An overview of the semantic Web--an extension of the current Web-- that may act as a "collective memory," augmenting individual brain power and accelerating the pace of human learning and discovery. The author argues for guidance now to "avoid the emergence of a dystopian digital dictator."
A group of software developers has released a peer-to-peer virtual aquarium, an experiment in distributed artificial life that is attempting "to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next..."
As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.
Web users are being invited to help create the first model of human thought. By collecting "atoms of information" a Canadian scientist hopes to be able to teach a computer what it means to be human. Once created, the body of knowledge will be made available to other artificial intelligence researchers trying to make machines smarter or easier to interact with.