The Internet is just a large Brain – When will it become Self Aware?

I never thought we would figure out artificial intelligence at least not in my lifetime, but yesterday I realised we already have and it is already quite a complex organism. It is of course the internet; it is exactly the same as brain. Many different parts connected by a network of cables, in the case of the internet, and synaptic nerves in the case of the brain. And every time we add more connections and faster networks it becomes more and more intelligent. I wonder if eventually the internet itself will become self aware? Not the way it is created in The Terminator films, where it is by one genius in a small super secret lab, but by the sheer fact it is the evolutionary destiny for the sum of all its parts, to eventually become a self aware living entity.


At the moment the artificial intelligence side of the internet is not seen as one thing, it is many things working separately, without much knowledge of itself. This may change over time as more and more information is added to the internet, and the incredible amounts of data flowing through those inanimate fibre optic cables starts to manifest itself as a living entity.

Whether this can or will happen is obviously debatable, and would we know if the internet started becoming self aware. Does our electrical impulses inside our brains, firing trillions and trillions of times a second, constantly creating new pathways; do they know the extent of the entity it is creating or allowing to be alive.

If you look at the known Universe and see an image from a space telescope, all the matter forms into filaments, which you can say are similar to the fibre optic cables or the synaptic nerves or roadways or anything that flows, even the arteries in your body. Is this the pattern of the Universe to make connections and in doing so extend existence?

Maybe the universe itself is a large brain, the connectedness of everything we see as reality. Anyway it’s just a thought.