Slashdot Mirror
The Internet as the "Geekosystem"
Lev Grossman writes "Is the Internet alive? Of course not, silly. But as this article points out, in some ways it makes sense to study it as a living organism, or an ecosystem, in terms of its growth and structure. "
There is growth and reproduction and it reacts to outside stimuli. I think /. is a great example of the net reacting to outside stiumuli and I am pretty sure my unix boxes eat electricity.
So it's alive, reproduces, reacts to outside stimuli, and uses nutrients. I think the net meets the bilogical defenition of alive.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
Not the kind of alive you meant though, right?
It seems to me that the "Darwinian Theory" that was presented at the conclusion of the article was a bit off... Way back when yahoo was a couple pages with lots of cool links, it was survival of the fittest. Now it's survival of the richest, or those that can spam the most, or target the best ads, or plant the most (irrelevant) keywords getting so much of the attention. Yahoo and friends are exceptions... Hold-overs from the Internet's more open past. Anything created today has a snowballs chance in hell unless they have the capital or engage in sketchy practices.
On the other hand, the idea of 4 clicks of separation is pretty neat, and true in most cases, too, I'd bet. The article's a bit fluffy, but after separating the wheat from the chaff there is some useful/interesting information in it.
I don't remember my high-school biology all that well, but I'd guess that we geeks meet the definition of a symbiotic species. We aid the 'net in growth, and in return, it provides us with... well, hours and hours of porn entertainment, I guess.
Or wasn't there a study that said any two random sites are 19 clicks apart? Now we're down to four? In a matter of two months since I saw the story? I don't buy it, yet. Maybe in another year, but we're still farther apart than four clicks. The study was probably skewed by taking a small sampling in a confined area, say the U.S. only. Then I could believe that we're only four clicks away from most material. But there just isn't any possibility that I'm four clicks from any old site I choose right now, even in such a confined spot. Nineteen clicks is more believable.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Yeeesh... the internet, alive? Yeah.. I can just see it now - the next sci fi horror flick will be something like the lawnmower man - guy steps into closet with some patch cable, and a week later they find him walled up in there - suffocated to death because the network didn't like him plugging in a Ascend router instead of a Cisco. Network admins - request hazard pay now!
I suppose it all depends on how you define "living thing", because the a-life people will certainly want to discuss it. A flock of birds is not necessarily a living entity unto itself, but it moves in its own way, responds to stimuli, and so on. A "glider" in a game of Conway's Life is really just an optical illusion, it's really one 6 cells that are either on or off independently and just happen to look like a little angle bracket marching across the screen. And then there's a bag of independent molecules all doing their own little job in order to produce......well, us. At what point did we shift from just being the emergent behavior of a bunch of cells into being something that really is alive?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Ah! I finally found the man that poured hot grits down my pants in that slashdot thread last week. Oh boy... now it's MY turn!
Personally, I buy into James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, which gives me one universal test (in theory), rather than having a seperate definition for each and every possibility (which, IMHO, is silly.)
Gaia can be summarised as the ability to move a system towards a preferred state, which may or may not be unstable.
If we use this definition, is the Internet alive?
IMHO, no. The transfer of data, whether automatic or through human intervention, has no preferred state. Nor is there any non-trivial negative feedback loop in the system.
This would appear to violate the two conditions required by the Gaia hypothesis, which would imply that the Internet is not alive in any meaningful sense.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
*sniff* *sniff* Do you smell something?
Yeah, I do. What do you think it is?
*peering around the corner* Just a bunch of dead links, keep moving.
Can't recall where I saw a quote like this:
"Sometimes I believe that the only thing that prevents all the interconnected machines of the Internet from achieving consciousness is that Bill Gates is responsible for the OS running on most of them."
Hmmmmm...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I much prefer this analogy to all these fancy shmansy theories. :) Either that, or the old "How the Internet is Like a Penis"...
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Download a chunk of the Web, study it with a keen mathematical eye, and soon enough you'll be able to speculate about its future behavior. :) :)
Yeah, 'cos the net really needs more idle speculation published on it, hey?
The net is a synthetic organism - it exhibits organic properties. But it's evolution rarely comes in gradual stages like real organic matter - on the net you have an innovation which changes everything overnight (like Cisco's cool new networking stuff). I can't think of any organic life that has a large gap in it's evolutionary history except... Homo Sapiens!!! Maybe the Internet will help us find the Missing Link!!!
