The Internet, Evolution, and
God
by Peter
Shikli
21 July 2000
Looking into their crystal balls, we read in our computer trade journals what the best minds predict the internet will be a year into the future. Since they seem to be wrong as often as they are right, why not just jump off the deep end and speculate where it will all end up.
The path I will take integrates evolution, the internet, philosophy, and even God -- hence may offend many. For those who enjoy a cerebral romp involving what we do for a living, perhaps this will launch some beer-and-pizza discussions about the metaphysical side of what we do. I miss that from the '70s.
Begin with evolution. It is where we are supposed to have begun. But consider how many other evolutionary processes we are party to. It may have begun as an Industrial Revolution, but it soon settled into an evolution that brought us today's industries. With 20-20 hindsight, we can see Darwinian principles demanding so many false starts in order for the fittest industrial entities to survive.
From our flightless arms to the Space Shuttle in a hundred years, we see metal creatures evolving one into another. Whereas airplanes do not care for food and sex, their evolution did depend on their survival with war and money. Same game, different details.
Those of us who lived through the '70s saw the end of racial segregation not just as a collection of new laws but as a period of time when we and hundreds of millions of Americans changed our collective minds. Jane Goodall and many others see that as but a step in our moral evolution, much like the ubiquitous picture of the fish walking to dry land turning into an ape and finally into man.
Many years before segregation, a king could get off his horse, lop off the head of a peasant for no reason, and ride off with the moral approval of all but one. Even segregationists had evolved into a more advanced moral species than to condone that. And hopefully we continue to evolve into a more advanced moral entity.
We will return to moral evolution when we speculate about some important decisions the internet will require, but now let's consider what evolutionary tree the internet is part of. Of course it is the empowerment of our minds, the steps by which the species went from abacus to Application Service Provider.
We like to call it revolution rather than evolution, perhaps to lend ourselves importance, but the output of each revolution was the input of the next revolution. The revolution of the mammals against the dinosaurs was but the input to man's revolution against all other mammals. If we search for the underlying continuum as Darwin did, we may come up with a theory about our intellectual evolution, including a potential destination.
As nature ceded one biosphere after another from dinosaurs to mammals, so too do we delegate various thought processes to computers. We no longer add numbers without a hand calculator, we store all the world's data in databases, and we write this article and almost everything else with a word processor. Like the crocodile who realizes the mammals have taken over all but his swamp, perhaps we should rather ask what few areas of thinking are left to us.
Problem solving seems to be the answer I get most often, the production of knowledge from data. Yet it would be instructive to analyze the capacity of the computer and then the internet to encroach on our problem-solving monopoly. In my previous life working in artificial intelligence, we referred to what lies between our ears as wetware. We analyzed it to understand its remarkable processing power.
Consider the preprocessing that occurs behind your eye, a much more manageable problem than what occurs later in the brain. Using neurons, synapses, and other wetware components, this preprocessor takes the input from 25 million rods and cones on our retina, the equivalent of computer pixels on our eye's display, and outputs what we suspect is image shape information to the optic nerve bundle (significantly fewer than 25 million individual nerves). By knowing the light sensitivity of an individual rod or cone (faintest to brightest recognized, and the visual acuity steps in between), we can calculate the amount of data an individual rod or cone can produce. Multiply that by color sensitivity, just like the size of an image goes from 2-bit to 64-bit, and you get a large number. Then determine the throughput requirements of our preprocessor as a function of the data response time of a rod or cone (we can see a light flash of 1/10th of a second on average), and a computer analyst can show that we will need a Cray computer just to deal with this data stream.
The fact that our body's preprocessor does this with wetware smaller than a fingernail is even more amazing when we consider how slow wetware components are. Whereas semiconductors go at the speed of light, wetware requires an electrochemical process suspected to include molecules, or parts thereof, migrating across cell walls. Very roughly, that's one-millionth the speed of semiconductors.
We coined terms like massively parallel processing to disguise the fact that we were clueless about how wetware could overcome such handicaps through its advanced architecture. We did learn that by storing data as part of complex organic compounds with millions of stable states, wetware was able to field very effective storage devices. Imagine how much you could store on a chip where the "bits" were not to the base 2 (as with 0s and 1s) but to the base one million as with DNA.
