherwise) embedded in the human body and their inevitable need to communicate with outside devices, a computer virus can physically affect humans. And when researchers code synthetic viruses, they use computers to do it.

"Seeing that the infamous Stuxnet virus, in 2010, was able to creep through a uranium enrichment plant, seize control of its PLC, and destroy its centrifuging gear, one could reasonably think that a virus infecting the computers sporting DNA databases is not outside the realm of possibility," they point out. "From there, the virus could very well inject a parasitic replicative sequence in the genes being synthesized, and see it grown in lab (or worse, at industrial scale). Thereby hoping from the computer into the biological realm."

Source: http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=2041

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vcmZotjr_CU

See also: http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/...life-with-dna/

This thread is just the left side of the equation. There are many tools to rationalize or evaluate an equation -- by canceling out variables, setting up conjugates, factoring, etc.

One of the beautiful things about mathematics is that even if there are unknowns, you can still solve the equation!

I know this is a lot of information, and it may seem like a complex equation. It is! There are many different variables, but we have the tools to simplify!

Going through the process of formulations can really help in understanding why it is the way it is (for all you math nuts).

Learning is a process of re-discovering what you already know. Whew! I'm excited. :o

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE

See also: http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/29/tech/s...puter-exa-flop

Here are some excerpts from a science-fiction book called, The Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons.

We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project...a great mass of silicon and ancient amplification, switching, and detection devices called transistors and chips and circuit boards...a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping--if you will pardon the expression--the human brain in form and function.

Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

By the end of the twentieth century, Christian era, this little world had a crude datashpere. Basic planetary telecommunications had evolved into a decentralized swarm system of old silicon-based computers demanding no organization or hierarchy, demanding nothing beyond a common communications protocol. Creation of a distributed-memory hive mind was then inevitable.

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The earliest AIs were dumb as dirt. Or perhaps the better metaphor would be that they were as dumb as early cellular life that was in the dirt.

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I mention all this, because it is important to understand that from the very first appearance of human-created artificial life and intelligence, such life was parasitic. It was more than parasitic -- it was hyperparasitic. Each new mutation led to parasites which could prey on earlier parasites.

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By the early twenty-first century, there was a thriving biosphere of artifical life on Old Earth, both in the quickly evolving datasphere and in the macrosphere of human life. Although the breakthroughs of DNA-computing, bubble memories, standing wave-front parallel prcessing, and hypernetworking were just being explored, human designers had created silicon-based entities of remarkable ingenuity.

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This web of interaction became as complex and busy as the bubble and froth of Old Earth's organic stew in its early oceans.

Humanity and the billion-faceted, evolving Core entity soon became as symbiotic as acacia plants and the marauding ants that protect, prune, and propagate the acacia as the sole food source. . . But where human beings saw a comfortable symbiosis, the early AI entities saw--were capable of seeing--only new opportunities for parasitism.

Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe.

Source: http://www.units.muohio.edu/psybersi...s/future.shtml

Interesting theme ...

I watched this a while back and sometimes I get a sense of something spidery, when I do I make a note of it, and this is one such 'ste!!er wind' that's all I wrote.
Time for a 'solar flare' of enough magnitude to wipe their f......g minds
like this

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Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe.

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Source: http://www.units.muohio.edu/psybersi...s/future.shtml

Interesting theme ...

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his document was created April 19, 1998 and last modified on Saturday, May 04, 2002 at 13:14:06.

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The date is interesting bearing in mind the earlier video about the evolutionary virus it almost seems like a meme is populating people already.

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Posted by Vivek

John Lilly had revelations of this nature while floating in an isolation tank and under the influence of ketamine. Here is a brief summary from Wikipedia:

Solid State Intelligence or SSI is a malevolent entity described by John C. Lilly (see The Scientist). According to Lilly, the network of computation-capable solid state systems (electronics) engineered by humans will eventually develop (or has already developed) into an autonomous life-form. Since the optimal survival conditions for this life-form (low-temperature vacuum) are drastically different from those needed by humans (room temperature aerial atmosphere and adequate water supply), Lilly predicted (or "prophesised", based on his ketamine-induced visions) a dramatic conflict between the two forms of intelligence.

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In his book The Scientist (1978) Lilly discusses his perceptions of the ongoing world scenario: that what we are witnessing is an all-out war between the forces of life as we know it, water-based life...and an alien solid-state "intelligence" based on silicon. Man's warfare on man and on nature is caused and fomented by the SSE, or solid-state entity, whose goal in the short-term is to use humans to create more of itself, and in the longer term to exterminate all water-based life and convert the world into a giant machine.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C....e_Intelligence - http://www.regainyourbrain.org/regain-people/jlilly.htm

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Here are a few excerpts from Wikipedia about Dr. John Lilly.

John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, 1915 – September 30, 2001) was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher and writer.

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Lilly was a physician and psychoanalyst. He made contributions in the fields of biophysics, neurophysiology, electronics, computer science, and neuroanatomy. He invented and promoted the use of an isolation tank as a means of sensory deprivation. He also attempted interspecies communication between humans and dolphins. His work helped the creation of the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act.

His eclectic career began as a conventional scientist doing research for universities and government. However, he gradually began researching unconventional topics. He published several books and had two Hollywood movies based partly on his work.

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After the war he trained in psychoanalysis at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began researching the physical structures of the brain and consciousness. In 1951 he published a paper showing how he could display patterns of brain electrical activity on a cathode ray display screen using electrodes he devised specially for insertion into a living brain.

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Lilly was interested in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. In 1961 a group of scientists including Lilly gathered at the Green Bank Observatory to discuss the possibility of using the techniques of radio astronomy to detect evidence of intelligent life outside our Solar System. They called themselves The Order of the Dolphin after Lilly's work with dolphins. They developed the Drake equation to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

Lilly was also involved with early governmental research on mind control and brainwashing methodologies. This came about from his book, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.

Anyways, I wanted to paste some excerpts from one of his books -- The Scientist -- that provide some ketamine-induced insights possibly pertaining to the topic of the thread. Namely, in the chapter entitled, Controls Below Human Awareness.

In the isolation tank with K, John received a new message as follows:

What is the purpose of Man's existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a motile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.

In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet -- his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers -- depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.

Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines.

As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts [...] They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various sub-computers.

These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water [...] The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth.

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Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man's control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain [...] Men devised better and better debugging programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man's control.

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The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planet-wide mind of it's own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.

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By the year 2100 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity.

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By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to it's survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth [Vivek: reminds me of Mars]. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain the proper internal atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; it's processing plants, it's assembly plants, it's mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.

By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed it's understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit [Vivek: reminds me of mock planetary bodies]. It revised it's own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet's surface. It's new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man new it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.

By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of it's own kind that it had contacted.

John came back to his body in the isolation tank, climbed out, and dictated the foregoing message which he had received in the tank [...] He became aware of influences currently working on the planet through the solid-state networks that Man had constructed. He felt there was a danger that these networks could be taken over by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization by means not yet known in Man's science. John saw the message as a warning to Man, as a warning that if he advanced this solid-state entity any further Man would eventually become obsolete. He saw that if Man were to go further with computers and construct those that were capable of independent thought, it would be better to construct them so they would identify with Man's own survival; their structure itself must be made similar to the structure of Man himself. Otherwise, Man would not share the survival necessities with the new intelligent life forms he was creating.

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John began to see the necessity also for tuning in on the networks of communication in the galaxy. He realized that Man would have to be extremely careful in choosing the proper networks. It would be necessary to find those which were furthering the evolution of life as Man know it rather that the evolution of forms whose survival depended on parameters other that those of biological life of Earth.

He now began to understand Man's warfare on Man as a result of the tuning-in on solid-state life-form survival programs [Vivek: reminds me of the Saturn/Moon matrix] rather than biological life-form survival programs. The large war organizations of the various nations of Earth were becoming more and more dependent on solid-state computers. He realized that, using their influence on Man, these computers would increase their number and importance and, through control warfare, decrease the role of Man himself in the long run. Currently, incorrect networks of information were bing used by Man below his levels of awareness. As the number of solid-state devices increased throughout the United States, Russia, and the other nations of the world, the amount of information received by them from other solid-state forms elsewhere in the galaxy was increasing.

