Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
238 12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics
yet that also has its own self-model and global workspace. Both the individuals and the meta-
mind should be capable of deliberative, rational thought, to have a true “mindplex.” It’s unlikely
that human society or the Internet meet this criterion yet; and a system like an ant colony seems
not to either, because even though it has some degree of intelligence on both the individual and
collective levels, that degree of intelligence is not very great. But it seems quite feasible that
the global brain, at a certain stage of its development, will take the unfamiliar but fascinating
form of a mindplex.
Currently the best way to explain what happens on the Net is to talk about the various
parts of the Net: particular websites, social networks, viruses, and so forth. But there will come
a point when this is no longer the case, when the Net has sufficient high-level dynamics of its
own that the way to explain any one part of the Net will be by reference to it relations with
the whole: and not just the dynamics of the whole, but the intentions and understanding of
the whole. This transition to Net-as-mindplex, we suspect, will come about largely through the
interactions of AI systems - intelligent programs acting on behalf of various individuals and
organizations, who will collaborate and collectively constitute something halfway between a
society of AI’s and an emergent mind whose lobes are various AI agents serving various goals.
The Phase 2 Internet, as it verges into mindplex-ness, will likely have a complex, sprawling
architecture, growing out of the architecture on the Net we experience today. The following
components at least can be expected:
e A vast variety of “client computers,” some old, some new, some powerful, some weak —
including many mobile and embedded devices not explicitly thought of as “computers.”
Some of these will contribute little to Internet intelligence, mainly being passive recipients.
Others will be “smart clients,” carrying out personalization operations intended to help
the machines serve particular clients better, general AI operations handed to them by
sophisticated AI server systems or other smart clients, and so forth.
e “Commercial servers,” computers that carry out various tasks to support various types
of heavyweight processing - transaction processing for e-commerce applications, inventory
management for warehousing of physical objects, and so forth. Some of these commercial
servers interact with client computers directly, others do so only via AI servers. In nearly
all cases, these commercial servers can benefit from intelligence supplied by AI servers.
e The crux of the intelligent Internet: clusters of AI servers distributed across the Net, each
cluster representing an individual computational mind (in many cases, a mindplex). These
will be able to communicate via one or more languages, and will collectively “drive” the
whole Net, by dispensing problems to client-machine-based processing frameworks, and
providing real-time AI feedback to commercial servers of various types. Some AI servers
will be general-purpose and will serve intelligence to commercial servers using an ASP
(application service provider) model; others will be more specialized, tied particularly to a
certain commercial server (e.g., a large information services business might have its own AI
cluster to empower its portal services).
This is one concrete vision of what a “global brain” might look like, in the relatively near term,
with AGI systems playing a critical role. Note that, in this vision, mindplexes may exist on two
levels:
e Within AGI-clusters serving as actors within the overall Net
e On the overall Net level
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013154