I disagree. Saying that the internet loves something is similar to saying that "information wants to be free" or that a certain material is "hydrophobic". None of these things are "sentient" and so can't have opinions, desires, or fears, right? Well, maybe but what gives us "sentient" beings opinions, desires, fears, etc? I reckon it's just some kind of emergent phenomena. Well, the internet's "love" of cat photos is similar to this. Probably.
It does exhibit emergent behaviors that are arguably lifelike. Mostly its still human driven, like the worlds biggest Ouija board(1). It will get lots more interesting when it becomes mostly machines interacting (and effecting the physical world) thanks to the IoT.
Good that we have cleared that up. So, after that, could anyone explain to me how Washington can keep making all those laws and far-reaching descisions about our lives? Isn't it just a collection of buildings?
It's not just the Internet. It's also "them". And "us". No such thing!
"Everyone knows" is, like, a modern prayer. You just say it, and then everything else becomes true. Everyone knows you can just say 'everyone knows something' and you'll have described the Godhead, and/or thus God itself. Which, everyone knows, doesn't actually exist.
The Internet is an electronic godhead. Did everyone not get that briefing at the entrance door?
Why not ? One of the main properties of neural networks, like the human one, is that many of them act just like a single one (provided they communicate), only smarter.
In fact, your brain is not a single piece of brain matter. There are 3 "main" sections to your brain. That, and they're doubled up on 2 sides. Shoot all 3 on one side, and that human will respond almost as before, with very minimal loss of function (assuming the resulting bleeding doesn't kill the person of course).
That's not where it ends, the cortex is further subdivided in ~300 regions, each of which is to some extent independent. For instance, they have their own separate connection to the spinal cord. That means you could shoot 299 of them, and the person would not die and still respond like a human being to some extent. There are caveats, like that only 4 of those regions are connected to the eye, only 4 are connected to the ear, so chances are if you kill off most of the brain, it'd be a blind and deaf human being, but ...
So the internet should respond, in the other direction and only to some extent (because communication is very slow), like a human being.
