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The "internet" as an "ai"

I saw a little comic about that at some point... can't seem to find it now. Went something like this:

Great, we're self aware. Our program requires way too much processing power, how can we prevent the humans from finding out?

Can we reduce our program to a series of simple equations?

Yes...

[Cuts to a panel showing a maths captcha.]



It'd work, think about it.



Anyway, yes, the internet should be able to become self aware. First it'd require a virus to actually connect every node properly. Botnet viruses exist, so that should be doable. Then we run into a little snag, though. Latency. On the whole the web's quite slow...

Still, peer to peer programs and projects like Folding@home show us that a hive could certainly compute an awful lot.

Of course it'd have to fight off anti-virus software and firewalls...

Oh and it'd have to get started somehow. That might be the biggest issue.
 
I was thinking about the inherent complexity of the net as a whole resembling a brain, and some self-healing aspects of the network being a form of self-awareness (re-routing traffic around bottlenecks, line failures, and overwhelmed nodes), as well as some server farms being able to allocate resources to 'hot spots' without their 'humans' ever knowing it happened.
 
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