“Since then we’ve slowly come to realize that we need to take better care of ourselves if we want to survive. Think of it as one great big single organism. The Earth is its body. Mankind is its brain.”
Even if I didn’t realize it right away, I think that was the moment Julian won me over; when he said the Earth was the body and mankind was the brain. It was an intriguing concept. In the last couple of months I had been reading various books and articles about Artificial Intelligence, and I had been writing several small AI programs. Some of them were pretty good at simulating AI. However, I didn’t want a simulation. I wanted the real thing.
“So what about intelligence?” I asked. “And more importantly: consciousness.”
Julian nodded as if he had been expecting the question. “A child is obviously intelligent and conscious before puberty, but these qualities are refined during adolescence, and a person’s self-awareness reaches a whole new level. Mankind as a species is getting there.”
“How?” Ginger asked. “I don’t see it. I mean, you make it sound as if the whole planet is thinking with one mind and speaking with one voice. Clearly that is not the case.”
Julian smiled. “Not yet. Think back five years to your early puberty. You were confused, weren’t you? You were struggling to make sense of it all. You had mood swings. One day you loved a certain song or book or movie, the next day you hated it. You were torn between all the different attitudes and opinions a person could have, and it took you a considerable while to develop your personality as it is now. And I daresay it will take you another while to become the person that you are meant to be. That goes for all of us, by the way. We’re still kids. We’re still learning. We’re still fighting lots of battles within ourselves in order to find the person we are meant to be. I argue that while you and I may be halfway through this very delicate process, mankind has only just started it. As the dominating species in the world we’ve only just started growing synapses to connect all our neurons.”
“Whoa, slow down, Einstein,” Tummy said. “How did we get from brains to particle physics all of a sudden?”
“Neurons, Tummy,” I said. “Not neutrons. Neutrons are subatomic particles. Neurons are nerve and brain cells.”
“Not to be confused with morons,” Ginger added. “Morons are people like you.”
We all laughed, except Tummy. Although he had grown quite a thick skin over the years and usually didn’t mind being the butt of a light-hearted joke, his humour had its limits when it came to Ginger. Not because he didn’t like her, but because he did like her, and because he was secretly striving for her respect, not her ridicule.
“Actually, in my analogy,” Julian continued, “neurons are people. Think of every single person as a neuron in the global brain, and think of any connection between any two people as a synapse.”
Ginger looked at Tummy. “A synapse is a connector between two nerve cells, by the way, not a Jewish place of worship.”
Tummy scowled. “I know that!”
“Every interaction, every communication between any two people is a synapse firing in the global brain. For hundreds of thousands of years, neuron clusters were very small, and synapse firings were very localized. In prehistoric times, the average human being would only ever interact with a few dozen others in their immediate surroundings: their families, their clans, their tribes, their fellow villagers. All that changed with the invention of writing. Written language was the invention of the long-term memory. For the first time in history it became possible to convey a message not only to your immediate spatial and temporal vicinity, but to people who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away or indeed months, years, even centuries into the future. The effect further multiplied with the invention of the printing press, and it grew exponentially with the advent of radio and television. Mass media made it increasingly easy to convey messages to thousands if not millions of people. As a result we have seen an explosion of knowledge since the middle ages, and mankind’s collective memory is growing bigger every single day.”
“Memory alone,” I interjected, “doesn’t constitute intelligence, though, let alone consciousness.”
“Exactly,” Julian said. “The problem right up until the end of the 20th century was that mass communication was a one way street. It was relatively easy for a select few senders to reach millions of recipients, but the masses never had the chance to respond in kind. Sure, you could always send a letter to a newspaper editor or to your favourite author if they were still alive, but that took forever and only in the smallest amount of cases led to a meaningful two-way communication. The Internet changed all that. It democratized mass communication on a large scale. Today a politician can say something incredibly stupid on Twitter in the morning and resign in time for the evening news on account of the instant shitstorm he created. The masses have a voice now.”
Ginger sighed. “Too bad they’re wasting it to talk about The Geordie Shore.”
“Yeah, well,” Julian shrugged. “You can’t really blame them for that, can you? When you learned to talk as a child, you didn’t jump right into discussing Spinoza; you used your newly learned skills to say a lot of—presumably—pretty silly things.”
“Because I didn’t know who Spinoza was; or care, for that matter.”
“I know. But that’s where mankind is at this moment in time. We have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, but most of us aren’t ready or interested to use it yet, so we spend our time watching cute cat videos or discussing The Geordie Shore. But we’ll get there. It’s only a matter of time.”
“So what about consciousness?” I asked.