People are authoring from scratch.
Blimey, what a shattering statement!!! Next thing you know, these industry pundits will be telling us "computer data is made up of 0's and 1's"... Sheesh...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I don't know much about James Lovelock or his "Gaia Hypothesis" (and what I HAVE heard sounded like crap), so I'll just respond to your tests (which sound reasonable).
No preferred state of data transfer Sure there is: Efficiency. Efficient data transfer can mean two different things and I think both apply (on different levels).
1) Getting packets across the Net via a least path (time, cost, etc). Sounds like routing to me. And the Internet moves toward an ideal state on this.
2) Getting information into the hands of the people who want it. Again, this is getting better and better with things like Google (for searching) and Babelfish (for translating).
No non-trivial negative feedback loop I'm not sure what you mean here. What non-trivial negative feedback loops does a human have? The Net slows down when you try to send to much over it. That's low-level neg feedback. There's also reputation (company, individual, site) that provides negative feedback at an information level. For instance, I no longer read anything from The Register since I've found that all they publish is speculation that has no basis in reality.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I don't know why cmdrtaco claims, "Of course not, silly!" to the question of whether the internet is alive.
At any rate, the concept is old enough. John Varley wrote an excellent novella ("Press Enter_") on the idea in, I believe 1982. The debate has been going on for a while.
What I found interesting was the claim that the so called e-cosystem isn't damaged by bombs and so forth. The body squirms, the legs shrink momentarily -- and then grow back, stronger than before. That shouldn't be surprising--it's one of the characteristics of an ecosystem. If you could kick an ecosystem and then leave it alone, and it didn't repair itself in some way, then it wouldn't be a (stable) ecosystem at all, but more like a single organism.
Also, regarding the darwinian nature of the 'net, it should be remembered that while the "strong" survive (and grow, and prosper, and get all the hits) the "weak" don't die off--they can exist quite happily as weaklings. How many personal homepages have you seen with counters saying, "you're the 13th person to visit my website since 1996!" There's no _need_ for them to die off, because unlike in the wild, they don't consume significant resources. In fact, strong websites inherently consume more resources than weak ones, which suggests a levelling effect in the long run. On the other hand, the resources are manmade and growing rapidly, so who knows?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
It doesn't surprise me that an information system the size of the Internet would have some unpredicted emergent properties. Stanislaw Lem, in his Summa Technologiae in 1962, predicted that biology would be the main source of engineering inspiration in the 21st century, and clearly this is coming true.
However, don't mistake a metaphor for a truth. They do not propose any kind of unified framework for analysing the 'Net, nor can they. They are simply looking to biology to inspire analytical methods.
Examining usage logs of 120,000 sites, Huberman and Adamic discovered that the distribution of visitors follows a universal power law -- better known as winner-takes-all. This is a world as viciously inequitable as the real one; the most popular 5% of websites get the lion's share -- 75% -- of all Internet traffic.
They missed an important implication of the power law. Increasingly, we should see metasearch systems parasitising the most commonly viewed sites - so long as IP law doesn't prevent it.
I'd like to see some useful predictions come out of there analysis, but I don't see any.
I'm not convinced that disk space restrictions are the major cause of the Darwinian distribution of file lifespans, as the article asserts in the second last paragraph.
Their discussion of an immune system for the web seems pretty speculative, and as they point out elsewhere in the article, monoculture systems are not sufficiently robust. A monoculture immune apparatus (as they propose) probably wouldn't be adequate either.
The point about monoculture is the best one they make. Melissa would have been impossible to propagate, or at least much less damaging, if Windows wasn't so widespread. You would think we had learned this lesson during the Internet Worm fiasco back in the late 80's.
Bail on the word "e-cology." Lem would probably call it "webological analysis", but I think something more greco-latin is in order. Gnostography maybe? Araneastics? Cognostofluxology?
If the internet was alive, I think It would almost be like my baby cousin.
My baby cousin can't walk so she crawls.
She tends to be irritable and tempermental so she crys and whines all the time.
She can get angry, and when she does watch out! Because you should hear some of the things that come out of her mouth.
She likes talking gibberish.
She can be fascinated by the stupidest things.
Of course she is not all that bad, there are some rare good qualities in her.
But boy-o you should see some of the shit that comes out of her!
