Could The Net Become Self-Aware?

Could The Net Become Self-Aware? is the title of an article I chanced upon over at New Scientist. I was led there via this article at Cnet. Sounds like a Terminator movie, doesn't it? Or like Isaac Asimov's Multivac, which I've blogged about before twice. An excerpt:

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

Click here to read the whole article, and here to read "Eight Things You Didn't Know About The Internet".