The Internet as a superorganism AI ... thoughts?
This thought just popped into my head, so it's still quite nebulous, but I want to float it out here, see what other's have to say about it, before I really dive into it.
Superorganisms are things like ant and termite colonies and beehives ... and, for the sci-fi minded, the Borg. The theory/idea is that the individual ants/termites/bees are not actually independent living beings (or at least, not exclusively), but closer to cells in a larger, distributed body, with a distributed intellect driving the colony to thrive and reproduce, which only happens when, eg, the beehive throws a swarm that eventually becomes a new beehive.
The "Earth as Gaia" theory is comparable, suggesting that all of the life forms on Earth form an amorphous, distributed superintelligence that is trying to reproduce ... which would happen once humans colonize Mars, or meteor strikes on the Earth successfully transfer living organisms to another celestial body where life ultimately takes root.
So ... you see where I'm going with this? Is it a feasible idea to consider the Internet itself as a nascent AI superorganism, made up of both the humans (and, increasingly, the bots) that use it, as well as the assorted hardware and software that comprises it?
I'm confident I'm not the first person to entertain this idea, and I expect that, as soon as I start searching the 'Net for this topic, I'll find plenty on it. Just wanted to post the idea while it was still just my idea.
And of course, if I never post here again ... assume the Internet took me out.
The keyword you're looking (but only for classically living stuff) is holobiont.
Much of the decision-making goes through people so the question is whether decision-making by large networks of people could be considered an organism? I'm not sure what that gets us, in terms of being able to predict things that we wouldn't otherwise?
On the other hand, the author of Wait But Why wrote a whole series about politics using this metaphor.
Seems to me like the internet and mass communications has only enabled our thoughts to exist and spread outside of our own heads, and persist past death. We've had that since we invented writing and the printing press, but the effect has intensified and sped up to near-realtime in recent decades. Now you have all the thoughts of your entire race - good, bad, ugly, and batshit insane - in your pocket, with no reliable way to tell which is which, nowhere near enough time to even consider a fraction of a fraction of a percent of it, and mountains of financial incentives hell bent on confusing things further.
Calling it a hive mind misses the mark considerably, though. We are the nodes, just like ants are the nodes, but what goes on inside the mind of an ant or a colony of fungus or a collection of tree roots is nothing at all like what goes on inside our minds. We're orders of magnitude more complex and abstracted. Those hives are more like a knee-jerk reflex without self-awareness, a nervous system flailing around without real cognition. Whatever our 'hive' mind is becoming is something completely new to this world, maybe even this universe, and it's truly uncharted territory. It's also as far beyond our own understanding as the ant's hive mind is beyond any single ant, and that's not likely to change.
It's as if the memes are becoming the true decision-making units of our hive, rather than individuals.
Oh god. I don't want it to be true but honestly I can't think of any counter-arguements. I've seen too many people blindly trust memes over facts. Now I'm wondering if this has always been the case, but we never had a good grasp on it because we didn't have the right framework to think about them.
I mean, the word meme is from memetic which is a term coined by Richard Dawkins to describe how an idea (a thing with no physical presence) survives and propogates (eg "evolves") : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Take Q-anon as an example. It's a mind virus that continues to evolve and change shape to suit it's hosts. It has no formal definition, it's core premise remains (mostly) the same but the details of it change depending on when you ask about it and who you're specifically asking. The "meme" of Qanon continues to survive because of it's ability to adapt to new "hosts", and because it keeps getting attention from both it's followers and it's critics.
I'm sure it's been true since the first fire-keepers started retelling stories to their tribes. Those memes had a very limited, localized reach. That's changed now, the memes have gone global and they can get around at close to the speed of light. They can live on blogs and in books rather than just in heads, too.
I'd argue that the internet can be categorized as a super or meta organic intelligence, people are not AI.