The one area of intelligence that my wife and I agree on is the definition of X-in-the-loop.

A machine that requires input from a person is a human-in-the-loop device/system.

All commercial automobiles require a person to operate the automobile (but that is quickly going to change).

Is a road full of automobiles that require no human input a sign of intelligence?

What about the Curiosity rover on Mars?

What features can we list that show autonomous functions in one subset, intelligent functions in another and a set of features in the subset of the autonomy/intelligence junction?

What makes the autonomous functions of my central nervous system intelligent or conscious?

What about the automatic connection of my laptop computer’s WiFi radio subsystem in this room to the WiFi router in another part of the house and then on out to the Internet?

What is pure hardware-in-the-loop intelligence like, no HID required/allowed?

If a database is updated by a software program which seeks to maximise its collection of available knowledge, knowledge that it alone determines is valuable, is that intelligence?

And what about the age-old arguments of the conscious-vs-subconscious thought sets?

These words are just a few that pass through my thoughts before I make a last-second decision upon another upon another, etc., until I type these words in a coherent whole row called a sentence, in exclusion of and in competition within a finite possibility (you won’t find Croatian or Sanskrit here without the use of an online translator, for instance).

If the Internet is now an extension of my thought set, am I a human-in-the-loop extension of the Internet?

I sit here, taking an occasional sip of black label Irish whiskey (“Black Bush”), looking at the clock, which shows 22:38, and contemplate going to bed, where I will not be directly disturbed by the Internet, although my dreams (my subconscious?) may work through thought patterns I’ve had today about artificial machine intelligence which date back to my childhood days of the 1970s and the promise of LISP/ELIZA and other AI programs that relied on pattern-matching (why does the image of trees appear in my thoughts right now?).

…data structures…hmm…

On the floor next to me, in addition to “Dictionary of Quotations” by Bergen Evans, “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert and “The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Satre and R.D. Laing,” are two books that captured my attention several years ago: “I, Cyborg” by Kevin Warwick, and “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” by Andy Clark.

From them, I contemplated a novel I write using software agents in a database, with every word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/chapter hyperlinked/connected such that the story changed based on reading the reader’s online self, with a voiceover and accompanying 3D video that interjects based on the reader’s vital signs, the novel frequently switching to a series of random words to shake up the reader’s thought patterns, slipping in and out of the reader’s online life — social life, blog, game sequences, website, etc. — so that the reader soon could lose track of self completely in a world of half-plagiarism, half-homage collage.

As I write this blog entry, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the word I’m typing to suggesting the rest of the end of the sentence.

After hundreds of blog entries, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the rest of this sentence to write the rest of the blog entry for me.

Based on the research I perform on the Internet every day and the books I have lined up to read the rest of the week, as well as following my daily patterns, including eye movements, my software agent has written the rest of this week’s blog entries for me, suggesting that I skip using the Internet altogether today and go for a nice, relaxing hike in the cool autumn morning, using my “Internet of things” kitchen appliances to assemble a sandwich along with the rest of my meal/snacks to eat that my smartphone will remind me of when my vital signs show sign of hunger along the trail.

Readers of this blog can now no longer tell when I stopped writing these blog entries, or when I sometimes step in as a person-in-the-loop to tweak a blog entry as a surprise, because both I and the software agent use the trick of occasional misspellings and grammatical errors to give an ambience of authenticity to my/its speedy typing and lack of postcreation proofreading/editing.

Is this intelligence?

If all I do between computer programming gigs and life coaching, other than go out to eat, shop, attend football games, watch movies and travel with my wife, is write blog entries here, your only connection with me, could you say I am more or less intelligent than the output of my software agent?

What if my writing became more oblique and more full of interesting Internet links, would I (or, rather, my proxy) seem more intelligent?

When all of us depend on software agents to supplement or (perhaps) better yet, substitute for our online lives, is the Internet intelligent/conscious?

When software agents are interacting with software agents to create unique output that I and the other people who created their software agents would not have thought of, is that a sign that the Internet has become intelligent/conscious?

Is a “train” of autonomous automobiles traveling on a road an intelligent/conscious entity all its own, receiving stimuli from the environment and reacting as one just like a caterpillar or earthworm from our anthropomorphic view?

How can I say that my typing here is anything more than an autonomous response by my set of states of energy to the environment?

Am I really just a hardware-in-the-loop device like any other set of states of energy in the universe?

Why should I label “me” as a special condition of intelligence or consciousness?  Because I say I can see myself write this blog entry while I “see” thoughts that do not win the competition to make this blog entry a coherent sequence of symbols we call words?

The wooden mannequin on my desk has no autonomous functions, does it?

What about gravitational pull holding it down on the desk?

What about the photons interacting with its surface, indicating a series of paths from the incandescent light bulb inefficiently emitting more heat than light that reflects off the shiny surface of the mannequin into my eyeballs?

Obviously, I’d be more convinced if the mannequin started talking to me in a manner I could understand — arm gestures, leg movements, etc.

I shake the desktop and the mannequin shakes in responses.

We have a relationship with each other, if not an understanding between us.

Is that a sign of intelligence/consciousness?

I cannot assume that what I anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically want to call intelligence/consciousness is what I will see when the interconnected wires and fibers we call the Internet becomes more than an automatic response to our stimuli, which is really all I am in one view, aren’t I?

Never assume the event horizon hasn’t already been crossed just because your definition of the impossible is the only one you can envision.

Hindsight is mostly 20/20.

Symbiosis is asymptomatic, in my book (but that’s the whiskey talking, not me).

Good night!