The human brain is an interconnection of billions of neurons, each connected to about ten thousand other neurons. A single neuron is a rather deterministic machine with a simple instruction set. It can signal with the frequency of action potentials and neurotransmitters. In the same way as a neuron, a digital computer is a deterministic machine, but it's instruction set is much more universal than the one of a single neuron. Today, billions of computers are interconnected to each other, each having access to millions of web servers and peers.
Thus, the analogy between the Internet and a biological brain is obvious. Low-level animals such as worms or insects only have a few hundred neurons, and their intelligence is very rudimentary. With increasing number of interconnections, behavioral patterns become more and more complex. With the human neocortex, biology has surpassed a critical threshold, and a supercritical brain emerged, capable of developing consciousness and reason. In analogy, the "behavioral" or emergent complexity of a computer network grows exponentially with the number of computer nodes and interconnections. A small company intra-net is comparable to the brain of a fly, whereas the Internet has an order of magnitude of nodes and interconnections similar to a mammal.
Will the Internet reach a critical mass so that it will develop consciousness and reason? The answer is, we don't know, and there's no way of knowing - we wouldn't understand the level of abstraction on which the Internet "thinks", in the same way as a sensory neuron in my finger can never understand how I think. But there are signs of organic growth in the Internet. Cultural revolutions such as Google, Wikipedia or Facebook "suddenly" emerged. The Internet "grows", even though there's no central architecture, no central management, and it works astonishingly well for an emergent information system of that size.
Will the Internet eventually enslave or destroy humanity, as "Skynet" did in the movie Terminator
? No, it won't, because of the fitness function in the evolution of machines. Biology evolved by a fitness function optimizing survival in a hostile environment. Thus, free will, aggressive behavior and fight or flight mechanisms evolved. Contrarily, machines evolve by optimizing usefulness to human consumers. Machine development is driven by market success. Hardware or software for which there's no demand on the market disappear quickly. For example, remember Microsoft's "Office Assistant" in Office 2000? This piece of software sucked terribly, and there's a reason why it disappeared. Machines behaving like biological creatures, willfully, unpredictably, or even aggressively, have no chance of survival on the free market. Therefore, artificial intelligence evolves for the benefit of human society.
