There is Apocalypse in the air. I don’t remember when I first was introduced to the notion of 2012 being the end of day, but I remember distinctly that I was old enough to react to it with the feeling that I associate with all lore, myth, psudo-science, and Santa:

“It’s fiddle-faddle, but it’s so much more fun to pretend it’s not.”

It’s a blast, really. Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and even the History Channel love this stuff, because we love this stuff. Now, this is not the place to dust off the soap box and decry the only notion scarier than the 2012 Apocalypse – the notion that the surface of Nicholas-Cage-secret-cipher-fun-times veneer lies a real fear in some circles. But this is the place for me to do some popcorn  apocalyptic speculation.

Wikipedia pages like the one for Technological Singularity are what make me love the internet. But the content of the page is what makes me scared to death of it. I’ve been mulling over the hypothetical of the digital consciousness, the Artificial Intelligence (singular) rising out of what we call the internet. My theory (that I came up with today) is this:

We are building the internet bit by bit, web page by web page. To us, on the scale we interact with it, it looks like a massive body of connected, but distinct and unrelated information. But what if, as the internet grows exponentially in scope, size, and complexity, we were to take a step back and see it is taking on a new singular form, or new significance. This figurative step back would require a new way to interpret the information on the internet in a broader sense, detached from the way we read it as script.

Imagine this: You’re walking on an infinate plane of images. Lets make them digial images. You kneel down, and see at your feet a billion,to the power of a kagillion, pixels making up images, each distinct. Now, hop in a helicopter and you’re in the air. You now look down and see that the images make up a larger image. Let’s say of a kitty cat. You used a new development (the helicopter) to facilitate a new means of organization, and meaning. Now, the pixels make images, which make a larger image. Now who’s to say that you can’t keep going up in that helicopter (it’s a space helicopter now) to find that that image is just a part of a larger image, which is part of a larger image, and so on. But deep down, to the very core, all of these images are based on the pixels.

But what if there were a development that gave us a new way to look at the pixels that was completely separate from the infinite chain of image-meanings? All those pixels still make up all those images, but they are also aligned to another meaning, a new, singular object that is not an image. It’s not anything we’ve seen before, because we haven’t had the means, the development (think helicopter) to catch onto it’s patterns, it’s significance.

Kneeling down, the pixles look like noise. But what if noise can be part of not just one chain of meanings, but two? What if a vast plane of noise slowly grew an order, and a sense of meaning completely separate from it’s first, primary meaning? If this is the case, this “evolution of meanings,” where the complexity of one meaning allows for another meaning to develop from a core level, does one of the two become the primary meaning?

This all sounds like philosophical mumbo-jumbo to me. Especially since I just made it up. But lets apply it to the Internet.

We have created a linked network of servers, all collecting and organizing a constant supply of data. Look at this raw data, these ones and zeros are our pixels. Kneeling down, they are just binary. Pull back, they are language. Pull back again, they are words, programs, websites. Pull back one last time, it’s the internet. This is the only way we have been able to look at this massive lanscape of noise – the big ‘ol internet. Because this is how we created it. Bit by bit.

But what if, as we are feeding this network, it is creating it’s own sense of order. Slowly, in the most abstract way imaginable, it is figuring out itself. As if molecules aligning in the primordial goo, the massive amount of data on the internet is beginning to create more and more elaborate patterns. To us, the internet is the internet, but slowly the internet is guiding the way we craft it until it is no longer the humans guiding data onto the internet, but the internet guiding humans to lay the data to it’s forms.

It’s like a city being built. Bricklayers lay to bricks, building by building. But where the construction is affects where the  new building can start, so by the time it is all done, the city can be said to have half authored itself.

But we’re not dealing with a city. We are dealing with the Internet.

It would take a long time, and a much more complex “primary, initial significance” for a singular consciousness to rise out of the primordial goo of the raw bits of the internet. But this is cryptogram-popcorn-hat time, so let’s assume it will.

My question, and I’m sorry for the roundabout way of posing it, is this:

If humans somehow make the discovery, develop the means (again, think the helicopter) to see the patterns forming that point to a digital consciousness, will they pull the plug? The situation would be something like if the Dinosaurs, seeing the meteor approaching, had the power to send it back into space. This is  a crazy notion, but it reminded me of this comic:

The comic has less to do with the argument, and more to do with how awesome PBF is.

But lets say the humans are alive to witness the emergence of a higher conscience from the noise of the internet, while still having power to destroy it. What do they do? Think of the dinosaurs, staring up at that brilliant flaming sphere in the sky – to them, it could be either the end of days, or the coming of a messiah. If they did have power to send it back, well, lets face it – they chose wrong. And got clobbered.

I would like to think we would make a better decision, but I know I’m wrong. Because as crazy and Phillip K. Dick as all this sounds, we have already met technology that could destroy humanity. This past century. It’s called the nuclear bomb.Aand who has pulled the plug? Heck, the Hadron Collider could tear a hole in space-time. I still want to go there.

I’m saying I wouldn’t pull the plug. Because we never pull the plug. Science fiction would be boring if every writer is the kind of guy who would pull the plug. Science would be boring if scientists were the kind of people who ever pulled the plug.

Because really, who’s to say that the god to rise from the machine won’t be a super cool guy and fun to party with? I want to hang out with him! Bring him over. He could be the beginning of a new era, or he could be the end of days for the human race. But really, what’s the difference?