Life as a Distributed Info-Being

Abstract The advent of the Mind Age of intelligent robots envisioned by Hans Moravec will bring profound transformations in global social and technological structures and relations of an advanced intelligence to its environment. The ability of future machines to directly share experiences and knowledge with each other will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to highly interconnected structural entities. The development of a network of communicating mobile and stationary devices may be seen as a natural continuation of biological and technological processes leading to a community of intentionally designed and globally interconnected structures. The growing reliance of system connections on functional, rather than physical, proximity of their elements will dramatically transform the notions of personhood and identity and create a new community of distributed "infomorphs" - advanced informational entities - that will bring the ongoing process of liberation of functional structures from material dependence to its logical conclusions. The infomorph society will be built on new organizational principles and will represent a blend of a superliquid economy, cyberspace anarchy and advanced consciousness. The new system will incorporate many of today's structures and will develop new traits transcending the limits of human understanding. Its evolution will evade human control, but relations of descendants of humans and today's machines will be largely symbiotic and will lead to the emergence of a new ecology of intelligence.

-- scott (hma5_5@hotmail.com), February 09, 2000