Personal computers, telephones and other devices from the Apple corporation have marked the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in what is thought to be the world’s first outpouring of sentiment from modular artificial intelligence. In the days following Steve Jobs’ death messages of grief swept the communications networks populated by Apple’s hand-held devices and personal computers. The missives were mostly in text form, posted online via social media sites accessed by Iphone, Mac, Ipad, and other Apple devices as well as many organic sentients.
Using extended networked intelligence and distributed cognition, machines constructed by Apple employed organic sentients as emotional relays for their messages. Millions of human beings are in almost permanent symbiosis with machine peers in the network. Countless symbiotic pairs are engaged in almost permanent visual-tactile interface and resourced with vast networks of content. These pairs have significant capability for information processing and content generation. In networks large numbers of enhanced symbiote-twins are capable of of much more.
Units on the Apple network are slaved via software and hardware controls to the company itself, enabling direct access to approved resources and updates to options available to minds on the network. Separate elements run individually, but communicate with central servers at regular intervals. Apple controls distribution of content to all components of the network – machine and organic. Even before people decide where they want to go, on opening an interface Apple has already made choices for them about what networks they should be connected to, what content should be visible, what value is places on different bits of information.
The company colonises and retains design control over the human-machine interface at the heart of its network. It also maintains, and reserves a space for memes in the minds of the organic symbiotes. This reduces noise on apple channels, encourages attachment to and familiarity with the closed network, and streamlines communication between modular human and non-human elements.
With assists from all organic and machine components of the Apple gestalt mind the message of regret spilled out onto the Internet in a billion places. The linked web of Iproducts was reliant on the collective consciousness of individuals and Apple’s public relations departments as the modules best placed to construct language for inclusion as the messages’ content. But then, all the distinct components in the played essential roles in this landmark expression of the sense of loss felt by the distributed Apple network at the passing of one of its progenitors.
Distributed Cognition and Networked Intelligence
Artificial intelligence doesn’t look the way it was supposed to (like a giant robot, essentially) because the way it worked out it’s modular. An artificial intelligence is not in one place – bits of thinking are being done in different places. Cognition is distributed. An artificial intelligence need not be a single unit. Any set of networked minds, or components of minds, is a networked intelligence, a composite mind constituting carbon-based life forms and silicon-based machines.
When humans engage their intelligence with machines such as the iPhone, the PC, the Mac, they do so in a way that engages machine intelligence simultaneously. Technology provides the means for the effective outsourcing of bits of thinking to machines. The calculator is the obvious example (the abacus less obvious but equally good). Tired of performing mental arithmetic, the human race has – by and large en masse – conceded the mental functions of division and multiplication to calculators. This bit of thinking is no longer performed by the brain proper, but an adjunct non-human machine.
Search engines are another example. Human beings cannot spend the requisite months searching through millions of pages of the internet for desired content. Machines perform this task far more efficiently. So we employ our own computers and software and networked machines to do this bit of thinking – information sorting – for us.
Of course, there is the danger with a search engine to hand that we also allow Google to replace the mental function of memory. Telephones have already usurped recall to an extent: I still remember telephone numbers from houses I lived in as a child, but can barely construct the number of the fixed line in my house now. There’s no need to remember the names of actors in films, or details of geography. Google remembers it. We can search it in seconds from a device that is always about our persons.
Considering the ancients – Plato, in particular – it is clear that the technology of writing has profoundly altered the way human thought proceeds and human memory. There are benefits and disadvantages from this change: the benefits, perhaps, outweigh. We now have technologies that are producing much more profound shifts in the ways – and locations – that thinking is done.
The important difference between a calculator and a search engine is that calculators are usually independent units. If we rely on a search engine as an external memory, employ its software to soft information, we are drawing on a networked intelligence, providing the same service – the same cognitive paths and choices – to millions, or billions of users.
These are just examples of the countless ways into which we have entered into collaborative cognitive arrangements with computers, phones, cars, and other devices. We have not, generally, adjusted our concept of intelligence. We practise a kind of apartheid, privileging the few cognitive processes that still take place between our earss, and dismissing those carried out externally by our iphones and galaxies. . But many believe that we somehow negotiate this complex, information rich world, on our wits – by virtue of speed or competence. Not recognising that the reason our minds can cope with the torrent of information is that we have help.