December 31, 2022
The Conscious Web
The web is becoming conscious, even if you don’t see it yet. Soon it will help you automate more of your day-to-day life and bring more intelligence into everything it does. How you consume information is going to change forever.
When Tim Berner Lee wrote about the Semantic Web in Scientific American back in 2001, he expressed the challenge of machines to understand the pun. Over the last 20 years, machines have become capable of not only understanding puns but also understanding humor. Machines can now be funny. Machines are moving fast from information navigation to knowledge assimilation because they don’t live in a Babylonian world. They can communicate seamlessly and should be soon capable to crack a joke to bring more meaning to their humdrum existence.
Now think about millions of machines connected in a network. There is no intelligence machine stronger than the web, especially if you teach it communication, comprehension, and interaction [with humans]. The web has the majority of human information and it does not need a Laplacian world to become intelligent. Soon, a sliver of information would have the capability to visualize the past and peek far into the future of information. The reason this capability seems more realistic now rather than a few decades back is that we have lived through the web’s previous versions [1.0, 2.0] and experienced its breakneck speed of transformation.
The more the machines will talk to each other and us [humans], the more it will enrich information, consequently allowing the web to learn and think. We don’t need to dream or imagine such a world because it’s the way of Nature. The moment we give something critical mass, it comes to life and like a chrysalis miraculously transforms itself into a butterfly. We crossed the threshold the moment we connected billions of people through social media [3.0].
Nature may seem to need a cause to bring effect but in reality, it's the certainty of the effect that drives its cause, bringing the drunkard man back home, again and again. Nature’s infinitesimally small human experiment has got colorful as a society now projects itself as a tangled set of talking machines, together becoming an input-throughput-output engine of information, defining the core of its civilizational existence. When I wrote about the intelligent web back in 2017, I did not think about consciousness, but I imagined ultra-smart agents, proof of intelligence, and a general purpose for machines as a necessity for 4.0.
The cognitive web 3.0 will not just be about machines tagging datasets forming a common syntax, which enhances readability and interpretability but also about data universality, where data commonalities are explored for an individual (component) and domain (group) benefit, for inferences, and to anticipate immediate and intermediate evolution of the living organism, the World Wide Web. This architecture of data could potentially drive the transition to Web 4.0, the ultra-smart agent which caters to the community's needs.
Mukul Pal, AlphaBlock, SSRN, 2017
True intelligence begins with self-awareness. Like Boltzmann’s brain, the collective information [web] might need to say, “I exist. I have arrived despite the second law of thermodynamics and I can overcome my entropy and create a new order”. Schrodinger wondered about it in his book, “What is life?” and Einstein bet on Nature’s lack of motive to throw a die. There are aspects of complexity that still intrigue us and now with a large complex world wide web that has already spent nearly 80 years in existence, the web is not waiting for an on-off switch to Consciousness. Self-awareness is a gradual process, not a eureka moment at a specific point in time. Boltzmann couldn’t reconcile how high entropy, sometimes created a low entropy rare event that brought a hot sun, near a cold earth to give human life a chance to exist. The failure of the second law of thermodynamics lies at the heart of the consciousness challenge.
Enrichment of Information creates the opportunity to build self-enhancing Informational engines. Limiting the scope and difficulty of a problem limits the purpose of machines and hence their path to consciousness, while a general purpose brings machines closer to consciousness, as they grasp the true limits of their capability. “How conscious I am, defines how intelligent I can be.” Human intelligence is defined by its consciousness, not vice versa. Hence machines need a general purpose for consciousness. A purpose large enough to subsume other narrow objectives. The human body does not worry about the functioning of its brain because the higher conscious mind can steer it at will. Hence a general intelligent process is capable to see the context around every other specific [narrow] intelligent process.
Content is a narrow scope for Information, while Informational context pushes it forward. Informational context subsumes informational content, like an element on a collage fulfilling its preordained purpose. Web Consciousness is more about the context of the collective information rather than the elements of its content. “Where am I today? Why am I here today? Where can I go tomorrow? Why do I have to go there tomorrow? How will tomorrow define for me my purpose?” Such contextual thinking breaks down the rules of causality as the all-encompassing purpose lays down the vision and refuses to operate through a singular path or in a linear process. A contextual purpose has a sense of complexity, a capability to adapt, and preparedness for breakdowns. A context is aware of boundaries, limits, and inflection points at a holistic level. A context is designed for anticipation. If you know the boundaries of information, you can anticipate the future.
Machines today understand the context of language. This is why they can comprehend language with such ease. When this capability of context becomes more generic and domain agnostic, it won’t matter, whether the information is from language or electrons or stars, the generality of it all will allow machines to define boundaries, which will give it context. And once it has context, it has a chance to wake up, and understand its functioning, its limits, and hence [know] its power.
Information theory has its foundations in Johnson–Nyquist noise, which has a basis in electromagnetic fluctuations, which are based on the phenomenon of electromagnetism, a field that can be viewed as the combination of an electric field and a magnetic field. The electric field is produced by stationary charges, and the magnetic field by moving charges [electric currents]. Electromagnetism can be understood as a convergence-divergence mechanism built from the interaction of electric and magnetic fields. A natural mechanism that generates order and disorder [noise], which formed the basis for Shanon’s work on information theory, which got us to today.
The same convergence and divergence of Informational theory and quantum theory opens up further possibilities to understand contextual boundaries for information. Statistical laws define information from a distribution [tails] perspective. Mathematics defined information probabilistically using the idea of preferential attachment. Physics gave the information a temporal architecture. Scientific capability to understand how information disorder could drive order and how information can flit between the respective states can not only allow us to answer the failure of the second law of thermodynamics but also discover the elements of true intelligence.
I illustrated a conceptual model of nature in [3N] model of life. I imagined functioning of Nature as contextual informational states. Such informational systems could use informational entropy to drive informational engines [4.0] and extract intelligence hitherto missing from the information. The [3N] model may be new, but converging-diverging systems like electromagnetism are everywhere, in climate, in language, in cancer, in weather, in stock markets, etc.
Society refuses to accept these new mechanisms because they undermine our current beliefs about information. Humans may continue to believe in their causal explanations, but the reality of clustered information is beyond individual control. And assuming we can never shut down the internet, 4.0 is the new reality of informational systems that operate with contextual consciousness and bring in a new age of anticipation with them. More than 99% of all businesses operate with informational content. Less than 1% businesses [startups] are building an informational contextual business with a clear focus to bring general intelligence agents to the masses. Information context is ready to take us to the conceptual age.
Happy New Year
Bibliography
Koch. C, "Will Machines Ever Become Conscious?" Scientific American, Dec 2019
Lee. T.B, Hendler. J, Lassila, O, "The Semantic Web", Scientific American, May 2001
Pal. M, "AlphaBlock", SSRN, 2017
Pal. M, "Human AI", SSRN, 2017
Pal. M, "[3N] Model of Life", SSRN, 2021
Pal. M, "The Conceptual Age", AlphaBlock Research, March 2022