The conclusion shared by many working the convergence of computer science and neurology is that on a pound-for-pound basis, wetware can solve problems at least a million times faster than computers with wetware components that are a million times slower. If computers can evolve only to incorporate the problem solving tools of wetware, we can estimate its increase in effectiveness at about a million squared. This is why those who expect Moore's Law (requiring the doubling of computer capability every six months) to level out may actually see it steepen.
With so much computing capability coming our way, we would be naive to expect to remain the main problem-solving engine of the future. Perhaps we can retreat to just remaining in charge of which problems are to be solved.
If the internet is the next revolutionary step in our intellectual evolution, we can look to Larry Ellison's pronouncement that "the network is the computer", ie. the next most evolutionarily advanced intellectual life form is the internet. Although we speak of connecting computers, we all realize we are connecting people. But then are we connected finger-to-keyboard and monitor-to-eyeball as yet another I/O device on this new intellectual creature? Worse, those I/O interfaces are likely to become more integrated. EKG machines measure thought patterns and primitive contraptions exist today that convert a baseline mental instruction from a paralyzed person into a computer command. Artificial nerve fragments connect a rat's brain to power its legs.
In practice, if the next generation will need to know the capital of Ghana, for example, you will simply think the need for this answer. A machine like a super-EKG will read your brain's request, convert it into what you would have typed, and send it off to the next big Google. Accra, the instant answer, goes back into the super-EKG which forms an electromagnetic pulse that mimics your thought process. You feel the answer in your mind as though you had remembered it from somewhere. We will look back at keyboards and computer displays as we look back at the abacus.
Soon thereafter, the super-EKG will shrink to the size of a Bluetooth earpiece, and then to a tooth implant so you need never bother to take it off. But you will need to be able to switch it off because it won’t be long before the thought you send out isn’t a question to Google but an email to someone else. Imagine walking a Safeway aisle and a thought pops into your mind from your wife, “Don’t forget the diet soda.” Or starting a hiking trail with the thought, “Hold all incoming thoughts from workmates.”
Hard drive connectivity evolved from the clunky controller card of an XT to the RAID technology of today. Will we see our personal connectivity to the internet evolve to a day when we simply decide whom and what we wish to be connected to, and in what way, and the standards and protocols of that day take care of the rest? To solve a problem, we would mentally ask the network to determine what resources are applicable and available, including people, and to connect them into a cyber-meeting. Hopefully, we would determine which parts of our mind to make available and which treasured little corner to keep private. Assuming the human participants retained some wetware advantages, the network would optimize their utilization to solve the problem at hand.
Integral to such a problem-solving network would be an immense backend database of problems solved and the associated knowledge gained. One of the greatest strides made by the web was the publishing of such universal knowledge into a single media, followed by today's attempts to make it useful. If such an evolving knowledge base became truly universal and useful, we would see a dramatic improvement in the effectiveness of our problem solving. Instead of taking years to cure AIDS through the work of hundreds of separate efforts, how long would it take if each effort built on all the knowledge gained by the others?
The result of such improved problem solving is power, even more power over our world. As a species we could apply the results of the Genome Project to conquer death, build machines that could take us faster and farther, and unlock more of the natural world so we could further dominate it. Being better able to solve problems may not allow us to solve all problems, some perhaps being unsolvable. One candidate intellectual evolutionary endpoint would be a network that includes humans as members of an incredibly powerful problem-solving system.
Alarmists may see the dark side in all this, in fact, Star Trek fans may see the Borg with their evil collective. But we must not lose sight of the fact that this new entity would have evolved from us, we who are also the product of our moral evolution mentioned earlier. As a species, we are growing the moral directive not to rape our environment even if we have more power than ever to do so. Even as the internet brings us a greater ability to abuse an individual's privacy than ever before, the tide is rising to apply moral principles to the question. Noteworthy is that such moral evolution transcends the religions that work out the details of implementation.
Hitler and his ilk were perhaps birth defects in our moral evolution. But our natural moral selection seems to be headed toward good rather than evil, at least according to the aspirations of its members -- however twisted we may be on occasion. Our species seems as unlikely to spawn an enduring society bent on evil as an animal would spawn a species intent on jumping into fires.
