Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream is one of my favorite blogs. Earlier this week, Mr. Kelly wrote a post titled Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, in which he seriously entertains the idea that the Internet (working as a distributed brain) with cloud-based software (roughly analogous to the mind) could develop into a self-aware, semi-autonomous superorganism.

Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,”  — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual.

These two systems are able to “manufacture intelligence” and sell it to the humans that participate in the system (by adding raw usage-information that these clouds use to refine their understanding). This money is then invested by the curators of the cloud to expand its computational power and scope, and the organism grows. While it seems like there’s an intentional blurring of the line between the hardware/software itself, and the companies that use them to deliver the services, I think it’s fair to respond that a corporation is a fairly abstract entity, and if Google were able to do it’s job of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful with fewer employees and more computing power, its shareholders wouldn’t mind so long as the share price continued to rise. So such an organism could be viable as a company.

The final phase of the development towards something lifelike (or maybe even alive) would be self awareness, in which the Internet could map itselfs to determine whether the information it’s delivering comes form within or from without.

All of this, I suspect and hope, is still a few years away. So we don’t yet need upper-year university ethics courses on the proper and just treatment of packets and subroutines, but I find it gives a new perspective to my everyday internet-habits if I assume that each search I make, and every book I buy online, could be contributing, to an infinitessimal degree, to the creation and emergence of a new form of life; and that this process is happening in a surprisingly innocuous and organic way.