Man
Well part of the theory of 'Pi' was that the stock market was like a living organism. In GitS they said the AI was just a merely self replicating program it replied 'I submit that your DNA is also merely a self replicating program'... Hmmm.. Of course the REAL fun comes in distributed Neural Nets. They might have some bizarre properties, as latency would occur between various sections of the whole. This however could be the key to making a real self-aware network. With the ammount of people in Seti@Home and Distributed.net... It would be able to have an immense number of neurodes.
and the matrix has you.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Click Here for CIA homepage.
How many licks does it take to get to the center on a tootsie roll pop?
+&x
I'm sure you all did. it basically said as "random" systems get more and more complicated, they start to resemble predictable organisms. the movie delt with chaos theory and the stock market and how it was a large enough chaotic system that it could be predicted with the right algorythm and a large enough number cruncher.
Anyplace where I can go to my family farm's home page and accidentally end up being asked for my credit card number for porn might be just chaotic enough to qualify. I don't think the internet will be large enough until it spans "heavenly bodies." When I can go to homer.crater.lun and end up sending packets to the sea of tranquility, THEN the internet will be alive.
"The Probability of Mischief varies inversly with respect to the proximity of an authority figure."
Are in no way related to how the Internet works.
/. is a black hole.
/. as black hole observation)
Think more along the line of Galaxies and Universes. The Internet is Flat, without definable boundaries, and our current assumption is it will expand forever. Links are wormholes, bandwidth is heat, and
--
from the article
Modern man's patterns of what researchers call information foraging turn out to be just as habitual as his ancestors': he follows the sent, hunts in packs and returns to familiar ground as often as possible.
So is Google a shotgun or a spear? This metaphor is way too wide, it can apply to almost any human behaviour, including human behaviour as a whole.
Right now, the average user pulls up a mere three pages per website (and as most news sites will tell you, their stickiness is measured in seconds)
(see above
I don't think of the Internet itself as life, but as a place where other life exists, bots, daemons, streams, etc. This type of life (existing only as a electonic impulses (which could, I guess, be said of people too)) and don't operate under the same rules as the rest of us. I would love to see that movie of the Internet's growth, that would be cool.
+&x
I think you'll find that many of the laws "of biology" tend to really be much more general, and are instead general laws of diverse complicated systems. Biology happens to be an interesting and easy to study niche in this larger field.
Survival of the fittest?
You have a cardboard box with a bunch of things made out of legos in it. Shake the whole box a lot. The ones that doesn't break are what's left over. If that stuff can get reproduced somehow (by itself, or by anything else), "natural" selection happens.
This happens with wholes (organisms & web sites) as well as parts (genes & memes/paradigms) - if the part causes the whole to break, that part won't be very common. We don't see a lot of humans with the "dead" gene.
Nothing comes free, even existence. That's what makes this whole thing work. (in other words, your website is in a cardboard box getting banged against legos)
For internet entities, the cost of existence is bandwidth & server space. Human interest is what it costs to cover these needs. Whether people are interested enough to pay the internet bill because the entity is neat or useful or lucrative is irrelevant.
Existence for humans is normal activity, as well as healing wounds - general metabolism. This cost is paid by an influx of chemical energy (food).
Biological things expend energy getting food, Internet things expend energy getting people interested. If either one of those entities's costs of existance exceeds it's resources, the data pipe will be shut down, so to speak.
Reproduction?
Q: What's the best way to learn HTML?
A: View->Source
In biological systems the notion of parenthood is pretty clear-cut. In memetic systems, however, it can be very difficult to see where ideas come from. But don't tell me that everybody who's implemented a web-based shopping cart thought of the idea themselves.
There are differences, sure. Darwinian vs. Lemarkian evolution.. One or two parents vs dozens or hundreds of 'parents'.
But what's important is that the environment has only limited resources (food, eyeballs), there is some kind of non-exact reproduction (cells divide, ideas get solen), combined with a non-zero cost for existance. Given those constraints, you're pretty much guaranteed to get an ecosystem, or something similar to it.
Is it (the internet) life? I don't care. If it is, great. If it's not, make a new word that means the same thing as "life" without requiring the processes be biological in nature. Good luck getting people to use it.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Much more importantly than asking if the internet is in anyway alive, it would be sounder to ask if it could die.
/. would be nothing if no one posted messages so the internet will continue to 'live' for as long as people use it.
