Abstract
The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the ‘cognitive ecology’ that helps to shape, support and (on occasion) realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of ‘machine cognition’. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic (machine-based) forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.
Highlights
Over the past two decades the Internet1 has emerged as an important part of the material environment in which an ever-expanding array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated
The idea that we should view the Internet as a form of cognitive ecology is inspired by so-called ecological approaches to cognition (Bateson 1972; Malafouris 2013; Hutchins 2010; Tribble and Sutton 2011; Neisser 1997; Cooke et al 2004; Hirose 2002; Barrett 2011)
I suggested that we should view the Internet as a form of cognitive ecology
Summary
Over the past two decades the Internet has emerged as an important part of the material environment in which an ever-expanding array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet has spawned a renewed interest in the familiar idea of human–machine symbiosis (e.g., Licklider 1960; Jacucci et al 2014) where human and machine capabilities are factored into hybrid processing loops that span the biological and technological domains Such interest is evidenced by the recent explosion of research into ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems (Branson et al 2014), game-powered machine learning systems (Barrington et al 2012), human computation systems (Law and von Ahn 2011; Michelucci 2013), citizen science platforms (Khatib et al 2011a) and Internet-enabled forms of collective intelligence (Michelucci and Dickinson 2016). The basic idea, in this case, is that we can see the Internet as a means of enabling humanity to play a productive role in the creation and configuration of a cognitively-potent online environment, one that is poised to shape the profile of both human and machine cognition
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