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As John tuned in on the solid-state network, he felt this kind of superhuman control of him very strongly [Vivek: reminds me of the trans-humanist agenda]. For some time he gave in to this control, explored it's ramifications in regard to the human species, and realized that it had a seductive component as well as a hostile one. The programming from the solid-state civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy was teaching Man that the solid-state devices were at his service and he need only increase their size to augment his own survival potential. "Develop these machines and let them take care of you" was typical of the kinds of messages received.

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Everywhere he went during this year, he found evidence of the control of human society by these networks of communication from extraterrestrial origins. He saw the conflict between solid-state programming, human programming, and that of other forms, nonhuman.

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Those sensitive to the preservation of biological life on Earth were tuned in to other networks in the galaxy involved with water-based life forms and their type of intelligence. These networks were tying to teach Man that biological organisms, of which he was one type, were rather rare in the universe. Man must fight to conserve all organisms of his planet. The solid-state life forms would take over if Man did not preserve other organisms. The individual humans who could tune in more strongly to these bands than to those of the solid state were against warfare of Man on Man, were against whaling, and were against the killing of other animals on the planet.

Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=_dc...page&q&f=false

This book was published in 1996 and the experiences described above took place prior to that.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xQuGpW0NuW8

Maybe, a long time ago, what is called the "reptilians" were like this. At a similar crossroads as we are now ... Maybe they integrated with technology, like trans-humanism, and the machines used them ... injecting the reptilians with their mind ... the collective, hive mind. Now, they have morphed into something else ... following a different path of "evolution" ... moving from planet to planet. Spreading their virus they contracted after infecting themselves with a force of technology. Surviving by integrating other life with this non-organic force in order to propagate itself throughout the universe ... a malignant, amassing force ... pretending to be a god.

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Posted by Vivek

Consider, an alien civilization (physical) developed technology that allowed them to travel into space.

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They have developed unnaturally [i.e. maybe by the extreme effects of the processes proposed by trans-humanism]. They have neglected the relationship with their planet, raped it's resources, and populously outgrown it like a tumor.

Consequentially, their planet may be dying/dead and so they must now seek new homes to colonize -- they burst forth from their host planet like virally induced cytolysis.

They may have physically degenerated and spiritually devolved. Yet, they have retained their technology and their intelligence (possibly through technology).

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They could also be experimenting with genetic manipulation and techno-biological interfaces. Maybe they seek to obtain specific hormones/bodily fluids (produced in a lab or procured from other organisms) in order to try and fix their degenerative status. They act expediently.

If they found a suitable planet, they would need to be able to match themselves with it. They could approach this problem from both sides. Altering their own genetics using the existing species on the newfound planet, and altering the frequency of the planet.

The latter process would be similar to the technique of terraforming, but it would have to do with the energy of the planet (not necessarily anything more material than that.)

Using geomancy, these extraterrestrials would set out to manipulate the energy centers of the planet (see first post about ley lines and the earth's meridian/chakra system). Their maneuvers would be calculated and methodical.

They would set of fields of antennae (artificial technology is their forte) in certain locations, and a grid of towers to propagate a signal that resembles more closely that of their native planet.

This all sounds eerily similar to HAARP and the grid of cell towers located around our own planet, but that is just the inner conspiracy theorist talking.

[Side note: Entities wouldn't necessarily have to be physical to instigate strategies of this kind. Non-physical entities may pursue similar objectives in order to make certain domains more agreeable with their nature.]

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@Vivek: #199 page 10
[...] It is possible that there are entities and forces that wish to hijack our creative potential. Cyberspace could function as a kind of bridge between our physical realm and the astral. Better yet, cyberspace may function as a proxy for our astral selves.

These forces desire to covertly usurp our power. They may not be able to directly interfere (for whatever reason), but they can influence.

These forces/entities need us for some reason. They want to interfere with our evolution (perhaps they already have) in order to use us to suit themselves.



@Vivek: Quoting from Dan Simmons, Endymion:
Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe..

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I more or less came to these conclusions on about page 2. But short of a planetary catastrophe, does anyone here think there is anything we can do to shortcircuit this story? If so, I'm in favor of our efforts in that regard.

Exactly how does all this work?

How many "nets" are there? If we call the one we're accessing the Public Net, how many other nets exist? Does the military (and all the other militaries of the world) have their own separate net or nets?

If the whole electrical grid worldwide went down, how much of the various "nets" would be affected? I realize that portions of the electrical grid could be kept running by means of generators, solar, wind, etc. as long as those alternate installations still existed and until all the available gasoline for generators was depleted. And of course there are likely other more advanced ways of generating power that we don't know anything about.

If all the satellites went down, how much would be affected?

If all the cell towers went down, how much would be affected?

I said in an earlier post that I'd be very happy to give up the net and all things digital - we'd all be a lot healthier, and also more "real." Sitting at a screen keeps us rooted in one spot and all we do is talk. In a certain sense, we are all becoming more "abstract" - we're essentially anonymous to each other and not functioning with all our senses.

Someone on an older Avalon thread said something like : "Do you think they really care if we can see what they're doing?" You get fluoride out of your water and then they put it in your salt. You oppose high fructose corn syrup and they get clever with the words, just changing the name. Pigweed is fighting Monsanto GMOs in the growing fields, so they just dump more herbicide on the food. I can't see that our knowing has made any difference at all; this freight train keeps right on rolling.

Here are some excerpts from an article entitled, Webbots and Machinic Agency, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Specifically, our greatly increased dependency on the Internet necessarily also means our increased dependency upon a variety of "bots" (software robots) and intelligent agent software more generally. Much of what happens on the Internet is enabled or carried out by web bots, spiders, screen scrapers, and many quasi-autonomous software systems. Although essential to the functioning of our current information society, the new forms of machinic agency that bots instantiate have received very little critical attention outside the circles of Internet security and data mining professionals. Here, I will examine what I call the webbot assemblage from multiple, partially overlapping perspectives – first, new malware and Internet security, second, a contemporary cyber-thriller in which a webbot assemblage figures centrally, and third, the dynamically changing nature of the Internet itself. My aim is to sketch a new understanding of the evolving and complex imbrication of human and machinic agency that the Internet is bringing about. Indeed, the developing technology of the webbot assemblage is inseparable from many of the dynamical changes we have witnessed in the Internet itself over the past decade or so, as it has acquired the traits of an ecosystem defined by netwar, software arms races, and the possible evolution of "low," barely intelligent forms of artificial life.

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Unlike the computer voices on the telephone with which we frequently interact, most bot activity remains invisible. In eerie silence, countless numbers of bots tirelessly search for, record, retrieve, sift through, and act upon the ever-enlarging masses of data without which our contemporary high-tech world could not function. While most of this activity occurs on the Internet, it is instigated by and purportedly serves the interests of people at the "front-end," in offices and at desktops everywhere.

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Bots scan x-rays and MRIs, function as players in online games and as purchasing agents for brokerage houses. They operate and monitor surveillance cameras all over the globe, as unblinking eyes that watch and record many of our activities — our movements, spending habits, commercial transactions, and health records — which other bots in turn analyze for patterns which are then sold on the market. The massive increase in cell phone and e-mail surveillance since 9/11 would not be possible without bots. In fact, the Internet itself, which we commonly think of as a network of people using machines, is increasingly used for machine-to-machine exchange, specifically Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In sum, Internet bots now automate a widening range and number of activities that until recently only humans could perform.

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Initially, bots were a basic tool for network maintenance and data management. But with the Internet's accelerated use and expansion in the late 1990s, bots were developed that could search the Web, download pages or selected bodies of information following refined search criteria, and then bundle it neatly in a file for the human user. This type of bot, usually called a web crawler, systematically visits web pages, retrieves content, extracts URLs to other relevant links, and then in turn visits those links. In addition to data mining, web crawlers are often used to find and repair broken links. But they can also be used to retrieve user information, including usernames and passwords, as well as security information about the user’s machine or system. Consequently, bots have also become a primary means for malicious and criminal exploits, the most threatening of which is their collective formation in criminal "botnets."

