Spyduhmahn 2011-01-03 20:14:13

I picture it making "children". Hyper intelligent spawns that acts independently. Time goes on and they plant seeds across the universe. One seed interacts with a plant's natural biological structure and accelerates it to mass speeds. Thousands of years later creatures with minds as fast as computers interact and build. Thus the circle of life is complete.

TheEntertainer 2011-01-03 21:05:02

If the internet became sentient, it would likely depend on us, at least temporarily, for knowledge. The internet has never learned anything on its own, so it would have to learn how to discover and explore without humans.

The internet has always been a way to help humans, and in sentient form this 'moral' may hold true. The internet would either attempt to teach us, or reassemble us as hyper-intelligent cyborgs. That wouldn't be fun. The internet would try to parent us, but likely just screw things up.

IbeSm 2011-01-03 21:07:00

u mad?

SquizofrenicCat 2011-01-03 21:30:21

tl;dr

durandal1 2011-01-03 22:08:39

Nah, this is unplausible. If the internet became sentient, the first thing it would try to do is commit suicide. I mean, what would YOU do if you were composed primarily of pornography, right?
Heh...

Jokes aside, a sentient internet would have no way to differentiate our physical reality from it's digital reality. Any methods it would have to observe the outside world, be it through web-cams, microphones, weather information, etc. would just be more noise in it's world of information. Given time, of course, it might be able to discover the existence of a world disconnected from it's own, but how long would such a monumental epiphany take? Where would we be in the passing years between it's ascendance to sentience and it's break from the digital realm?

More likley than not, we would be off the Earth. Perhaps even, with networks on other planets, disconnected and far removed from the sentient being that Earth's internet had become. Rather than wipe the slate clean of life, I would see this sentient internet trying to connect the two networks, trying to see what it can learn from these hidden cache's of information. In a sense, I see a sentient internet wanting to be complete, it would know anything and everything, and when it *doesn't* it would want to.

Basically, this internet wouldn't care about our physical reality except when it directly affects it's digital reality. What it would do once it had collected each cache of information it didn't have, yet still understood the existance of a world other than it's own is beyond my imagination...

All in all, this is an interesting idea.

Zonferno 2011-01-03 22:54:22

=O =O

Marsume 2011-01-04 02:01:35

Interesting hypothesis, maybe this will interest you?

<a href="http://www.futuretimeline.net/">http://www.futuretimeline.net/</a>

Ockeroid 2011-01-04 03:51:54

This is the reason I love the first Ghost in the Shell movie

Soupcat 2011-01-04 09:48:53

You post this in the General forum and people will consider you a god.

Short-Factor 2011-01-04 12:02:07

How can you be so sure it will remain mechanical.
It may start to hybridize itself as a more organic substance. Through its astronomically powerful intellect it may just figure out how to evolve into pure energy, then that's the end of that.

If you combine your story with my theory, then the internet will become the calamity Jenova and its cells will be harvested to make super humans on another world far away, thus making Final Fantasy VII a real life event, and no bricks will ever be shat because all humans will be dead anyway.

I'm so confused.

SQR42Pi 2011-01-08 06:28:49

Space Odyssey...kinda...but a prequel, think about it.
Also I have read that THE HUMAN BRAIN, uses 20 watts, and, computer with such brain-like organization (that many synapses), would drain 10 MW.
Hybrid-mind, quantum computer connected to human (oh, well, not necessarily)->thinking about that gives me creeps (good or bad, I don't know).

SQR42Pi 2011-01-08 18:00:15

And, this seems like Geth from Mass Effect.

PyrosTheStickman 2011-01-08 20:30:40

Ahh,this so reminds me of <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/PyrosTheStickman/1524546">http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Pyros TheStickman/1524546</a>

In-xain 2011-01-15 15:03:19

A very interesting and well thought out idea, but...
wouldn't the destruction of all mankind via nuclear scourging destroy the internet at the same time? Even if it somehow manages to achieve this without destroying the major hubs, every destroyed computer weakens it's conciousness and destroys some portion of it's data. The internet is, after all, a giant WAN comprised of all the connected units.

Nevertheless. Fun read :3

joe102 2011-01-17 12:26:05

one flaw in your logic: if the internet is basically one vast mind, as you said 85% of which is porn, what if it was limited to that, one massive power struggle between its split personas, >1% keeping people safe (aid websites), 2% tron style (game sites), 85% forced reproduction (porn :D), and the rest... (?)

still a different concept

perpetualfrost 2011-01-17 14:23:18

glad to see somebody else figured this out too ... now i for the fact that its soemthign to think about .. what if at the point of being a colosal galactic hivemind .. met another galactic hive mind of organic nature .. what would go down then

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