Intelligent Life

What is INTELLIGENCE? for that matter, what is LIFE?

by Laura Trippi

Riding a crest of evolutionary momentum that began in the primordial swamp, we humans have been more or less left alone on earth to talk amongst ourselves. Intelligence sets the species apart. Or does it?

As we cross the threshold to the next millennium, new forms of life and new conceptions of intelligence are taking shape around us, aided and abetted by digital technology. Software programs breeding in cyberspace hold the simultaneous promise and threat of a quasi-Cambrian explosion of digital life. (1.) At the other end of the spectrum, in the realm of what we once called outer space, growing evidence fuels a groundswell of interest in extraterrestrial affairs. It seems we may not be alone in the echo chamber of our own pondering for long.

Meanwhile, the inner space of mind and the social space of interaction are being remapped. Here, intelligence no longer appears as something solely in the purview of individuals, nor even a uniquely human attribute, but a characteristic of whole systems evolving over time.

These developments speak to the gathering convergence of technology and biology. Machinelike models for explaining events and organizing individual experience--which have kept nature and culture, the hard and social sciences, reason and intuition on opposite sides of a divide--are giving away to methods that mimic not the products but the process of nature. Just as the sequential maths of algebra and calculus were engines of the industrial age, so the "evolutionary intermaths" made possible by digital technology are fundamentally altering the ways in which we apprehend our world. (2.)

On the Web, so the joke goes, nobody knows you're a dog. Woof, woof! Evolutionary ideas of adaptation are excited in exquisitely intimate ways as we interact online, pitching our personae through a changing cast of member names, avatars, and passwords. Linking from site to site, mutating slightly from sign-on to sign-on, users flock, disperse, and migrate in protean networks of information-based relations. In this way, the Internet itself seems like a sprawling--and unintentional--simulation of a living system. Nowhere else is the shift in our understanding of what counts as intelligence and what constitutes life more pronounced.

The accompanying map presents an array of Web sites spotlighting hubs of activity in this expanding field, ranging from artificial life (in cyberspace) to remote sensing (of, mostly, outer space), and from the figure of global evolution to the ground of distributed intelligence. Underscoring the role that digital mathematics plays in shaping the field, the map is based on diagrams of "neural nets," a method of computer programming modeled on the neural networks along which information travels in the human brain.

As in neural-net diagrams, along the top are the "input nodes"--here, disciplines in the hard and social sciences generating models of life and thought.

Along the bottom are the "output nodes"--in this case, art, theory, and popular culture, categories of cultural production that (among other things) filter, redirect, and disseminate material from the sciences. The middle nodes do the grittiest work, and it is here that the Web sites themselves appear, arranged in the four main thematic groupings mentioned above. Within this, subgroupings (biotech, extraterrestrial life, ecotech, and so on) represent distinct but related clusters of activity. Lines running between the nodes of the map indicate the complex network of pathways carrying information through the neural net. Clearly, we are not in the Kansas of linear logic anymore.

Unlike linear equations, nonlinear maths don't necessarily produce the "right" answer on the first try or the same result every time. Neural nets forage through piles of data and evolve--adapting their behavior, reconfiguring their paths, and becoming, ever so gradually, better at their particular task. To do this, they must receive "training data" of feedback from a programmer, or both, conveyed into the system through the synthesizing action of the output nodes. In other words, neural nets "learn," eventually operating outside the reach of human intervention and, some argue, comprehension. This is true of the software programs now self-replicating in "tanks" around the globe.

The neural net that appears here is also a section diagram of cultural change at the onset of a digital epoch. The hubs of activity describe a cross-disciplinary thematics of practice, in which the idea of digitally triggered evolutionary threshold swims to the surface. Eager technology! What the diagram does not show is the role of history, as training data, and of ourselves, a distributed programming agency occupying the net in its entirety. We are still alone, in the recombinant ecology of the digital--at least, for now.

1. See "The Burgess Shale and the Digital Cambrian: A Workshop on the Origins and Future of Life on Earth." at http://www.biota.org/.