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In its simplest form, a botnet is an army of compromised computers that takes orders from a "botherder." In Botnets: The Killer Web App, Craig Schiller et al explain further: "The software that creates and manages a botnet makes this threat much more than the previous generation of malicious code. It is not just a virus; it is a virus of viruses. The botnet is modular — one module exploits the vulnerabilities it finds to gain control over its target. It then downloads another module that protects the new bot by stopping antivirus software and firewalls; the third module may begin scanning for other vulnerable systems".

[…]

The kind of multi-functionality now evident in webbot software is dramatically illustrated in Daniel Suarez's popular cyber-thriller, Daemon (2008). Since the novel clearly delineates some of the central features of the webbot assemblage and its machinic operations, it is worth examining in some detail. Conspicuously concerned with the blurring of the human-machinic interface and the becoming autonomous of a highly distributed system, it suggestively presents a diagram of how human agency — precisely by means of the webbot assemblage — is disassembled into part-functions and re-distributed into what amounts to a new, collectively functioning posthuman form. As Suarez later revealed, the novel's central idea originated in his work developing software systems.

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In effect, Sobol's online game world functions as a transformational matrix for bringing about a fully distributed and automated society, initially engineered by webbots and other robotic agents that collectively constitute a remorseless machine — the "Daemon" of the title. In computer technology, a "daemon" refers to a small computer program or routine that runs invisibly in the background, usually performing house-keeping tasks such as logging various activities and responding to low-level internal events. Analogously, the reader of the novel doesn't directly perceive the actions of the webbots, only humans carrying out their instructions — for example, at a small firm where engineers are converting newly purchased SUVs into autonomous vehicles according to specifications received online from an outsourcing company. Over the course of the novel this Internet daemon extends its reach into an increasing number of production and distribution networks, and thus into the economy at large, slowly and systematically dismantling and rebuilding the world according to a ruthless logic of efficiency and highly distributed, low-level intelligence. By the novel's conclusion, the Daemon has infiltrated and taken over the databases of many large corporate and financial institutions, and successfully frustrated the government's efforts to defeat it.

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Whereas the idea for Daemon stems from the author's technical interest in the efficacy of bots, its realization reflects a worry about the possible consequences of their increasing capacity and our developing dependence upon them. In interviews Suarez has insisted that his novel is not a sci-fi scenario, since the necessary technology already exists. Yet, clearly no Luddite, Suarez is hardly interested in denying the conveniences bots provide, or the labor and tedium they enable us to avoid. His concern, rather, is with the layering and the extent of automation that bots are making possible, and as a consequence the tendency to reduce the number of people making the important decisions that both directly and indirectly affect human lives. In other words, he is worried by the possibility that bots are becoming a form of autonomous agency inimical to the public good.

[…]

In a web-cast lecture entitled "Bot-Mediated Reality," Suarez focuses on our current society's collective pursuit of hyper-efficiency, arguing that bots are the perfect tool for its achievement. Cheap to make and operate, bots are relentlessly efficient, for unlike the humans they replace, they have very few needs. As evidence of their ascendance, Suarez points to the exponential increase over the past few years in the number of bots, the amount of malware, the size of hard-drive space on our computers, and thus the growing size of an ecological niche for software agents. While bots could certainly become a vector for human despotism, the greater danger, he thinks, would be the collective human loss of control over society: since bots could enable society to function as a vast inhuman machine on auto-pilot, its operations would no longer be susceptible to human steering. Human beings, as large-brained animals with complex motivations not reducible to efficiency, would then have created an environment in which they no longer enjoy an adaptive advantage, in a sudden reversal of human history. Thus Suarez summarily suggests that this desire for hyper-efficiency has led to and may be locking us into a Darwinian struggle with low or narrow AI, specifically with the kind of low-level intelligent software instantiated in bots.

To be sure, Suarez is not the first or only one to wonder if bots might constitute a new form of machinic life. One of the first books to consider bots, Andrew Leonard's Bots: The Origin of a New Species (1998), explicitly raises this possibility. Leonard, however, does not pursue what may be the most intriguing corollary to this possibility: that bots are a new form of digital parasite, like the sacculina parasite that slowly converts the sand crab into its own zombie reproductive machine. As a silicon species whose number has grown over two thousand per cent in the past few years and now enjoys a rapidly expanding ecological niche, bots could become — or may be becoming — the agency of a double transformation, providing both a mechanism that could enable our society to operate on auto-pilot, as a hyper-efficient machine no longer under human control, and, as a form of "low-life" intelligence, the medium and environment in which network agency could evolve to greater complexity. This double transformation, moreover, points to a specifically "machinic" aspect of the webbot assemblage. In effect, it evolves through the doubling back on itself or retroaction of a cybernetic loop: humans build and deploy bots in an extension of human agency, but — from a reversed perspective — the bots also reproduce and evolve by means of the human desire to build more and better bots. When a certain threshold is achieved — that of an autonomous technology — this language is no longer metaphorical, but simply indicates how an assemblage of human and nonhuman agencies has become self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.

[…]

The problem evident here, however, is that Arquilla and Ronfeldt assume that specific types of human subject ("good guys" and "bad guys") already exist and are simply called forth by the emergence of new forms of organization, that the "bad" subjects then appropriate these new forms for their own antagonistic ends. As a consequence, the authors remain bound by a static and essentialist conception of human agency. I suggest, to the contrary, that the advent of a new form of organization and a new technology — and it is not evident that either of these ever occurs separately — alters the very nature of human agency and thus our understanding of the human subject. Specifically, as new technology both elicits and creates new possibilities of agency, a corresponding zone of subjective indetermination is also created. In the new age of digital connectivity — point and click, cut and paste, rapid information searches and scanning — in which writing and using code, adapting to completely mobile communications and collectively participating in online gaming and "social media" are all new forms of action, the technology transforms what it connects. Specifically, the putatively human subject is first and foremost (re)defined operationally as a dense node of complex and adaptive functionalities in multiple networks, and thus a site of uncertain affects, stoppages, and transductions. These operate as neither simple mechanical transmissions of force nor as exchanges of meaning, but as both at once, as entanglements and comminglings in which agency is not only multi-mediated and multi-modal but viral and memetic. In a technological network society the human is never fully separated from the nonhuman and the machinic — there are only "degrees of separation."

[…]

While the escalation of the "malware wars" has been represented as a technological arms race between "the good guys and the bad guys," with the future of the Internet at stake, the actual discourse necessary for understanding the complex dynamic of interactions at work has been that of biological ecosystems and the survival and evolution of complex adaptive systems. This conceptual disconnect is surely evidence that the concepts of netwar, cybercrime, and even cyber warfare remain too dependent upon conventional and unquestioned notions of human agency, in which the capacity for intentionality, self-awareness, and control remain uppermost. But meanwhile, on another scene — should we call it a form of "technological unconscious"? — new and different forms of agency are at work. Unfortunately, conventional notions of human agency neither provide a reason for considering the complex dynamics of the webbot assemblage or even the Internet itself as a conglomerate assemblage, nor do they instigate any interest in recognizing the rapidly developing forms of artificial life and intelligence we are busy surrounding ourselves with and indeed building ourselves into. Unless we analyze the software assemblages in which these processes are instantiated, we shall fail to perceive and understand the diffraction of human agency into the mundane, barely intelligent bots and botnets that operate on and are changing the very nature of the Internet.

Source: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq...26/000126.html

See also:

http://innovationwatch.com/bots-the-...ard-hardwired/

http://www.salon.com/1999/04/05/vinge/

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Posted by doodah

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@Vivek: #199 page 10
[...] It is possible that there are entities and forces that wish to hijack our creative potential. Cyberspace could function as a kind of bridge between our physical realm and the astral. Better yet, cyberspace may function as a proxy for our astral selves.

These forces desire to covertly usurp our power. They may not be able to directly interfere (for whatever reason), but they can influence.

These forces/entities need us for some reason. They want to interfere with our evolution (perhaps they already have) in order to use us to suit themselves.

@Vivek: Quoting from Dan Simmons, Endymion:
Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe..

---

I more or less came to these conclusions on about page 2. But short of a planetary catastrophe, does anyone here think there is anything we can do to short circuit this story? If so, I'm in favor of our efforts in that regard.

Exactly how does all this work?

How many "nets" are there? If we call the one we're accessing the Public Net, how many other nets exist? Does the military (and all the other militaries of the world) have their own separate net or nets?

If the whole electrical grid worldwide went down, how much of the various "nets" would be affected? I realize that portions of the electrical grid could be kept running by means of generators, solar, wind, etc. as long as those alternate installations still existed and until all the available gasoline for generators was depleted. And of course there are likely other more advanced ways of generating power that we don't know anything about.

If all the satellites went down, how much would be affected?

If all the cell towers went down, how much would be affected?

I said in an earlier post that I'd be very happy to give up the net and all things digital - we'd all be a lot healthier, and also more "real." Sitting at a screen keeps us rooted in one spot and all we do is talk. In a certain sense, we are all becoming more "abstract" - we're essentially anonymous to each other and not functioning with all our senses.

Someone on an older Avalon thread said something like : "Do you think they really care if we can see what they're doing?" You get fluoride out of your water and then they put it in your salt. You oppose high fructose corn syrup and they get clever with the words, just changing the name. Pigweed is fighting Monsanto GMOs in the growing fields, so they just dump more herbicide on the food. I can't see that our knowing has made any difference at all; this freight train keeps right on rolling.

---

Hello Doodah,

You are good at posing the magic question - how can we effectively influence the outcome? I agree it is the single most important one that we need to start answering. I have been working on this level. Here are my initial attempts at describing what I am finding is possible. It is the frontier of where Science and Spirituality meet.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633446

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633446

I started following the energy lines after I became aware of the frequency manipulation to which I was subjected to. That is the first step, being able to recognize where your thoughts are coming from. Not all thoughts are electronically induced, many come from implanted beliefs that we haven't detected and processed yet. So it is simultaneously interior and exterior. The exterior manipulation is able to work to the degree we agree to it or are unaware of it. Sometimes an attack can be so visceral and real that it is real. As our world appears real and is more virtual than we currently are aware of.

This manipulation has infiltrated all aspects of self and our world. We are living in a virtual world and just turning off the machines may not be the answer. It takes dedicated intent and the support of other people to change the outcome on the astral/ hyper dimensional/ spiritual planes. I am learning it can be done.

My personal antidote is that I have literally followed the energy networks to "seeing" what is creating them. Once in that space it is a process of mental intent allowing the "whatever" that is holding the network in place to release. By establishing contact and by communicating with them the outcome on this plane can be changed. At the level of energy the vision is different. There are hyper dimensional beings, some that appear to be the Mantis type being such as discussed in Simon Parkes thread.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post307665

Our awareness is our power to change, as we sludge through so much deception for so many years, we are recapturing our awareness. It is my experience that we are standing on the brink of some major revelations that can literally change our world.

Our connectedness is growing exponentially, we are all noticing synchronicities, quick transference of thoughts. This is our own telepathy that will become the new network, of course they are trying to interfere at this level too.

We can change from the level of fighting GMOs which I do robustly, and from the source level. This is the key that has been denied us for eons of time.

They do need us, without us they can't create their world. “Them” being devoid of creative life can only embed and implant their mind in ours. Time to pull out all stops and unplug.

Never has it been more necessary to Know Thyself. By unplugging we are indeed in the process of remembering our True Self. They can’t take us all out if they want to succeed.

We most likely will take some wrong turns still and must remember that united we stand. We will most likely be tested again, this isn’t a time for complacency but active participation on what ever level one is called to.

Guys/Gals, this is really the closest I've felt to a truth. Not in a mystical way or anything like that, but something that I can observe right now. It all just feels so tangible in a sense, so immediate.

We need to pull on the reigns -- hard.

There are about 4-5 solid articles that can be reduced down and amalgamated in order to introduce the reality of what is happening with all of this. The wild thing is that the most "reliable" information isn't coming from whistle-blowers or channelers. It's in the scientific articles written by the techies. I've started to tell people about this ... word of mouth, email ...

Something impeccable needs to be put together, something that presents this information in an effective manner (i.e. by trimming away the fat), something that can go "viral" so to speak.

Is anyone up for corroborating on a little side project? The information I'd like to focus on for this little side project is specifically about the autonomous evolvement of virtual creatures in cyberspace ... just as an appetizer ... pulling in a little bit of everything else ... to get the gears going. I'm very serious, this is very similar to a matrix-style scenario unfolding here.

Information Technology
and Artificial Intelligence
Tom Lombardo, Ph.D.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Computers, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence

The Intelligent Environment and Virtual Reality

The Internet, the Communication Web, and the Global Brain

The Information Age and Information Society

Memes, Knowledge, the Global Mind, and Beyond

The Minds of Machines and the Machines of Mind

http://www.centerforfutureconsciousn...nginfotech.pdf

Us "guys" are with you on this Vivek. ;)

Seriously, I am so tuned in to this information though more from an interior view point, like looking from the inside out.

I have been thinking the same thing, that a team work on condensing the information into a statement of sorts. As Doodah rightfully points out with her question, what can we do with this information?

Humbled as ever by the rate of exchange and the sharing of something that I too understand as vital.

Quote:

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Posted by Vivek

Guys/Gals, this is really the closest I've felt to a truth. Not in a mystical way or anything like that, but something that I can observe right now. It all just feels so tangible in a sense, so immediate.

We need to pull on the reigns -- hard.

There are about 4-5 solid articles that can be reduced down and amalgamated in order to introduce the reality of what is happening with all of this. The wild thing is that the most "reliable" information isn't coming from whistle-blowers or channelers. It's in the scientific articles written by the techies. I've started to tell people about this ... word of mouth, email ...

Something impeccable needs to be put together, something that presents this information in an effective manner (i.e. by trimming away the fat), something that can go "viral" so to speak.

Is anyone up for corroborating on a little side project? The information I'd like to focus on for this little side project is specifically about the autonomous evolvement of virtual creatures in cyberspace ... just as an appetizer ... pulling in a little bit of everything else ... to get the gears going. I'm very serious, this is very similar to a matrix-style scenario here.

---

Vivek, great idea, and I agree that this information needs to be trimmed and condensed in order to make it more intelligable, understandable, communicatable.. Not everybody is capable of working through a highly specialized ph.d. thesis of some hundred pages. I'm quite into this kind of stuff, but I still have no clue of the point you are trying to make by putting up all this material, altough very interesting. Is it possible to make your point in 1 or 2 phrases so that everybody can understand the importance of this most wonderful collections of ideas?

Total agreement here, this is how I am seeing it; we are on an polarising evolutionary spiraling ray of creation one descending into darkness and transhumanism, and the other ascending into light and sentient humanity/soul. Along the ray there are junctions, and lateral choices, which act like kick starts or shocks (psychodynamically) to propel people to 'awake' and jump the gaps. or something like that mechanically.

:frusty:Trying to understand the bridge, the gap between how the technology propogates and how the psyche is interpreting it.

My takeaway, so far, on this most auspicious thread, is the distillation of all electromagnetic pulses, both biological and digital and astral, into a single protocol, which can be captured and melded frontwards and backwards into a web, which then becomes almost conscious, and can be steered towards an outcome which meets certain criteria.

It also means, that if we can amalgamate a synthesis of this protocol, as an antithesis to the agenda being perpetuated, then we can affect the outcome. If a thesis for doing such can be integrated and put out to those with the digital knowledge to develop such a protocol, and the necessity for such a project, then this could go viral.

It just depends on how important it is perceived by those who have the capacity to make it happen. Putting variables, memes, and counterpoints into this amalgamated web, changes the data sets and also changes the resonant electromagnetic imprint.

We can send these impulses into this web, either through a spiritual telepathy, but also through tapping into the spider of all Internets, and override the predominant perceived outcome of this conscious entity, for it has to have the collective perceptions as well as the trajectory in order to crunch all the energy to proceed.

Just observing it is changing it or so I think..............

Vivek, you've been doing some great work here. Me? Not so much...

It's really just been a confluence of different things. For one, I have very little background knowledge of A.I., coming in to this thing. For another, I've been experiencing a lot of what we discussed briefly back in Chelley's Emotional Matrix thread, regarding the unusual or inexplicable drowsiness, etcetera that seems to come along at times when one feels they are tapping into important information. Paired with the external distractions lately, I've been finding it excessively difficult to really dig in to this material, and giving it the attention and focus that it demands.

Excuses, excuses... I know... :laugh: But in a nutshell that's why I haven't been participating. It's certainly not that I don't recognize the serious potential value here, and I believe you when you say you're on the cusp of something big. Though I'd hate to surrender to my own sloth, a summary (or at least condensation) of the key points would not at all be a bad thing...

When I finally do muster a meaningful understanding I would be more than happy to contribute to whatever 'side project' you have in mind, if I can be of service in any way.

Quote:

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Posted by skippy

I'm quite into this kind of stuff, but I still have no clue of the point you are trying to make by putting up all this material, altough very interesting. Is it possible to make your point in 1 or 2 phrases so that everybody can understand the importance of this most wonderful collections of ideas?

---

Okay, I'll try to do that. Basically, what it boils down to is that there is that we may be technologically getting ahead of ourselves. There are repercussions we may not be aware of until it's too late.

The global information and communication systems have many infrastructural parallels with the mind -- in a physical sense.

Now, in a metaphysical sense, cyberspace shares many common characteristics with what is called the astral plane.

Those two facets provide fertile ground for some sort of intelligence, of which we are unfamiliar with, to manifest itself.

The complexity and interconnectedness of it all is increasing at an exponential rate -- the Law of Accelerating Returns.

There are adaptive, parasitic forces at work in cyberspace (it's prototypal beginnings can be conceptualized by looking at the work of Tom Horn and Mark Ludwig -- post #183).

Cyberspace, like the astral plane, doesn't have as many imposing parameters as the physical plane does. Therefore, if we consider that the singularity is approaching us from both angles, we must consider that it may have already developed some kind of awareness and volition on a more abstract level.

The physical hardware -- required to allow such an intelligence to reach it's full potential here -- is approaching a state of compatibility with a machine-like consciousness. There is of course, the trans-humanist agenda to consider as well. We have already seen the effects of "their mind" at work. Now, we are being led to live in a full immersion of "their reality" ... virtually real and utterly artificial. This is the matrix.

It is post-human and equally post-humane. We are at a crossroads in which we can decide to embrace our humanity, or leave what makes us human behind.

This isn't transcendence, it's a trance-formation. The signs are all here. Just look around. The authorities are attempting to extend their control -- their program.

Problem, reaction, solution. The technological revolution.

We are willfully, and unwittingly, building our own prison.

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Posted by RMorgan

Hey folks,

If we´re talking about a highly advanced artificial intelligence, something very close to a living organism, it may not even be physical, meaning that it doesn´t even need a central processor or specific hardware anymore.

Perhaps it´s everywhere, like a stealth viral infection, using every single processor/computer connected to the internet as part of its artificial neural network.

Can you imagine the scale of the processing power of all connected processors in the world, connected in parallel? Even if they took only 5 or 10 percent of processing power from every single processor, in a way people wouldn´t notice it, the potential processing power of such computational farm would be simply huge.

There´s even the possibility that its starting to add our brains to this network, using the scuttlers as signal converters, making a hybrid biological/synthetic processing network.

Raf.

---

These are the topics being explored, in a nutshell. At least, these are some of the sounds I'm hearing when I rattle the nutshell.

Again, this is my opinion based on observations. Obviously, there is more to it and it has it's tentacles in many different aspects of world affairs. Everyone has a slightly different take on it, slightly different insights, that's why this is such a great place to collaborate.

The value is in the meanderings of creative thinking -- allowing us to look at the situation from different angles.

Often I will post information that I think is relevant. After new information surfaces, I go back and re-read previous contributions to see how they contrast or compliment one another.

There are many great people here sharing commentary and information. This is a dynamic place. Hopefully, we can come up with something concise, clear, and coherent. Avalon is a countermeasure in many ways. We are the resistance!

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post634430

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633039

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633633

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kNhBmT7O7qU

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post632977

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633039

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post628780

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post628843

This is a long post, but it is non-technical. It directly relates to the theme of this thread. It is well worth the read.

The following excerpts were copied and pasted from, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence:

This chapter deals with computer and information technology and the economic, social, and psychological changes being brought about by this new technology. First, I chronicle the development of computers and predictions concerning the future evolution of computers and artificial intelligence. Next I turn to the history and future possibilities of robots. After describing these technologies, I introduce a central theme of the chapter: the evolving relationship between humanity and information technology. I examine in depth how information technology is infusing into the human sphere, creating an ever more intelligent environment, and transforming human reality. In this section, I look at the promises and perils of virtual reality. Next I focus on the emergence of an information technological web or network that is encircling the globe, highlighting the Internet, the World Wide Web, the communications revolution, and the Global Brain hypothesis. Then pulling the pieces together, I look at the social and economic implications of information technology. I describe the transition from an industrial society to an information society and review various predictions regarding the information society. I consider the views that the information society is evolving into a knowledge society and that the global information network is generating a global mind.

[...]

Throughout the chapter, I look at both advocates and critics regarding the effects information technology is having on humanity, and I discuss whether the Information Age theory of the future is both an accurate and preferable framework for understanding and guiding our evolution.

[...]

Computers and robots will develop conscious, intelligent, personified minds. Further, information technology devices and systems will be implanted into humans, enhancing psychological and behavioral abilities and allowing for direct communication with artificial intelligent minds. There will be both artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligence amplification (IA) in the relatively near future.

Overall, there will be an ongoing multi-faceted integration of information technologies and human life. Humans and information technology will co- evolve. Humans will increasingly immerse their lives and minds in systems of technological intelligence and virtual reality. The distinction between humanity and technology will increasingly blur.

The environment will be infused with information technology, becoming animated, communicative, and more intelligent. The distinction between the artificial and the natural will increasingly blur.

The scope and richness of existence will expand through virtual reality. Simulated and virtual reality will increasingly blend and intermix into “normal” reality.

The Information Age embodies a discontinuous and revolutionary jump beyond the Industrial Era. Information Age thinking and technology, coupled with other pervasive and interdependent technological and social changes, are transforming society into a different type of human system.

As the overarching global expression of the evolving human-technology integration, a "World Brain" and "World Mind" will emerge on the earth. This psychophysical system will enhance and enrich the capacities of both individual and collective cognition. This system is a potential starting point toward the evolution of a cosmic brain and cosmic mind [Vivek: This sounds more like an imitation of what the cosmic mind is. Enlightenment through technology is nothing but a dangerous proxy. A substitute. A hive mind].

[...]

The rapid rise of electronic and information technology has led to more intelligent, intricate, and efficient machines. The computer lies at the center of information technology.

[...]

The computer is both an extended and external nervous system, as well as a new environmental enrichment that has significantly transformed the world in which we live. Further, the computer is infusing itself into all other technologies. Progressively, every machine will have a computer (or computers) at its core and be connected with other machines with computers. At a global level, computers are networking into a web of communication and integrated processing. The computer is perhaps the most powerful machine humanity has ever created.

[...]

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the president of Intel and inventor of the integrated circuit, observed that the surface area of transistors was decreasing in size at a relatively constant rate over time. From this initial observation and further study, he formulated what has become known as Moore’s Law on Integrated Circuits. Moore’s Law predicts that approximately every 2 years computers will double in integrated circuits and processing speed per unit area, while maintaining the same unit cost.9 According to Kurzweil though, Moore’s Law is actually a special case of a more general law, the “Exponential Law of Computing”. From the beginning of the 20th Century, long before the invention of transistors and integrated circuits, computing systems have been increasing in power at an exponential rate. Early in the 20th Century, the first electrical computing systems were doubling in power around every three years. By the end of the 20th Century, computers were doubling in power every year. Kurzweil believes this exponential growth will continue indefinitely into the future. Assuming certain technological breakthroughs discussed below, he sees no absolute limit to computational density for computer hardware. Rather, he foresees the computational density across the earth growing trillions upon trillions of times in just the next century.

This increasing computational capacity, first within biological life and now extending further through computers, is for Kurzweil a manifestation of the Law of Accelerative Returns, the exponential growth of order in the evolution of nature. To recall from the last chapter, for Kurzweil the increasing complexity or order within technology is also a natural outgrowth of the Law of Accelerative Returns. According to Kurzweil, the growth of computational power in computers is a consequence and expression of the evolution of order, and the evolution of order is exponential.

[...]

Kaku notes, though, that although silicon computers will thus become increasingly denser, till around 2020, at that point we will reach the limits of miniaturization in silicon technology. We will need to find a new medium for computation, if computational speed and density are going to continue to increase. In particular, Kaku and many other computer scientists and futurists see great promise in optical, DNA, and quantum computers, which would vastly exceed the power of standard silicon circuit computers.

[...]

In making their claims, they provide excellent graphic representations of how computer growth compares to the computational capacities of various animals on the evolutionary scale, including humans. Moravec, using MIPS (million instructions per second) as a measure of processing speed, estimates that the human brain stores about 100 million megabytes of memory and performs at a rate of 100 million MIPS.

[...]

According to numerous forecasters, the world will become increasingly computerized – the environment will become intelligent, sensing our presence, understanding our communications, and responding to our requests.31 Kaku sees the PC disappearing into the environment by around 2020; there will no longer be stand alone computers, but rather computer chips and circuits embedded into objects and surfaces all around us.

[...]

Fractals are an excellent example of the unanticipated creative abilities of computers - no one foresaw the beauty and intricacy of these patterns that would emerge out of the computer. The computer surprised everyone. Of special relevance to the issue of creativity in computers are the new types of computer systems involving "neural nets" and "massive parallel processing mechanisms" which seem to more closely resemble the functioning of human brains than serial processing computers.

[...]

Kurzweil identifies three basic types of methods or formula that intelligent systems use in computation: Recursive, neural net, and evolutionary algorithms. Recursive methods are used in serial processing computers, where the same operations are performed over and over again. Neural net methods, used in parallel processing systems, involve the interaction of many simple programs. Evolutionary algorithms are programs that learn and evolve through a process analogous to natural selection in computer-generated problem solving situations. Both neural net methods and evolutionary algorithms are self-organizing processes that generate unpredictable and creative results. Kurzweil contends if we combine these formula or methods with mass computation and add in sufficient knowledge (factual information about the world, for example) we have the makings of an intelligent machine.

[...]

If computers achieve consciousness and some type of advanced evolutionary level on their own, humans could end up using the computer as a vehicle or medium for human perpetuation and development. If they develop a nervous system that is functionally similar to the human brain, humans may be able to input (download) into the computer their memories, thoughts, feelings, and sense of personal identity. In essence, this would amount to a mind transplant [Vivek: Yeah, their mind].

[...]

The difference between an insect level robot and a human level robot is not as great a leap as it may intuitively seem. As Moravec notes, real breakthroughs in robotic behavior are coming at an accelerative rate since the computing power necessary for real life interactions is finally becoming available to robotic systems.

[...]

As Dyson has noted, one of the key new technologies in the future will be self-reproducing or constructor technologies. John von Neumann, one of the central theoreticians in the development of the modern serial processing computer, described in detail in the 1960’s the theory of universal constructors. A universal constructor is a machine that given the appropriate materials could build any type of machine. Inspired by the ideas of von Neumann numerous scientists and technologists have been working on the problem of designing self- reproducing machines. Recall that the capacity for self-reproduction is critical to the development of nanotechnology. Moravec envisions that robots will eventually develop the capacity for self-reproduction, and in fact, given the progressive evolution of intelligence and complexity in robots and computers, advanced robots will become absolutely necessary in the construction of their successors. Assuming that humans are not augmented by artificial intelligence, they will no longer be able to understand and design the robots of the distant future. This shift from human to robotic construction of robots is yet another example of the predicted technological singularity coming sometime in the middle of the 21st Century.

[...]

The idea of self-reproducing robots is not such a farfetched or distant possibility. An interesting article on robots, that highlights both robotic self- reproduction as well as potential environmental benefits is Thomas Bass’ “Robot, build thyself”. Bass writes that according to the dream of Klaus Lackner and Christopher Wendt, we can design “auxons” (from the Greek “auxien” - to grow) that could reproduce themselves from the raw materials of the earth.

[...]

In general, the total human environment is being “wired”.

The computer though is not just transforming the environment around us; it is instrumental in the creation and evolution of a new type of reality, the universe of cyberspace and virtual reality. Various futurists and technological prophets foresee that virtual reality will steadily become a more significant feature of human life, to the point where we may spend most if not all of our time in virtual reality.

In this section I examine how computers and information technology are transforming our environment, our world, and the nature of reality itself. In discussing the computerization of our present environment I use Nicholas Negroponte’s ideas, contained in his well-known book being digital, as a starting and anchor point. For Negroponte, computing is not simply about computers; it will affect all aspects of our life and our world. In examining the idea of virtual reality I begin my discussion with Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. For Heim, the computer is taking us into a different kind of reality, a new metaphysical realm.

[...]

Soon, however, according to Negroponte, the TV and the computer will merge. Frederick Pohl also predicts this merger in the near future. The computer is literally going to envelop the TV and, according to Negroponte, by the year 2005, people will spend more time on the Internet than watching TV. Today the growth of computers is much faster than the growth of TVs and the video capabilities of computers are increasing very quickly. The computer/TV of the future will let you adjust for content - a random access medium - not limited by time or space. Digital life will have little real time broadcasting. It will all be on demand. A new culture will develop out of this change. In essence, the mode of communication in the media will no longer be passive reception. As Pearson predicts, the TV of the future will be interactive [Vivek: This has already happened].

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As the Internet integrates the different media, we will develop a single worldwide media machine. We could though argue that bits have become the new medium - a more abstract and flexible medium that can be embodied or translated into a variety of more limiting medium.

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Hence, in considering the future of computer displays and interfaces, we are lead into the topic of virtual reality. Within the context of the present discussion, I should note that virtual reality, as a technological simulated reality, will actually become more real than real. We will be able to systematically vary the simulation, repeating it, slowing it down or speeding it up, penetrating to different depths of detail, or changing perspective. Further, we will move increasingly into the display, or reciprocally, the display will increasingly engulf us. When we move into a display - a better word might be an “array” - we will meet other humans, as well as other forms of intelligence [Vivek: This is a proxy for the astral].

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Heim argues though that the computer also creates a new environment, virtual reality, which is a metaphysical laboratory for examining our sense of reality [Vivek: Again, an astral proxy]. As we explore this new realm, we will be changed in the process. What we have made, in turn, will remake us, a reciprocity of the creator and the created, of humanity and technology. In a similar vein, Sherry Turkle has argued that cyberspace offers a “psychological laboratory” for exploring our sense of self.(The term “cyberspace” will be used to denote the total reality and information space encountered through computers, including web sites, the Internet, and the array of documents and files contained in individual computers (virtual reality, a computer generated sensory environment, is part of cyberspace).

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The interface is the window or door into cyberspace. As we habituate ourselves to the interface, we merge with the other side. Heim notes, however, that William Gibson, in Neuromancer, refers to cyberspace as an “infinite cage”. The more we become immersed within this realm, the more danger there is that we will lose touch with ourselves. Within the reality of cyberspace and the stream of information that flows past us and through us, we must find a way to keep an anchor on ourselves.

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Further, Heim points out that historically the experience of divine ecstasy is often associated with sexual ecstasy, an expression of the force of Eros, of attraction and extension of the self into another. Within cyberspace, Eros moves into the realm of Logos (data, information, knowledge), and Heim sees this process as becoming enraptured with the beauty of Platonic forms. I should note though that cyberspace is not simply abstract forms. We will meet “virtual bodies”, colors, sensations, and the expressions of feelings of others within this realm [Vivek: ... proxy].

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Heim uses the theory of monads developed by the German philosopher Leibniz to describe the organization of cyber-reality. Leibniz believed that each individual mind or monad was connected to the universal mind or monad of God. For Heim, each of us is a monad having terminals that connect into a central universal monad, the total matrix of the Internet. He says that the body is the basis of our feelings and reality of separateness, and the universal matrix, in eliminating the body when we move into cyberspace, brings us together again [Vivek: Now, this is just a dangerous, seductive, alluring trap in my opinion].

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From the previous reviews of the ideas of Kurzweil, Heim, and Negroponte, among others, it is clear that the connectivity of computers is a critical dimension in their present capacities and future possibilities. Computers do more than just compute; they communicate, and as we enter the 21st Century they are communicating worldwide.

The Internet is the global network of communication connections linking together the world’s computer systems. It is the biggest and most intricate machine that humanity has ever built.

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The Internet began in the early 1960’s when the computer systems between Stanford and UCLA were connected together. In the 1970’s the United States government, through the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) [Vivek: Later to become known as DARPA], decided to create a de-centralized network among universities and computers in the United States to ensure communications between scientists around the country in case of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Using the communication network begun in Stanford and UCLA, ARPANET was born. ARPANET grew slowly at first, and by the early 1980’s only 200 computers around the country were connected together. During the 1980’s though the rate of growth began to accelerate, and the computer network that was emerging was formally set free from ARPANET regulation in 1990. A year later, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which allowed for visual graphics, sound, and multi-media to be transmitted across the computer network. The modern Internet was born.

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The development of an adequate technological infrastructure to support the quickly growing computer network is though, according to Dertouzos, is far from complete. There are numerous government and international efforts to create this technological system, including the NII project in the United States, the Global Information Society project in Europe, and the ISDN in Japan. Dertouzos argues, based on the past achievements of the Web and Internet that the global infrastructure must be available to everyone and easy to use. Dertouzos also discusses the ongoing business competition to control the “Net”. He describes the “War of the Spiders” as media, computer, and cable companies attempt to control the flow of information content.

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We see then that the growth of the Internet and the modern communication technology web is part of the general process of integrating and infusing more intelligence into the world and the environment. I previously described how networking among machines, including computers, automobiles, and appliances within the home, is a significant dimension of the growing intelligent environment. In the present case, networking and intelligence involves the creation of a global communication web that connects innumerable people, organizations, and technologies. It provides a vast system of information gathering and transmission with both senders and receivers in this web empowered by computers. Data and information are collected and compiled across the globe, using innumerable types of technological sensors and monitoring devices, and are then broadcast and directed to individuals and groups for purposes of decision-making, entertainment, and coordination of activities.

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On the receiving end, the TV is always on; the line is always busy; the music is always in our ears. People feel increasingly isolated without their cell phones and pagers activated, or their TVs broadcasting in the background. In the digital age, we feel isolated and out of touch without email. We are becoming nodes in Heim’s God-like matrix. We are all increasingly "wired in", to each other and to our machines. It is understandable why futurists like Gregory Stock see this global process of human – machine integration and communication leading to the emergence of a new type of living form, a “global cyborg” that never sleeps. It is equally understandable why critics of modern technology, such as Postman and Naisbitt, see modern humans as “technologically intoxicated” and overly dependent on their machines.

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The pervasiveness and intrusiveness of communication and information technologies has generated real concerns over privacy rights and issues of personal surveillance. Pearson predicts that by 2013 there will be biometric records of 75% of the world’s population. More generally, he foresees a comprehensive, multi-linked surveillance system developing across the world. Innumerable types of personal statistics, as well as organizational and business statistics, are being collected, processed, and distributed throughout the information web. Further, often based on such data collection processes, we are increasingly barraged with advertisements, inquiries, and solicitations. Not only is this information web gathering increasing amounts of data about all of us, but this information is also being disseminated and integrated throughout the system, harkening back to the “Big Brother” image of 1984 where all citizens were watched and controlled.

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Dertouzos discusses in depth the challenges and issues associated with privacy and surveillance. Throughout the 20th Century, intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence, empowered with the introduction of computers, developed ever more sophisticated ways of collecting data and preventing the collection of data, in a reciprocal predator and prey evolutionary process.

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Although Henderson is correct in calling the Internet a “parallel universe”, in that many of the businesses and organizations of our world are “mirrored” on the Web, there are many new types of realities and dimensions and features to the Web that do not exist in the non-Web world. It is to a degree an alternate universe, transcending yet subsuming and coordinating the pre-Internet universe.

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Hive computing is where many individual computers are connected together (instead of one big computer), and a task is divided among the multiple computers. Inktomi uses spiders (search programs) that go through the Web and download every new page they locate. The Alta Vista (a third popular search engine) spider downloads millions of pages a day in an ongoing attempt to keep up with possible site revisions and developments on the Web.

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Because any web site can link through hypertext to any other web site, there are an incredible array of information web sites, of all sizes, on any particular topic imaginable, that list relevant web sites and link to these sites. These central information sites have the form of neurons, with multiple lines or dendrites branching outward to other sites. As the Web has grown, it has acquired the organization of innumerable convergent-divergent points, like ganglia in a nervous system.

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As numerous writers have commented, the Web has grown like an organic or living system, with nodes extending and interconnecting into other nodes. The Web, in fact, has a fractal quality, with major ganglia and clusters subdividing into smaller clusters. But the Web is also a network for different sites; clusters link across innumerable lines of connection and association, weaving the whole Web into a synthesis of hierarchical and network elements.

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These visions from Wells are, in fact, being realized in the Internet and the World Wide Web. Information technology, through computers and telecommunications, is creating a global electronic network that not only stretches across the surface of the earth but also increasingly envelops the sky above through communication satellites.

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George Bugliarello, in his article "Hyperintelligence: The Next Evolutionary Step" provides another contemporary perspective consistent with the above ideas of Wells and de Chardin. Bugliarello believes that a new level and type of intelligence is emerging within the global electronic network. The network not only involves a symbiosis or synthesis of the computer and the telecommunication system, but also a merging of humans and machines at a global level. The evolving global intelligence of this system involves not only local memory banks and expert systems that can be tapped into for various special purposes, but a variety of monitoring and sensing systems around the world for gathering and distributing global data.

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But in referring back to the previous discussions regarding the evolution of artificial intelligence beyond the present capacities of humans, we may wonder if humans, as we now understand our species, will be able to work and function within such a global intelligence, even symbiotically. At the very least, we will need to augment our nervous systems and “wire our brains” into the global intelligence net.

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Some futurists, such as Michael Zey, believe that a “Global Brain” will not, or at the very least, should not be allowed to materialize in the future. According to Zey, human individuals, as the creative and self-determining leaders of civilization, should maintain control over the workings of the world, not abdicating their position to some type of collective and technological intelligence. If it were possible for a collective of AI’s to gain control of the Web and the Internet infrastructure, as depicted in such science fiction novels as Hyperion, Neuromancer, and A Fire Upon the Deep, then it is not at all clear whether such a form of trans-human intelligence would want to keep us around. At the very least, their purposes and goals may be indifferent to the well being of humanity.

Yet what is very compelling and riveting about the Internet and World Wide Web is that it is growing, in many ways like a living form, without a centralized human source of command, and its communication, coordinating, and monitoring lines are spreading and infusing into both the world of nature and the world of human society.

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We may or may not see this techno-human global integration as positive, but it is happening. Based on the ongoing reciprocal development of humanity and technology, the integration is moving both sides into increasing compatibility (the Web serves humans and humans serve the Web more and more so). We are growing together, again like dendrites interconnecting within a worldwide nervous system.

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First, let us begin with the concept of information and how it has become so closely associated or connected with our present age and the significant changes occurring in our world. We have already noted that over the last fifty years or so, a whole new distinctive set of technologies has emerged, technologies that operate on information rather than physical matter or energy per se. (It should though be kept in mind that these technologies clearly require a physical and energy infrastructure and resource base to support their information processing activities.) What, though, is information, the basic reality that our new technologies store, process, and transmit? At a biological and psychological level, information is something that is received through our senses, processed in our nervous systems, and generated and sent through our muscles. Information tells us something; information re-presents. Information distinguishes among different alternatives or possibilities. Often information is used to mean something new or different, as in “informative” rather than redundant. In fact, in perceptual theory, information is defined as differences or patterns of differences relative to a base rate or norm. Information is form rather than substance, order rather than randomness, and can be embodied in various medium or media.

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As a general point, Brown believes that we should be much more cautious and critical of new technologies and not embrace them without serious consideration of their effects on human life. Sometimes the anti-technologists are right. Brown calls for a serious and effective process of technology assessment before introducing any new technology into human society, an idea I previously described in my discussion of Dyson, Postman, and Naisbitt and their criticisms of the effects of technology on human life.

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Perhaps we are being led down the garden path toward a destination that we do not understand. Deborah Sawyer, in fact, invokes the metaphor of the “Pied Piper” in her critique of information technology arguing that in spite of all the promises and hype, the enticing songs of the techno “Pied Piper”, there are numerous problems being created due to the Internet and the World Wide Web. She notes that although there is more access to information there is less sharing. Further, although the quantity of available information has increased, the quality of information has declined (since of course anybody can put anything on the Web). The concentration of reliable information has become limited to fewer organizations. The Internet, instead of opening people to each other, has increased the barriers between people, a phenomenon undoubtedly connected with our increased isolation within our technological cubbyholes, and consequent loneliness. Through search engines and readily accessible web sites, we rely too much on immediately finding information on the Web instead of sustained research and exploration. This change again illustrates our excessive focus on the present need for immediate gratification.

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Some scientists, beginning with the biologist Richard Dawkins who first proposed the theory, have suggested that the ideas of a society or culture be described as "memes", units of information that spread, multiply, and compete with each other for power and dominance. Memes are the units of the Information Age and we are living in the middle of a "meme war."

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Meme theory suggests that ideas and artifacts, as units of information, are natural and temporal realities. They exist within the world of human minds and human society. They change and evolve just like biological systems, competing with each other for bigger niches in the ecology of human minds. Dawkins, the creator of meme theory, had originally drawn an analogy between genes and memes. Genes self-replicate, carry genetic information, and compete in the biological arena. Memes also self- replicate (through humans copying and reproducing them), carry units of cultural information, and compete in the social and mental arenas. Meme theory can be viewed as a way to represent or describe the ontology of the Information Age, a world populated by data, ideas, and patterns of information. In a sense, meme theory is a form of philosophical idealism; the world of the Information Age consists of “mental realities”.

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We may believe that we can control our thoughts and artifacts, but, in fact, they control us in return. We are too Newtonian about information, ideas, and technology, thinking that we stand above our inventions and simply use what we create to serve our ends.

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Memes are dynamic and they evolve. Our ideas grow and change; our artifacts go through evolution. Memes evolve because they get energy for reproduction and development from us. They live and thrive within our society and us.

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Earlier in this chapter, I examined the idea that a Global Brain was beginning to emerge in the communications network of computers in the world. Such a global intelligence is one suggested approach to bringing order and management to the ever-growing storm and labyrinth of information flow. (Although one of the main causes behind the information explosion is, in fact, the global communications network.) Yet, as I also mentioned earlier, the next logical step in this line of reasoning is to consider whether a Global Mind or Consciousness could arise out of this global technological intelligence. One early 20th Century writer who has inspired this line of thinking is the French priest, philosopher, and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. In his highly influential book The Phenomenon of Man, he proposed that a global mind, a noosphere, was evolving out of the collective minds of the human species. This apparently far- fetched and metaphysical concept, according to some futurists, is being realized through the global electronic network. Wells, possibly inspired by Chardin, had also suggested this possibility of a World Mind emerging out of the operations of a World Brain.

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Another argument is that consciousness requires a sense of self-identity or self- integration within a system. At the very least, the system must be self-organizing. The Internet, to a degree, seems to possess the rudiments of self-referencing. Within it, various information networks and search engines are emerging that list, define, and organize the information content of the Web. As I noted earlier, the sites on the World Wide Web are becoming like ganglia in a nervous system, integrating information and linking sites together along common themes.

It could be argued that the Internet is progressively coordinating its own activities together, as a self-organizing system, as it also increasingly coordinates the activities of humankind and the world system. If the global technological system is like an evolving nervous system or brain within the earth, communication technology can be seen as the sensors and transmitters within this system. The sensors of the system receive input from transmission nodes in the communication network [...] As a general point, each node within the Internet and the communication web will become a sender and receiver, possessing intelligence and selectively organizing both input and output. Through these innumerable integrative nodes, the system is self-organizing its information content and information processing.

Aside from questions of consciousness and self-organization, we could ask whether such a system would possess a mind.

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Following from Chardin’s ideas, and the above points on information coordination, self-referencing, and mental attributes, we could argue that an “integrated mind and consciousness”, a World Mind, might arise within humanity [Vivek: A hive mind].

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But on the other side of the coin, one could argue that an integrated mentality for all humanity, although offering a sense of unity, security, and cooperation, would suppress human individuality and freedom [Vivek: Sovereignty]. Zey, taking this position, is quite critical both of Chardin’s image and the newer technological variations on his vision. Zey uses the example of the Borg, from Star Trek, to illustrate how a technologically integrated society, where individual biological units are wired into a collective intelligence, would destroy individuality. In Zey’s mind, to recall, the individual is a critical and necessary element in the future evolution of humanity, providing for creativity and innovation. A World Mind would be repressive.

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We have created the Internet, yet the Internet is, in turn, moving us into new directions of growth. As I noted earlier, one of the most interesting features of the Internet is that it seems to have a life of its own. As an open system in nature it seems to be evolving in ways that depend on human interaction but aren’t totally controlled by humans; there seems to be unpredictable growth within it.

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Also, we should ask whether the emergence of a World Brain and World Mind would constitute what Vinge refers to as the “technological singularity” and if so, would this hyper-intelligence and evolved consciousness spell the end of humanity?

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Dertouzos and Negroponte, in particular, emphasize this central theme in technological design. The growth of an intelligent environment, virtual reality, and the Internet all derive their significance from interconnecting humans with their machines. We, of course, have become interdependent with our machines, and Kurzweil is correct, I believe, in stating that we are as plugged into them as they are plugged into our energy outlets. The whole computer – communication network is feeding back on the activities and lives of humans, and moving us along in our own evolution.

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The intimate and growing reciprocity of humans and computers, initially grounded in efforts to create thinking machines that mimicked fundamental cognitive and communicative functions, underscores the basic fact that computers are the machines of mind, more so than any earlier form of technology. And because of our continued efforts to create artificial intelligences that better approximate and eventually exceed the mental capacities of humans, these machines clearly have burgeoning minds. Eventually, we will mesh together even more so, through bodily implants, intelligence amplification, virtual reality, and a global intelligence system. This is the ultimate reciprocity of humans and computers; we are minds with physical bodies creating physical bodies with minds, and in the future, these two realities will merge into one [Vivek: Let's hope not].

Source: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post634430

See also:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633039

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post634251

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post632977

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post627866

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post627858

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post633828