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Sunday, 16 Mar , 2014

PsyFi – Big Internet Data of As Yet Unforeseen Things

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With the tidal wave of lusted after general machine intelligence, I can’t help but let my mind wander. Humankind has never before had the capability to produce, capture, store and increasingly meaningfully analyse such gigantic quantities of data. “Just got that mail love?” I hear you cry. Yeah, well, some things are so big they […]

With the tidal wave of lusted after general machine intelligence, I can’t help but let my mind wander.

Humankind has never before had the capability to produce, capture, store and increasingly meaningfully analyse such gigantic quantities of data. “Just got that mail love?” I hear you cry. Yeah, well, some things are so big they take a while to get usefully processed.

What if (and that’s the crux of any purely speculative or fictional pieces I put out there), what if, between the micro and the meta, above the language and the memes, beyond all currently interpretable themes, there’s something else? A current running through the yottabytes of accumulated data.  A peek at a pattern that no prior generation has had the means to perceive. Not yet interpret, but almost imperceptibly detect.

A generation Y ghost in the machine.

Tempting for many to insert a spiritual theme.  What might this mean, IF it exists?  Higgs Bosonic principles say, if I’ve miraculously hit on something, it will be an ignored concept for the decade or two it might take to develop capabilities not just to hear, but to listen carefully to this “medi-scopic” digital spectre. Not artificial or general intelligence, just a sentient heartbeat of whisper of a tidal data flow. In the same way alien life is unlikely to be humanoid or green, why do we think programmatic means to evolve will result in anything we can currently define?

No matter how quantum or how cosmic our knowledge, there is always more to find.  Again tempting to see the hand of a creator, but what new truth might live in this middle? So ephemeral and impossible to parse (for now) it is pure, glimpsed in a dream, or felt in your chest, sensation.

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