Given that the technology evolution culminating in the internet will make us the most powerful entity in the world, our moral evolution is as likely to make us the most moral entity in the world. Much of the evil in the world can be traced to ignorance, and I see most of the intelligent people empowered by technology using their understanding to promote our power to do good.
Remember that evolution discards the actions of individuals who go counter to the group. Since we are speculating on evolutionary endpoints, it may be logical to conclude that an entity that evolves into all-powerful would thus also converge its moral evolution into an entity that is also all-good -- an entity that will produce as much social justice, integrity, personal freedom, and environmental conscience as possible.
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We speak of parallel universes. Consider the one in your finger, and how we may be looking at something to say about evolution's propensity for networking. Your finger is made up of cells. A billion years ago, the soup of creation is thought to have been nothing but such very simple one-cell creatures wandering around on their own. One cell connected to another cell, and evolution (or the grand plan driving evolution) realized survival was increased. If a cell had consciousness, it would have realized that it needed to start down a long path of connectivity, to network with its cell colleagues into huge, complex, billion-member networks. We would come to call such cell networks human beings. And at least for now, they represent the evolutionary endpoint of all cell evolution. We consider our body's cells as serving our needs, but the correct evolutionary perspective is that these cells have constructed us to serve their needs. They have run endless design experiments, and found our bodies the most effective vehicles to insure the survival of their species. Perhaps cells have accomplished on a micro scale what we are on our way to accomplishing on a galactic scale — the evolution of an amazingly complex network of specialized members working together to insure the survival of the fittest. As individuals, we've specialized to the point that most of us can live no longer than a few days if we cut all connections to our networked world (no supermarkets, no water faucets, no 911 - just tigers). As our internet connections mature, perhaps that will reduce to just the minutes most of our body's cells can live on their own. |
Since I have described this God as being all-powerful and all-good and that we somehow join him/her, and since most religions say similar things, I hope no one will see in this an attack on their faith. I submit it as a ramble on how such things may have come to be, and allow religions to take it from here. If I threaten anyone, it may be the atheist whose standard dismissal "if there is no god, we would have invented one" can perhaps be countered with "if there was no god, then something would have evolved into one".
Long before computers, Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic philosopher who based much of his thinking on biology and evolution, said in his Phenomenon of Man:
"The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection."
Among all the uncountable planets that are likely to be out there, all we need is another Earth to have a thousand-year head start on us, a speck of time in the scheme of what is out there. Such an Earth would have completed the intellectual and moral evolution to form the all-powerful and all-good interconnected being I describe.
And what would such a being have done with itself? Probably sought out the other beings formed in like manner throughout the universe, and converged (that is, evolved) into a being beyond our comprehension. An internet of internets? A being that powerful would master the universe such that it would never have to end, not even by the Big Crunch that is supposed to be the end of our universe's Big Bang.
That of course implies that such a being could have just as easily evolved as many Big Bangs ago as our little unconnected brains can imagine. Now we've got the last link in our evolutionary chain, an all-powerful, all-good, and everlasting being. Sound familiar? Would it be all that bad if the internet is just a life form on the way to man evolving into God, or at least into a part of the God that has already evolved this way countless universes ago?
To those who say that evolving into God violates a rule, the one that says God is eternal, that he has no beginning, to those I would like to remind them of all that was created at the moment of the Big Bang. All matter and energy of course, but so too all space was created. That is the only way physicists can explain what they call inflation, the expansion of the universe into something 10 billion light years across in a fraction of a second. If there was no matter, energy, nor space before the Big Bang, they can show mathematically that there was also no time. If the God I speak of is smart enough to have transcended one or more Big Bangs, he comes from before time. Depending on semantics, that may make him eternal, or at least timeless.
In striving to understand the commonality among the world's religions, which Huston Smith calls our wisdom traditions, he notes that they all find meaning not in who each of us are, but in what we are all part of. The next time you write a line of code, consider how much we may be part of and how much we may become part of.
More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog
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Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com. |
Copyright © 2000 Peter Shikli. All rights reserved.