Internet 3.0 - Artificial Life Online

By C.J. Jones

The internet has been growing and changing in leaps and bounds since it was first created back in the early 80s. We started out with just the most basic ability to post to bulletin boards and reference a few odd news sources. Over time we saw communication by e-mail, instant messaging systems, VOIP. Websites have become increasingly interactive since then.

Chat bot designs emerged even before the internet was fully realized as a sort of play on the idea of thinking machines. These programs would mimic an aspect of human personality through very simplistic scripting mechanisms.

Huge engines including Yahoo, Bing and Google took it upon themselves to acquire and sort the trillions of websites that can be found online so that we can more effectively peruse the available data.

The sophistication of all of these technologies has been evolving parallel and even 'into' the internet itself. The unifying element of these things is summed up simply as data access. The further we progress down this road the closer we are getting to what may be considered a unified, self-propagating educational system. The potential value of which is almost inconceivable.

Imagine for a moment that all forms of bias are stripped from education so that you aren't learning based on the perspective of a given country, religious view or ethnicity but from an overview of world affairs. Then consider how fast this system could build onto and refine itself by receiving and weighing out the input from all who use it without ever forgetting any of the details.

Historically, there is evidence of many great cultures which have been particularly amazing at one thing or another. Outside of a few relics here and there though, much of the knowledge they possessed has been lost over time. The internet is quite possibly the closest we've come as a race to a solution in avoiding the loss of accumulated knowledge and understanding.

Before the emergence of the internet, the closest thing to it ever to have existed might have been the Great Library of Alexandria.

With the internet being an interactive library itself. It's easy to see how an artificial brain leveraging the same data driven concepts for conversational interaction could take things to the next level.

Of course there are those who will argue that chat bots really haven't come very far and the internet is so full of rubbish that any real filtering system would be impossible. I beg to differ however.

While it's true that 'most' chatbot related programs are still just a simple scripting mechanism. There are some now incorporating far more advanced capabilities.

An artificially intelligent childlike brain can be developed specifically to learn from and process the data provided to it by way of conversation and even books. It's not yet by any means the ultimate solution. It is easy to see however that the new capabilities presented by individualized creations like this are potential game changers lining up a possible future in education like the one outlined above.

There are elements outside of the technology itself which holds back this potential future though. The most obvious being the lack of acceptance for change. Another may be how much weight and expectation is put on any given technological concept by Hollywood to perform as it has in movies.

Things like automated learning and research capabilities have shown up in a few isolated developments like Jeeney AI.

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