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In the days of AI, I couldn’t help think of applying AI principles to the biggest network of them all the internet itself. Android just announced 2 billion subscribers. There are more than 8 billion SIM connections out there. Billions of internet enabled things are being pulled by the market. That’s a ton of nodes I think.
Remember neural networks are modelled around the human brain. A series of interconnected nodes have started performing wonders in image recognition, translation, playing chess, medicinal research etc. If you take an image its every pixel is converted into 1's and 0's and fed into these nodes that are stacked as multiple layers to perform these amazing acts.
Can each endpoint like a mobile phone/ computer/ internet-enabled-thing be the node for a gigantic neural network… which is the internet itself? Technically yes, an app can sense what is happening around the mobile and feed it back in. Every image captured, location coordinates, browsing data, call data can be caught & sent. It already happens today but sent to their respective Apps or to the operating system. This can be changed and it can be aggregated. Every action at the edge point of the internet can be converted into a signal for the broader internet to read and act like a neural network would do. The internet can function as one big machine learning network and can also be divided into sub-networks to perform various tasks.
The endpoint can also act as a middle layer that processes inputs from other end points and does forward and backward propagation of information so the internet learns. Each endpoint node can subscribe to various subnetworks of the internet to enable various AI functions. And the most mind-boggling thing is that all of this can be unsupervised. Unsupervised to the extent of self-learning as has been shown in multiple applications. The internet will self-learn.
The App is critical and performs the function of getting signals + passing on to the other layers and acts as a layer for other nodes processing signals coming to it. Unsupervised.
Many concepts like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown that each intelligent sub-network would work like a human brain and like humans do can play games. They can be programmed to play games with each other. Concepts of game theory can then be applied at internet scale to optimize outcomes.
This app/ network has to be open source so control doesn’t reside in one corporation.
Imagine what can be achieved… some ideas
Map moods of people by regions and create+push music to change that
Use intuitive AI techniques to create movies of places on the fly
Eliminate arbitrage of pricing across commerce sites
Dynamically move traffic by changing calendars and offers from retailers
Move telecom bandwidth to where it is needed
Detect internet/ telecom network level fraud
Time series every point on earth and enable the illiterate to be literate at that point
Learned crowd sourcing of finance & resources
Control of outbreaks… malware, epidemics
The power of unsupervised learning is in its ability to think creative beyond what we can imagine… I wonder what could it produce… art, movies, business models that will leave us in awe!!