Ewan McIntosh draws our attention to Kevin Kelly's presentation on collective intelligence. Kelly suggests that the current state of the internet - in terms of nodes/neurons is comparable to the human brain. He personifies technology (i.e. technology wants certain things and possesses a deterministic path (and that we have a moral obligation to let technology increase)...as he notes, resistance to a particular technology doesn't typically run past one generation). Two problems with his general message:
- Consciousness, not quantity of nodes, is the defining attribute of complex biological systems (see Is Consciousness Definable? is an intriguing debate by experts on this difficult subject). Having 100 billion nodes or neurons is not necessarily an indicator of consciousness
- The internet, in it's current state, has similar attributes (in node size) to one human brain. But there's more than just a few of us humans on this earth...