the amazing, conscious internet? not quite.

Quick, what has almost a billion legs, is self-aware, and lives on Facebook status updates, lolcats, porn, and tons of websites, the overwhelming majority of which get less traffic than than a gravel road in the middle of a secluded forest? Why it’s the internet according to New Scientist, an entity that’s either on its way to waking up to its own existence, or that’s already partially conscious and slowly ramping itself up. And I’m really, really hoping that the article either misquoted the experts or kept just the sensational parts of what they said for this story because the notion of the web coming alive is one of those ideas that may sound superficially plausible but is actually based on extending an analogy well beyond its limits. Since the internet is a complicated set of protocols sending over 21 petabytes worth of data packets across countless machines and proxies per year, one could assume that if there’s a setup that’s big, obscure, and complex enough to come alive on its own, it must be the web. But the fact of the matter is that for all its complexity, the web is actually not all that clever…

Sparing you the lesson in how web pages are actually fetched and the names of what protocols usually do a specific kind of data fetching and display, let me boil it down to the following. The internet is a very robust and dynamic set of paths for data to travel to its final destination and the web is the interface that makes all of that data human-friendly enough to use in applications for whatever devices can be hooked up to ethernet cables or receive an airborne signal. All it does is push around data to where it needs to go and all its bookkeeping simply keeps a tally of how much it pushes, of what, where, and by what paths, as well as what paths it could use now vs. what paths it could use earlier. Performance enhancing queues and priorities take place when a stream of data packets reaches the server and is taken up the layers of the OSI model rather than in the web, or in the internet itself. Note how there’s no training, no learning, no intelligent action on behalf of the internet here. In fact, the internet itself doesn’t even care what it transmits. It just knows to get a certain amount of data from one IP to another and that’s pretty much it. Everything else is up to the users.

But if the internet is basically just pushing lots of data around, where did New Scientist get the idea that it can spring to life? Well, it seems that they latched on an analogy of the internet behaving like a big electronic brain exchanging information across large nodes which could be thought of as cortexes. Of course to describe the internet that way requires taking a good deal of poetic license and simplifies the brain’s functions quite a bit in the comparison. At the end of the day, the brain has to respond to external stimuli and make decisions. Not so for the internet, which really doesn’t have a choice in whether it wants to fetch you more web memes. While in the future we could expect some sort of genetic algorithm optimizing how data travels to you, we won’t have to teach the web any new tricks. It does exactly what it was meant to do and what happens when the data which courses through the global pipelines after it reaches a server or a computer, is up to the humans. The wealth of scientific, medical, and historical information we can access through the web is also quite firmly in human hands since all that data is hosted on servers and retrieved only when there’s a valid request for it, a request made by humans. Since the internet itself doesn’t, and can’t, read or parse the data on its own, we don’t have to worry about it making a habit of randomly reading through volumes of technical information to gain not only sentience, but also a wealth of cutting edge expertise in everything as per Nick Bostrom…