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

Citation

Mann, C.J.H. (2002), "Creating Internet Intelligence: Wild Computing, Distributed Digital Consciousness, and the Emerging Global Brain", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2002.06731eae.006

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

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

Ben GoertzelKluwer Academic/Plenum PublishersNew York, Boston, London, Moscow2002i-xvi, 342 pp.

ISBN 0-306-46735-6

hardback, EUR 110.00/USD $95.00/GBP £66.50

Keywords: Publication, Cybernetics, Internet

This book is published in the series ''International Series on Systems Science and Engineering'' which is edited by Dr George Klir the distinguished professor from State University of New York at Binghampton and is the 18th Volume. The series itself has produced a number of excellent studies and this study takes a very unusual look at, what the author sees as a ''little baby'' ready to develop. He believes it is on the verge of a fundamental transition. In his preface he writes that:

Today it's a distributed network of content and software, serving diverse people diverse functions. Soon enough it will be a self-organising intelligent system, with its own high-level coherent patterns, serving not only as a mind but as a world inhabited by a diversity of digital life forms.

In other words this is not another book about current web facilities, websites worth visiting, search engines worth using but one where the reader needs a strong intellectual background and an interest in more than the mechanics of a system. This is, we are told, a book that presents a detailed picture of the internet of the future, and the steps we can take right now to transform today's computer networks into their almost inevitable successor: a worldwide, self-organising digital mind. The author does this by introducing it in his first chapter – The Coming Evolution. This is followed by the presentation of his ideas assembled into three parts; Mind as a Network; Reconceptualizing the Internet; and Building Internet Minds and Worlds. References and Appendices 1-5 complete the work. A very comprehensive index is also provided. It has to be agreed that the ideas about ''global intelligent systems'', ''global brains'', and ''intelligent networks'' have been discussed for many decades. The first impressions of this text are that it will flesh them out and will achieve some of Ben Goertzel's aims of:

(sweeping) all the way from the philosophy of mind, society, and culture to the interactions between different cognitive processes in a distributed digital mind and the minutiae of communication protocols between increasing intelligent Internet agents.

A full review by the Kybernetes Internet Editor will be published in later issues of this journal.

C.J.H. MannBook Reviews and Reports Editor