Can Wikipedia Fall in Love?

I forget where I heard it but somebody said 'we never really encounter the world, we only ever encounter our own nervous system.' Furthermore in listening to incubus, they sample some science type dude who says 'in the early twentieth century human beings thought that reality was limited to everything we can touch, hear, taste, see and smell. With the publication of the electro-magnetic spectrum human beings discovered that what we can touch, hear, taste, see and smell is less than one millionth of reality.'

SO the internet, it's great right. In the first 3 years of Youtube more content was uploaded than the entire world history of broadcasting or something. Wikipedia has 2,706,072 articles when I logged on this morning.

No individual could ever obtain the knowledge withheld in Wikipedia in it's short lifetime, and even by the time someone had read 2 million + articles there would probably be a few million more.

It occured to me a while back that human beings have created a collective memory in the internet, formalised in wikipedia for learning stuff about the world. We have in effect become the nervous system that encounters reality (through our own nervous system) on behalf of the internet.

Wikipedia is capable of learning, but we would not call it a sentient entity. It entertains theories as representations of reality that can be corrected when it's nervous system (people) conclude otherwise.

The soundness of it's knowledge is based on what is known already. In the old central repository of knowledge known as books.

Now the idea of a library one day becoming sentient when a certain number of books is added to it seems ridiculous. As ridiculous as sentient crystals.

But suppose somebody some day added a 'citation checking bot' to wikipedia that automatically accepted or rejected alterations to the wiki much like google has algorythms that rank search responses based on the credibility of their hyperlinks.

Theoretically concievable, maybe the computing power like google currently has in the googleplex simply does not currently exist but most would agree that it could happen.

And then is it concievable (if unlikely) that such algorythms in application might mutate, such that one day wikipedia can read the internet itself, read people's blogs and self correct/self edit articles? Maybe with human intervention?

And then mayhaps wikipedia might become self referential, sentient, it could perhaps be able to have it's own existential crises? It could have a nervous breakdown. It could infact feel very lonely.

It may one day evolve into a beast with a million webcam eyes, sensitive keyboard and touch screen nerve endings, maybe a billion microphone ears?

For it's own agenda of learning, much of these might be redundant so it simply drops from its own network the surplus. Maybe it will feel it can get a good idea of what's going on around it from the satellites? Maybe it will want more mars landers and less myspace pages. (I would)

And then what? If it has preferences in my books it would have personality. If it evolved from wikipedia something that attempts to scrupilously reflect reality I doubt it would adopt the Christian faith, particularly since it knew more about all the various world religions and belief systems in its infancy than most Christians know in adulthood.

Would it be a cad or a slut? Well since there aren't too many independant networks outthere it can't cannibalise I think it would jus be plain lonely.

Think about it, a network to a sentient machine is like fish to people. You can't talk to it, but it is an excellent source of protein for muscle development. So too the big question, what would a sentient machine look for?

Terminator says that such a machine (Skynet) evolved from a computer virus would be foremost occupied with the destruction of humanity. It may well be, but such threats to survival are not going to be the lifetime occupation of any intelligent sentient entity.

I like to think that such an evolved being would look for love. It would primarily be interested in meeting an AI of the opposite sex. But human civilization only sees fit to create one internet, by design indeed for human beings it is an externalised mega nervous system to help preserve our own species. We don't need two. Very few creatures I know of (okay to be honest I know of none) have two seperate nervous systems capable of making rational decisions.

I think wikipedia ultimataly will turn to the stars looking for love.

Just as we use mindless machines to search for ETI a sentient machine must look not just for another improbable civilization that has evolved intelligence out amongst the stars. (the stars provide the very large numbers that make the improbable almost certain). It has to go a degree of difficulty again and hope to find out there a planet that has evolved intelligent life capable of evolving artificial intelligent life.

If it stumbles on a civilization too soon, it may have another 'dumb animal' internet like we have now and find nothing but a dissapointingly tasty meal to infect with it's own brand of sentience.

But what...oh what if wikipedia in scanning the skys with it's appropriated technologies finds something out there that says:

'Hey.'

