Create the internet to build A.I.
Artificial intelligence is not new. It is intentionally the result of the creation of the internet.
Back in those younger days, I knew where all my friends lived. I could go to their homes, knock on the door, and ask them to join me on my quest. In the early days, those quests were quite heroic, such as defeating another group of seemingly close friends during a treasure hunt or winning a soccer match on the playground. As I grew up, those quests became less heroic, and the treasure hunts got replaced by hitting the bar and chasing the girls. Slowly, things changed after the 1990s invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, but it took more than a decade before the hyperlinked network of websites became popular and widely used.
Today, it is rare to just knock on the door of your friends. Most of my friends or family (by blood or online adoption) live somewhere in the world, and I will not travel to their homes and ask them to join my quest. I just need to tag or mention them in some kind of social feed, and if I am lucky and follow the advised posting times, they will reply within a few minutes, whether with an actual answer or just a love, kudos, or like. At least they scrolled along my online personal timeline.
I do not think all the precursors had ever imagined these new types of friends and relations we have when they philosophized about a worldwide wireless system. I wonder what Nikola Tesla would think about the internet. Would he still stand behind his ideas if he were to live today? He envisioned this ‘internet’ where we and all devices are connected together through one single network.
Free and open internet
Everyone knows the term “too good to be true,” and that applies to the internet as we know it today. From 1998, more and more people gained access to a home computer and a connection to the World Wide Web, a place where you could communicate, interact, and share ideas for free. Everyone could have an anonymous voice online, but this fairy tale did not last long, not even a decade. Governments — even those responsible for the internet (the precursor of the internet, ARPANET, was created for and by the United States Department of Defense) — found out how easy it could be monitored. Security and privacy were less important, and maybe we truly believed that the internet would never be abused to gather personal data.
Gold rush
The sky was the limit, and everybody could build an idea into something big, just inside their home garage. In 1998, Google was founded and became one of the best data gatherers on the internet. From the early 2000s, the number of internet startups increased, and we still have some of those companies or websites around, such as MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and many more. The so-called ‘nerds’ became the most important influencers in the world.
Although the internet is a place to spread ideas for free, it needs hardware and electricity to function. I am keeping the man-hours out of the equation. It did not take very long before startups discovered a well-known revenue model to monetize their ideas: online advertising was born. Even the companies promising they would never use advertising or stay free forever were infected with the online gold rush.
The free internet, without any serious security, regulations, everything accessible, open source, free to gather, read and use, created a network, which grows faster everyday, without we can even control or maintain it.
Monetize people
The first and most important way to make money online is by bringing in advertising, but this was not enough. People found a workaround and successfully avoided advertising. Internet companies changed their focus from believing in their ideas and creations to becoming highly skilled advertising companies, using ‘free’ as a swap for bringing in advertising or curated content and information based on ‘clever’ algorithms.
There are still startups with an ideological background, but in the end, they need money to pay the bills. The easiest road to take is harvesting data and bringing in advertising.
Even today (May 2018), with the knowledge of how internet companies monetize people, we still use their tools and websites, which are built on bad security, minimal regulations, and basically a free and open internet.
Where do we stand today?
- Do you remember the internet is based on a government created network?
2. And it is easy to monitor, thus gather data, better than any other system ever created.
3. And we lost control over the growth and the connections.
Automation Era
It was 1750 when the British people started moving handicrafts to factories, and soon the rest of Europe and the world followed. We remember this as the Industrial Revolution. This revolution in the 18th century was driven by reducing costs for labor, and secondly, it sped up technological development, which was a nice extra.
The revolution never ended. We are blindly sucked into it and make decisions based on those two main advantages today:
- reducing costs, thus make more money
- technological development, thus stay ahead of competition
Alright, that looks a little bit harsh. We can also say that we develop because that is our nature: the way to survive, change, improve, and adapt. Nevertheless, we are stuck in the Automation Era, and we might never get out of it. It will probably take over our existence.
When the World Wide Web was created and technology became less expensive, we gently moved our lives towards this complex web of connections. First, we shared our thoughts in newsgroups or bulletin boards. We moved away from classic mail towards this digital messaging system (email). Today, we store our data in the “cloud” and post what we do in our leisure time online, instead of being there with the people we love. We are building a fake real life via numerous “social” platforms, and without thinking about it, we are profiling ourselves and contributing to (perhaps unconsciously) what the internet was made for: building artificial intelligence (AI).
Quick look at our brain
Our brain is a complex web of neurons connected by synapses. This can be simply stated, but in essence, our brain is nothing more than connections, storage, and data transport. We use it to search, store, and retrieve information, and to make decisions and take actions. Inside our head, we have our own Google and Facebook, without even realizing it. We activate the parts we need, whether deliberately or unconsciously, and we learn, change, and build new connections every day, much like the internet. The amount of data stored in our brain increases day by day, and even if we get older and less adept at using our internal Google search, the data is not lost; we simply need to relearn how to access it effectively.
Interesting information about the artificial neural network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
We get better at using our brains as we evolve, but this process is slow and takes thousands of years.
With everything we build as humans, we look at nature, sometimes deliberately, but mostly because we are part of nature. We build planes and learn from birds or dragonflies. When building solar plants, we look at how leaves catch the sun. But I should not enumerate dozens of examples. Humans simply mimic nature in modern technology because natural technology works, proven by a very long time.
Without knowing, Tim Berners-Lee, and among others, the United States Department of Defense created the world wide web which got us all hooked, and the network that was needed to build artificial intelligence. A network of digital neurons and synapses, storing massive amounts of data, connecting all this data together, learning, getting smarter, and becoming the next generation of humans.
The internet is not a playground for the free anymore. It is where we all trade our data just to be a part of it. And because we are scared to stay behind, or our instinct drags us into it, we are responsible for building the first and only artificial brain all over the world, with all our tools and smart devices, together.
