The computer programs that humans use can be considered symbols in a complex alphabet, and the internet its language. This language is perpetuated by far over a billion people on Earth already, and an internet connection is all one needs to become a participating speaker. Humans are not the only speakers in this intricate language. Software applications known as web bots patrol the internet, performing tasks a human could never take on alone. Spimes will change the way we interact by applying information from the web into the physical world. Never in our past have humans created machines that function with such useful or destructive artificial intelligence, interacting with billions of people everyday. Web bots have revolutionized our commerce, politics, entertainment, theft, and online communication networks that compose the massive collection of different cultures exposed to the internet.
Everything we have ever associated with human behavior must be reconsidered and redefined within the context of bots. These bots analyze, create, collect, and distribute inconceivable amounts of data and respond to human or bot-produced stimuli, facilitating a vast array of desired outcomes by the people who use them. The untrained observer cannot distinguish between internet bots and other humans, and eventually the lines between human and computer program will become as inconspicuous as has the written word.
How will the new humans be defined in this interaction in cyberspace? My research focuses on the implications that cyberbots have on our concepts of individuality and anonymity of personhood stretch bring the imagination to a vision of transhumanism: a boundless accumulation of human creativity and knowledge that seems to assemble itself in the vast encyclopedia of the internet.