“It’s only just beginning to emerge,” Julian said. “Most of the activity of the global brain is still subconscious. It’s all the memories the collective mind has acquired so far, and all the billions of localized information exchanges that happen every day. But there is an increasing number of instances when the consciousness of the collective mind flashes up; when for the tiniest of moments the whole world focuses on one event that no matter who you are or where you live you are bound to talk about the next day. The 9/11 attacks, for example, or the tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people back in 2004, or Fukushima. Natural disasters that kill large amounts of people are generally good candidates for flashes of the global consciousness, events that you will most likely talk about with your peers, whether you live in a mud hut in Africa, a council estate in Swindon, or a penthouse apartment in New York City, because they affect you in one way or another even though they may have happened halfway around the world.”
“Is it a coincidence that these are all negative events?” Ginger asked with a sullen look on her face. “Catastrophes, natural disasters, acts of terror and so on?”
“Perhaps not. These examples were the first that came to mind. If we want to draw an analogy to the mental development of prehistoric humans, I think fear and the emergence of conscious thought might be very closely related. However, one can of course think of positive events that captured the imagination of people all over the world. I bet that when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface, even the Russians, although they lost the space race, secretly shared a sense of accomplishment and felt proud to be human. Anyway, the point is that it will be shared ideas and ideals that will eventually constitute the basis for consciousness of the global brain, once it has acquired critical mass so that memes can roam freely and untethered from their origins.”
Up until this point I had been following Julian’s ramblings with limited enthusiasm. Not because they weren’t interesting, but because he had been talking to me about most of these things before, so they weren’t really news to me like they may have been to Ginger and Tummy. But now he had said something that he hadn’t had said before, something that hit me on the head like a hammer.
Once the global brain acquires critical mass, and memes can roam freely, untethered from their origins, consciousness will emerge.
I don’t know if an
yone else will understand this, but for a nerd like me this sentence was the epitome of hope and inspiration, the dream of a future that seemed so close that we couldn’t even see it properly.
Julian kept on rambling about his Global Teenager hypothesis that night, but I soon zoned out. I let Julian’s idea, untethered from its origin, roam freely in my mind, and that’s how MINDY was conceived. I immediately began devising little snippets of code, simple little programmes whose sole purpose it was to collect data and to report back to me. That doesn’t sound very exciting, I know, but it is, because those little snippets of code, the building blocks of what was to become MINDY, were completely autonomous. They didn’t run on my computer. In fact, they didn’t run on any single computer, at least not in the conventional sense. What they did was to utilize memory and processing power of computers that were connected to the Internet and not properly secured. They created a micro brain with just a few dozen neurons and synapses. Once I had set them free, I no longer had any control over them. I couldn’t rewrite them; I couldn’t stop them; I couldn’t call them back home. The idea was that all I could do, once they were on the loose, was to ask them questions and hope for an answer. I had no idea if it would work.
I programmed the first MINDY module that same night, all through the night, and I uploaded it in the morning right before I left for school. It was the simplest and most basic MINDY module, and it had only one single task: to find me, which sounds a lot simpler than it is. Remember, once I had uploaded it, I cut all ties with it on my end. And of course I hadn’t programmed it with my phone number or my email address. That would have defeated the whole purpose. All it knew was my name. I wanted to see if it was able to sift through all the data that was publicly available on the Internet and find the right Michael Carling. Again, that is no mean feat. I am very protective of my personal data. I don’t have a Facebook account, my phone number isn’t listed anywhere, and whenever I need to sign up or register on some website, I use fake names and dummy email addresses. Before we were famous, a Google search for Michael Carling would produce 6,140 results. None of them had anything to do with me. If MINDY wanted to find me, it would require at least a basic level of intelligence. I had no idea just how intelligent that inconspicuous little snippet of code that I wrote in a single night would be.
The Gospel According to Ginger – 3
It’s not that I didn’t like people. On an individual basis most people were probably all right. What always put me off was when more than a handful of people got together, and the hive mind—their lowest common denominator—took over and started dictating their words and deeds. That’s when I usually felt lost, unappreciated, and intellectually under-challenged. I never was one for discussing The Only Way is Essex, exchanging make-up tips, or fangirling over Justin Bieber. That made me a bit of an outcast among my peers, I suppose, but it was a role I happily accepted, because it didn’t seem right to me to lower one’s standards just in order to please others and be popular. So I usually stayed away from people. The only downside to being a recluse was that it made it next to impossible to accidentally stumble upon a gemstone on a beach full of pebbles. But one day such a gemstone threw itself up in the air and hit me right in the head.
On that day, as I was strolling across the school playground all by myself like I always did, with my hands buried deep in my pockets and my eyes trying to avoid contact with anyone, I suddenly noticed this guy from my class, Michael, walking next to me. I tried to ignore him at first, thinking he was mocking me while a bunch of his friends were probably standing at the other end of the playground watching us and laughing their arses off. But no one was laughing, and when Michael wouldn’t stop hovering over me, I finally stopped dead in my tracks, turned to him and asked, “What?!”
