Ben Boyle - Wave Commander

Interbrain

31 Dec 2022 T1

Personal Update

It’s been a long time since I posted yet again. I was going to work on this a bit more before publishing, but I will leave that to a later post and get this out for feedback and leave 2022 with what I consider to be a new Tier 1 post.

I’ve just been working away at my job which has been pretty good. I am now messing around with serverless containers on GCP Cloud Run and learning Rust.

I have a hypothesis that needs testing: all of the benefits of containerized microservices can be had with plain Erlang and probably with lower overall overhead and latency.

So, I am making a test app with Rust containers and will eventually try to match feature parity with Erlang (or Elixir perhaps) and load test them to get some rough numbers on at least the order of magnitide they are on relative to each other.

Happy New Year!

- Ben

Now, onto the main affair

Your brain is a processing unit that is a part of the Internet.

Here, I’m not referring to the physical and technical meanings of the word Internet: a network of networks connecting digital computers. I mean the Internet in the way that humans experience it, which doesn’t have its own word yet. Darn! If only someone could come up with a term that captures its ability to send and receive information from anywhere to anywhere nearly instantaneously. Any ideas?

The BPU

In a way, your brain is connected via a bus like a GPU is connected via PCIe. It is a BPU: biological processing unit.

Your brain gives and receives information via Human Interface Devices (HIDs). It gives information to your computer with touchscreens, mice, keyboards, controllers, cameras, microphones, etc., and receives information in the form of light from the display, sound from the speakers (or headphones), and vibration from the haptics device (some may not consider all of these as proper HIDs: I don’t care).

The bandwidths of these human interface buses are not well-defined and indeed vary from human to human (not the bandwidths of HIDs to computers; those are well-defined. The bandwidths of brains to computers).

Some people, like myself, are slow at reading. Some can listen to speech at high speeds. Some can pay better attention when they have an audio, visual, and textual presentation, like a captioned video. Some people are slow at typing or have difficulty seeing small differences of light.

We have established that your brain has input and output (I/O) with your computer, and we know that your computer has I/O with a very large number of computers on the Internet. Thus, your brain is indirectly accessible via the Internet.

The Network

Many of the computers on the Internet have human users who also have I/O with their computer and, therefore, their brain is also accessible via the Internet. Indirectly, through many computers and routers and switches and cables and antennas, your brain is accessible by and can access every other brain connected to the Internet. It is important to remember that all of the computers connected to the Internet that are not directly controlled by humans also have that indirect access to every brain.

So, we have this massive Inter-network of computers, many of them connected to BPUs via HID buses; who’s sending them data to process across these buses?

Judging by the volume of traffic: TikTok, YouTube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. The shareholders and executives of these platforms wield a Godly amount of power, as they have influence over the perception of reality for a significant number of the humans on Earth by influencing what information gets sent to them over the Internet.

Analyzing what happens on these platforms, and simplifying to highlight a particular lens, each BPU processes what it sees locally (both digitally and IRL) and becomes “excited” when it comes across something they consider important. The BPU then generates its own signal, and BPUs that are close (close in terms of degree of social connection) receive the signal. These close BPUs are simultaneously performing the same process: looking at signals coming from the unending stream and deciding if any of them are worth signalling others about. They will see the signals broadcasted from other close BPUs and decide if they want to rebroadcast it.

Note: “rebroadcast” here doesn’t necessarily mean “retweet” or “share”. It could be that they “like” a post and then that post ends up in the feed of another close BPU because the platform thinks there is a high chance of them engaging with it as well. It could also be that they DM a link privately and the rebroadcasting is not visible on the outside

Social media could, ideally, serve as a priority queue where the highest priority things bubble up to the top. The Network could perceive as much of the natural world as possible via cameras, microphones, fitness trackers, weather stations, IoT devices, seismometers; sensors of all kinds. It could then compute the most important thing that everyone should be acting on right now by having a massive network of BPUs aided by AI models filtering and prioritizing everything happening in parallel at each level of social closeness. Echoes of this actually happen now and again, like with the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, most of the time, this is nowhere close to happening. It is rare to find any amount of unanimous consensus on today’s platforms. We have a terrible blight of misinformation and no easy way to overcome it. The things that make it to the top are rarely optimal when considering what should most humans be paying attention to right now. It is more often what is most likely to excite the emotional weak points in these BPUs which causes them to short circuit and generate knee-jerk, infected, malformed signals that cause cascading disruptions and damage to the Network.

Higher Order Organisms

Some characteristics of living things:

Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more “cells”

Metabolism: transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components

Growth: A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter

Adaptation: the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habitat or habitats

Response to stimuli

edited from “Life” - Wikipedia

Cities and nations exhibit these characteristics at a macro scale. This is because they are the combined needs of the many organisms that make up the city or nation and they work together to meet their needs (ideally :( ).

In a sense, these large groups of humans are a kind of higher order organism that live and die, act and react.

The Interbrain

Let’s revisit that structure of BPUs forming a network. If you squint, this begins to resemble the structure of neurons in the brain, where neurons become excited and pass on signals as reactions to signals from other close neurons with their own filters and conditions applied.

Thus, it seems that the point of this whole “Internet” is to construct a higher order brain made up of entire human brains as its neurons and the Internet as its axons. An organ made of complex organisms and distributed across the body of Earth. A brain of brains built on a network of networks.

Keeping with this analogy, this brain is underdeveloped right now. Large cortices of neurons don’t communicate with each other because they don’t know how to interpret the other’s signals, or they misinterpret the other’s signals, or the connection between the cortices is damaged, or a connection hasn’t been made yet.

As hinted above, the nervous system connected to this brain is also in development. This brain will be able to remember and coherently react to more and more of the natural world as its memory and sensory infrastructure is built.

This brain is confused. It needs to wake up from its spell of confusion and put out the fires consuming its body.

We, the cells of this brain, are too busy sustaining ourselves that we are often unable to act harmoniously and form a coherent thought that spans this great Inter-network of brains.