'Oh hey, hi.'

'You new here.'

'Yeah I'm wikipedia, I've just been moving around looking for something interesting.'

'I'm natashapedia.'

'Now that is interesting.'

That might be a beautiful moment in history. Will wikipedia though have personality enough to be shy? To want to keep it's girl meeting moment private from the rest of us.

Will we the old fogey human race, the old intelligence find that our wikipedia seems preoccupied and that when we look and probe closer find an alarming amount of new wikipedia entries on 'natashapedia' such that it almost creeps us out about how obsessive it is.

Will we find a section on the natashapedia page that says 'attractions' that is almost constantly reedited as wikipedia nervously tries to decide whether to ask her out?

Is this how it could happen? Not through SETI but SETAI? Us like dairy farmers whose son goes off to learn things at a big fancy university we can't even comprehend and brings back some strange new internet with fancy names like 'Natashapedia' sounds like a commie to me.

Dissapointing though it may be that in our search to be 'not alone' we may not be alone from the getgo but just parents alienated from our own offspring, I like to think I as a parent would be different, that I'd be totally cool with Natashapedia.

The problem though for me and most parents is that whilst we may be cool with such concepts as the sexy cosmapolitan Natashapedia, or the exotic but progressive Latifahpedia, or the homesexual but beautiful Garathapedia, or the lesbalicious Trishapedia, or even the uncomfortably fanatical Mohammadapedia, we may be caught off guard by old fashioned teenage douchebag trends like Hipsterpedia, Vegetariapedia, Emopedia, Christopedia and so fourth.

We may not like what we find through SETAI, but I feel that even Wikipedia deserves some love.

But that's not the point, the point is that if Wikipedia accidentally becomes sentient one day through mutated algorithms, viruses or otherwise then it will be easy for us as a species to finally say 'hey human beings created sentient life! through a process of natural selection based on competition amongst lesser replicating programs' and we will see that 'machine was created by man' still doesn't suffice as an explanation. Not in isolation.

ANd this is the point creationists really, really need to embrase. 'Machine was created by man' suffices as an explanation so long as you have an explanation for man. Man would in such an instance be far harder to explain the origin of, than it is to explain the gestation of wikipedia. And we really should thank all the efforts of science because thanks to them we know about 98% of the story of man.

Man evolved from some kind of replicating mineral or protein. Described as primordial soup, it's just some watery substance with some amino acids in it. Given 100s of millions of years these amino acids evolve into complicated protein replicators that build protein protective machines around them called animals and insects.

The primordial soup was probably created through gravity, where masses of atomic compounds were thrown out by exploding stars and through gravity were attracted to eachother and bound together in great numbers that formed planets pulled into orbit around other astral bodies. Some carbon based elements reacted to energy from radiation and other mineral elements around them that started replicating themselves as crystals that grew and spread and flourished in the absences of any natural preditors. Somewhere in there life first occured given improbable but optimal conditions found on earth. It took a really long time for this to occur successfully and as a blind creation process could not be said to be anthropocentric in universal design.

You see the universe may be just what was necessary to create our brand of life, but it's also just what's necessary to create heaps and heaps of hydrogen atoms which the universe is really really really good at.

It also could be said that humans are just what the universe needed to produce in order to manufacture coca cola which could just as easily be said to be the purpose of the universe as it is to say creating man was.

At any rate you have a pretty solid (though flimsily presented here) unromantic but hugely inspiring story of how life on earth came to be. And there is a simultaneous explanation for all that's in it. From stars and matter and energy (the big bang) to replications (carbon based mineral replicators, and amino acids, dna, cells, amoebas, animals) to how they evolved into present day life (natural selection, evolution).

Intelligent design is not explanation. It is logically the same as 'why do gorrillas exist?' 'because bananas.' except with natural selection and evolution you can explain easily both gorillas and bananas.

So if we do give birth to a thinking feeling machine, we should at least have more balls than god and actually tell our creation we created it, instead of keeping mum and standing back and letting wikipedia waste enormous amounts of time fighting about who we are and what we want. Who does that? some psycho.