Notes on BreakPoint – by Jeff Stibel – An inspiring book appropriate to vanguard ideas on how the mind works and why the Internet is a mind in the making. Literally.
Computers, at least so far, are not intelligent. The Internet because it is a network will achieve intelligence first.
Here are some notes taken from the book
- The overwhelming majority number (99.999+ %)of species inhabiting the earth are gone. But 99.9% of all networked species are still with us.
- There is a creepy analogy between the workings of an ant colony and the workings of the brain. No single ant has a clue why it is doing what ever it does to support the colony just as no single neuron can possibly explain intelligence. Ant hill populations mature in about 6 years well below peak numbers achieved earlier on. Over sized colonies get confused. Similarly the neuron count in a mature human brain is approximately an order of magnitude below its peak in childhood (100 trillion vs 1000 trillion). A culling is necessary to achieve wisdom.
- Intelligence comes from the networking of neurons – Networks gain intelligence beyond the sum of the parts
- The human brain is 2% of body mass but consumes 20% of total body energy! Our physical size is the absolute minimum that could support such an energy hog brain.
- The Internet currently consumes 2% of all energy.. Cisco predicts 50 billion devices on line by 2020 and that will go bring Internet energy up to the 20% mark
- The Anternet: ants use a TCP like rate control mechanism. The bigger the food supply the more olfactory chemicals they exude as they forage which leads to more ants joining the march.
- We will have the “connectome” of the fruit fly completed within 10 years. This means whole brain simulation of the FF.
- The author states that learning to cook food is the number one reason humans came into being. Not only did this reduce parasites, it also considerably shortened the amount of time needed for foraging and feeding.
- Human nurons actually misfire 30-90%. The brain is highly fault tolerant.
- Hyperthynesia – perfect memory – a condition suffered by people like Jill Price who could not forget anything. The condition made if very difficult for her to learn. In order to learn we have to forget.
- The average westerner is now spending 70 minutes a day on the web. The web is changing how we think.
- The web has gotten too big for any organizational scheme to handle. Type in anything to google and you typically get hundreds of hits. Several billion pages of content are added to the web every day
- The web could benefit with two way links
- Neurons have weights to links.. the Internet should do the same
- Google search algorithms mimic neural nets.. Larry Page’s academic advisor was Terry Winograd who was a brain expert
- 150 relationships is the most we can handle (called Dunbar’s number).. the average Facebook account has 262 friends!
- The sea squirt uses its brain to locate a permanent home. Once that is done it will eat its brain. Never confuse survival with intelligence.
- The economics of “free” have changed the business model of the Internet. Even a price of one cent will deter many potential customers.
- Sometime back in the 80’s thanks to a grad student entering a primate lab eating an ice cream cone, a monkey with a wired brain showed an uncharacteristic neural blip. Predictive neurons were discovered. These neurons are tasked with running “what if” scenarios.
- We have discovered that language of the brain is universal and independent of any spoken languages. This is how universal human communications will be accomplished.
- The homo brain has been growing for 2 million years but began to shrink 20,000 years ago. As a consequence of agrarian communities, we have been able to sustain larger and larger numbers of simpler minds. It does not take a lot of brain power to till a field
- Evolution is concerned with survival. Brains are costly. Technology is doing more and more of our thinking for us.
- Telepathy is a fact- there are more than a dozen computer-brain interfaces marked today. An ESP chip is on the way which will allow the brain total Internet immersion. Check out the cat ears
- Meditation has been linked to the slowing of brain loss with aging
- If we create AI there will be nothing artificial about it.
- Re ants and humans – the solitary ant is almost void of intelligence, not capacity to survive alone. Similarly, no single modern human could even build a simple pencil from scratch.
- The Internet is about tight knit webs where humans thrive.. this was something lost in the industrial era.