“The Internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute. “It might already have a degree of consciousness…. The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful Internet mind develops.”

If the effort that has gone into developing social networking sites goes into developing Internet consciousness, it could happen within a decade, says Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels.