Of computers and ants.

Tweet

I was skimming an article and found this segment in it and it really kind of made me take a step back and it was kind of one of those "whoa!" moments. Here is the excerpt I'm referring to: "Ants are abysmally stupid, in our terms, yet the colony as a super organism often gives rise to give the impression of the individual ants being intelligent. With beehives this feature expands even further. Under the right conditions, a complex systems analysis of the collective can be indistinguishable from that as a single organism. Compare to cells in the human body, or brain alone. Each human mind is a hive, of neurons; a hive mind. Each neuron is abysmally stupid, and each brain part is nearly worthless alone, yet the interconnected cells of each part and each part interconnected give rise to consciousness and higher brain functions. Then there’s the Internet, with its millions of routers and billions of computers all interconnected as one that is already evolving into a ’smart’ semantic web on its own. It’s no wonder that philosophers often compare the Internet -as a complex system- to the brain, and many thinkers argue that at some point the Internet itself may become unintendedly conscious via emergence. But what if a collective of intelligent beings harnessing global scale supercomputers armed with state of the art algorithms made the goal of turning their symbiotic co-evolving component of the Internet their life’s work?" just food for thought, it has been accepted already that individual personal computers that can perform as many algorithms and calculations as fast as the human brain, costing less than $2000, will be available by the year 2014