

The Internet Doesn't Love Anything. It Is Not a Human Being. - yiedyie
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2014/06/the_internet_loves_the_internet_hates_no_the_internet_is_not_a_person.html

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okonomiyaki3000
I disagree. Saying that the internet loves something is similar to saying that
"information wants to be free" or that a certain material is "hydrophobic".
None of these things are "sentient" and so can't have opinions, desires, or
fears, right? Well, maybe but what gives us "sentient" beings opinions,
desires, fears, etc? I reckon it's just some kind of emergent phenomena. Well,
the internet's "love" of cat photos is similar to this. Probably.

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noonespecial
It does exhibit emergent behaviors that are arguably lifelike. Mostly its
still human driven, like the worlds biggest Ouija board _(1)_. It will get
lots more interesting when it becomes mostly machines interacting (and
effecting the physical world) thanks to the IoT.

 _(1) And it seems to have spelled out "I can haz"._

~~~
yiedyie
Remindes me of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_\(TV_series\))

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izietto
Sophism; _The Internet loves X_ implies _People on Internet love X_. Moreover,
the Internet is for Cats [1]

[1] [http://theinternetisforcats.com/](http://theinternetisforcats.com/)

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xg15
Good that we have cleared that up. So, after that, could anyone explain to me
how Washington can keep making all those laws and far-reaching descisions
about our lives? Isn't it just a collection of buildings?

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guard-of-terra
Internet is not a human being, but one might argue it is to some point alive;
and that it even responds to irritations.

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cotwomey
The internet is clearly very frustrated about being described as human.

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waps
Why not ? One of the main properties of neural networks, like the human one,
is that many of them act just like a single one (provided they communicate),
only smarter.

In fact, your brain is not a single piece of brain matter. There are 3 "main"
sections to your brain. That, and they're doubled up on 2 sides. Shoot all 3
on one side, and that human will respond almost as before, with very minimal
loss of function (assuming the resulting bleeding doesn't kill the person of
course).

That's not where it ends, the cortex is further subdivided in ~300 regions,
each of which is to some extent independent. For instance, they have their own
separate connection to the spinal cord. That means you could shoot 299 of
them, and the person would not die and still respond like a human being to
some extent. There are caveats, like that only 4 of those regions are
connected to the eye, only 4 are connected to the ear, so chances are if you
kill off most of the brain, it'd be a blind and deaf human being, but ...

So the internet should respond, in the other direction and only to some extent
(because communication is very slow), like a human being.

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fit2rule
It's not just the Internet. It's also "them". And "us". No such thing!

"Everyone knows" is, like, a modern prayer. You just say it, and then
everything else becomes true. Everyone knows you can just say 'everyone knows
something' and you'll have described the Godhead, and/or thus God itself.
Which, everyone knows, doesn't actually exist.

The Internet is an electronic godhead. Did everyone not get that briefing at
the entrance door?

