Self Awareness and the Internet
This is about the fact that the internet is NOT self aware, but should be.
Why?
The human brain has in the order of 100 billion (100,000,000,000) neurons (computing elements) and around 10 synapses (link points) per neuron
(Wikipedia)
The internet has 100 million (100,000,000) registered domain names (internet addresses),
each of these may have from none to hundreds of computers connected via company networks
(Domain Counts & Internet Statistics)
Each computer being considerably more complex than a single neuron.
(Biological neuron model -wikipedia)
Brain vs Internet: Computing power
There has also been an estimate of the raw computing ability of the brain
of about 20 Ehz (20,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second).
(How fast is the brain?)
Indeed this facility (Graham's Brain) is, in fact, made of over 10 individual servers all virtualised on a 6 x 64-bit processor machine.
Each processor runs at about 3 GHz (3,000,000,000 calculations per second) to have a total of 18GHz.
For the internet to be on a par with the brain it would have to have an average speed of only 20Mhz (200,000,000 calculations per second).
This is if there is only 1 computer for each domain name.
Modern computers are at least 100 times that.
This means that there is easily enough computing ability in the internet to be on a par with the human brain.
In fact it appears to massively exceed this by at the very least 2 orders of magnitude.
Brain vs Internet: Storage
Brain = 100 Pbits (100,000,000,000,000 bits) or 10 Pbytes.
(How fast is the brain?)
...unfinished
Brain vs Internet: Design
When I put this to my wife, who is a psychologist, she pointed to a difference in the nature of these digital machines.
Neurons and brains are designed differently to CPUs, RAM and hard discs, so it isn't necessarily the case that they work the same.
She does have a point.
Brain's are effectively pattern recognition devices and computers are instruction processing machines.
...unfinished
However, their are computers which process information in the same way humans do.
Not forgetting that the internet itself is designed by intelligent beings who feed it with information they themselves have processed.
So why is it not?