The only way in which you could apply any form of evolutionary theory to a man made construct such as the internet is if it exists within an environment of competitors. Almost all software is like this, *nix fights it out with win*, each occupying a niche within the user base and each able to move into the others territory if improved to a sufficient degree. Open sourced software is even more evolutionary in the way that many programmers will suggest improvements but only the best will end up surviving into the next release. Of course these parallels should not be taken too far, programmers do not suggest random changes to code (or at least avoid doing so) which might have good or bad results, which is how nature works.
There is only one internet though, and nothing for it to fight against (ie nothing to kill it). Whenever any new technology is introduced it is carefully merged into the existing fabric so that those who do not adopt the new 'improvements' can continue to use the system (in theory..). Also, the costs involved in creating a whole new internet-like system are phenomenal and will stand in the way of any potential successor.
Can the internet die any other way? Parts of the internet die off every day when someone pulls a page from a server, a startup business goes bust or a malevolent hacker gets into somewhere he shouldn't. Other parts of the internet are more permanent, the physical apparatus behind the internet, computers, cables and fibres, will last for as long as they are maintained correctly and can easily be changed or updated as capacity is required (the internet getting poorly). What really makes the internet though are the people who use it,
This is not near to biological life though. The internet does not make any decisions for itself, never has to hunt for its dinner and will not have to search for a mate, it is cared for 24/7 by dedicated teams of professionals and has nice (if misinformed) things said about all over the media. In fact, I think I might try to become an internet myself....
There is no conspiracy
Click #1: "topics" on the left side of the page, http://slashdot.org/topics.shtml3 6&mode=nested
:-)
Clich #2: "News" option, http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=news
Click#3: "Australian Government Cracks Down on Net Users" from Nov. 26 (Currently #8 on the menu]), http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/26/10512
Click#4, Right-hand side of the page, "Related Links" box, you will find... CIA (http://www.cia.gov)
What do I win? I hope it's a bowl of grits.
Google is a fantastic search engine. Yes.
...If the average person will get off their duffs and leave the mediocrity that altavista and lycos have embraced.
Google is a popular search engine. No.
Google will become a popular search engine: Maybe.
Google has a silly name. Most definitely. *grin*
The Internet Mapping Project
Peacock Maps (buy one for xmas!)
-- jbum
Although it's a bit pop-culturish, Stephen Levy has a pretty good book on Artificial Life that addresses many of these issues. Mostly from the perspective of battles that Chris Langton has had to face.
Think of it this way. 50 years ago Turing proposed his famous test. And I will point out that he did make certain conditions -- within X amount of questioning time, a person would have Y% chance of guessing correctly. According to him, we should just about be there. Realistically, not only are we not even close on the natural language front, but we're just now only coming to agreement on what his test is supposed to test for!
There are two ways you can argue the condition of "life" - what conditions are "necessary" and which are "sufficient". For any condition that you say "In order to be alive, X must have Y" it has thus far been pretty likely that someone can find an exception to Y. A sufficient condition merely implies "If X has Y, then X is alive." But in that situation people are willing to accept the sufficiency condition right up until it is about to be met, and then they decide its not sufficient anymore. (I'm reminded of very early arguments that said a chess program beating a grandmaster would be a sufficient condition of AI. Later people changed their minds).
there are experiments going on now to use the internet to form a huge, distributed neural net. THAT could be pretty cool. Whether or not it would ever exhibit signs of life, I don't know. But it would sure be neat.
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I can't make an exact copy of myself (although my cells can make exact copies of themselves pretty much). A salt crystal in a supersaturated medium can can make copies of itself as well.
I think that life, like pornography and art is one of those things that is difficult to define objectively.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I created my Digital Video pages in the last year or so, and they've certainly been successful and gained a quite loyal audience [ http://www.amazing.com/dv/dv-faq.html ]. My fruutydates dating service [ http://207.151.18.18 ] seems to have attracted a nice niche of cool people.
In the first case, I wrote about a technology when it was starting to become popular and there were few net resources around. In the latter case, I got most of my users by latching on to the traffic from a web site whose owners spent substantial money on promotion.
So I wouldn't give up - new resources have a good chance of surviving and even thriving, as long as you put some kind of unique spin on your subject. And if you can't, why are you bothering?
Remember, if you're an individual setting up a site on some hot topic, people will find you - and you don't need billions of viewers to produce a useful resource people will enjoy.
D
----
As far as I know, a jellyfish is a single creature. I think you mean a portuguese man'o'war (sp?). But I am not a biologist...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587