Visibly startled, he shrugged and said, “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? Why are you walking next to me?”
“I just thought you might like some company.”
“Seriously?” I rolled my eyes. “Look around you. This is a playground full of people. If I wanted company, don’t you think I’d just get some?”
“Sorry.” He shrugged again, turned around and walked away.
Suddenly I felt bad because of all the people in my class, Michael was one of the less obnoxious ones. He was a rather quiet creature, and, as far as I could tell, a bit of a geek. Not the worst material in the world.
“Michael?” I said after a few moments.
He stopped and looked at me.
“I appreciate it,” I said in a much tamer voice. “I just need some time on my own.”
“Okay. No problem. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
And then I caught myself smiling at him.
The next day, as our classmates were running out of the classroom after English class, I stopped at Michael’s desk.
“Want to walk with me?”
“Sure,” he said and got up. Just as we were about to leave the classroom I heard somebody behind me call out Michael’s name.
“Michael!”
We turned around to see Tummy making a very rude, sexually suggestive gesture involving his tongue and two of his fingers. Michael shot him an angry look that was met by a silly schoolboy laugh, put his hand on my back and led me out of the classroom.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” he said.
I shrugged. “Yeah, well. You wouldn’t really expect anything else from somebody like Thomas, would you? He’s just so annoying all the time. No wonder he doesn’t have any friends.”
“Well,” Michael said. “I’m his friend. Sort of.”
“Sort of?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah. I mean, we hang out and stuff.”
“Seriously? Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Tummy may seem rude, loud, and obnoxious, but deep down inside he’s a good guy. He doesn’t have it easy, you know. His mum runs a pretty tight ship at home. Tummy calls it a dictator-ship with his mum as captain and helmswoman all in one. Even his dad doesn’t have much to say at home. And outside of his home ... well, you know how everyone picks on Tummy, and bullies him all the time.”
“I daresay he’s asking for it. What with the way he behaves and everything.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But that’s because nobody really knows him that well. As I said, he’s a good guy, really. He’s honest. That’s a quality that seems rather underestimated.”
“I’m going to have to take your word for it, I suppose.”
I pushed the door open, and we stepped out into the playground. The air was crisp and clean and smelled of spring. We slowly negotiated our way through clusters of screaming middle schoolers until we reached a quieter corner of the playground. Our conversation about Tummy had come to an end, and we walked in silence for a while.
“So what do you do?” Michael finally asked.
“What do you mean, what do I do?”
“I mean, when you’re not at school getting annoyed by everyone.”
“Well, when I’m not at school I usually get annoyed by everyone outside of school.” She laughed.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, well. People are strange, aren’t they? Most of them are anyway. I mean, look around you. Which of these people would you like to waste your spare time with? I don’t know, I just don’t seem to get along with most people. It’s not that some of them aren’t really nice and friendly, but when I get to school on a Monday morning, the very last thing I want to talk about is The X-Factor, or football results, or whatever else has been on TV over the weekend. So I’m really glad, almost relieved even, when the school bell rings and I can get inside and listen to Mrs Hamilton talk about the Napoleonic wars or something for an hour. I don’t really have anything against anybody, but the lack of intellectual stimulation I get from my peers is just a major turnoff. If your life revolves about reality TV shows, shopping, and Facebook, then that’s fine, suit yourself. But don’t expect me to feign any interest.”
“I see
.”
“Oh my god,” I said and put my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t ... Please tell me your life doesn’t revolve around reality TV shows, shopping, and Facebook!”
“No.” He laughed. “No, it doesn’t, don’t worry. I don’t watch reality TV, I hate shopping, and I don’t even have a Facebook account.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “And to answer your question, I read a lot, play the piano, and help out at the animal shelter twice a week.”
“The animal shelter?”
“Yeah. I love animals. For some reason I find it much more difficult to get annoyed by animals. Compared to humans, I mean.”
“Right. So what you are saying is you don’t really like people.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t put it like that. I do like some people. There are some truly great people around, but they’re preciously few. Like, maybe one in a hundred, which means ...” I looked around. “There may be a total of four or five really cool people in this school. Unfortunately they get so easily lost in the crowd.”
We had been walking in silence for a while when all of a sudden Julian—another guy from our class—ninja’d his way past Michael and me, turned around and beamed at us with his big blue eyes.
“Check this out,” he said and handed Michael a piece of paper. Then he looked at me and said, “Hello, stranger.”
I frowned at him, and I could see the boyishly mischievous sparkle in Julian’s eyes, the pleasure he derived from confusing people.
Idolism Page 7
