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Centrally Networked Life Forms



Thanks to some comments left by Daniel, I’ve been thinking out some other implications of this recent announcement by South Korea that they will be testing 1,000 centrally and remotely controlled robots. Daniel says he would be cool with having autonomous (non-networked) robots like R2D2 or C3P0, but that he wouldn’t be okay with having a robot in his home that might be remotely controlled and may be reporting back on his activities.

That got me to thinking from a practical technical standpoint, what would be the benefits of having a type of life form that is *not* centrally controlled? In the original article that I quoted from, they said that central processing would enable the cost of robots to become affordable. I assume that the idea would be that the robots would be performing similar tasks across households, etc, and that it would enhance all of them if they pooled what they learned from their respective environments and tasks. Technically, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe more sense than requiring each of them to reinvent the wheel every time something happens.

Which makes me wonder - why is it that we ourselves aren’t centrally networked together like this, to instantaneously share our and learn from one another’s experiences? There may also be a chance that we are, but that we just aren’t aware of it. If we’re made to not be aware of it or if that connection simply doesn’t exist, what benefits do we derive from not having it?

One I can think of offhand is simply creativity and variety which may be a bigger deal than it sounds at first. Say you have 1,000 life forms who are centrally controlled. What happens when that multi-unit life form encounters a situation it can’t solve? BOOM! You suddenly lose 1,000 life forms in the blink of an eye. But then, you have us where we seem to be encountering situations individually on our own. When one of us hits a snag, we don’t pull down the entire system. Just one light on the motherboard goes out and we keep on chugging along as a whole. If that thinking is at all accurate, it would make sense then that ultimately robotics processing will go in the same individualized direction of greater and greater autonomy, greater decentralization in order to make it more flexibility, creative and adaptable. Who knows though, really, but it’s fun to speculate on.

Two other possibly related items: the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game (which I reviewed here) deals with some of these questions about different types of consciousness. And we had a discussion about using technology for compassion (unit to unit networking, essentially) a while ago which covered some similar ground.

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4 Reader Responses

  1. channel null Says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    This ties in with hierachal vs. “rhizomic” models of power–check out Jeff Vail’s Theory of Power for more on this. I’ve only looked at his blog, not read the book which he has on PDF. We could tie it into series and parallel circuits, and neural pathways, too.

  2. alistair Says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    if you are uncomfortable with people (the government…) knowing your activities then don`t fill out a tax return. we are already caught in the feudal technocracy. relax and enjoy the toys. just be glad we don`t live in china or some of these other tyrannies where people are tortured and killed for fun.

  3. Sis Says:
    July 4th, 2006 at 7:02 am

    Well, Edgar Cayce and many other psychics, etc would say that we are all tied together through the Akashic Records. EMF Balancing would say it’s a grid and we are all connected to that. Psychology, especially Jung, would call it the collective unconscious. Asian religions refer to it as chi, life force, which we can all tap into depending upon the modality in use (which by the way is how George Lucas found his inspiration for the Force).

    I think western religions, such as Catholicism and other forms of Christianity are not really big on recognizing how we are connected to one another but that is changing.

  4. Allison Says:
    July 4th, 2006 at 12:23 pm

    My question is, is there any way to have the benefits of both and minimize the negative aspects of each? Why does it have to be either/or? I think that might even be part of what the human ‘experiement’ is about — to make our interconnectivity largely unconscious but accessible by certain means, while the emphasis is more on individualized consciousness, with all the potential for creativity, diversity and innovation that opens up. But to really succeed in the experiment I, personally, would be aiming at a hell of a lot better integration of both.

    I’m sure the greater ‘force’ - the centralized God or intelligence that we are all connected to, and connected to each other through, is receiving the feedback from all of our individual discoveries and creations, but the abaility for us each as individuals to then be able to tune into that in turn, and take what we learn back with us to the individual level, think how much more quickly we could learn and evolve on all levels if we could all benefit, not only as a whole, but each as individuals, from all other individuals, and the whole. Wow, long sentence, sorry.
    The ideal I’d think would be to have a good back and forth feedback thing going, instead of almost everyone being cut off from the source and the collective bank of knowledge, and continuing to struggle and make the same mistakes over and over again until they die. But maybe that’s the ‘next step’ in evolution? One can hope.



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