The net has several associative memories, viz google or yahoo search and years ago Alta Vista

What it doen't have is reasoning - the data is not structured or parsed into any rule based system, and the data representation is in many languages, not in any common representation system -

Parsers from human languages to lisp based rule systems have been worked on. I remember reading years ago in the Washington Post about one of the greatest polymaths of the 19th century. He appeared insane to everyone, as he spent most of his life living at the Library of Congress developing a language independent knowledge representation system. I wish I had a copy of that article, but I don't.

How would a machine handle bad information and "insane" net sites? Contemplating the conditional logic and fuzzy logic involved for this is fascinating. How would the machine handle its conclusions as to individual bits and sources of information?

How would it recognize insanity?

And then, if the net did have the resources to reason, the reasoning process would still lack goals - unlike people, machines have no desries: the net has no desires -

It is also interesting to contemplate on what goals you would give to the machine for its reasoning processes -

also to contemplate on what kind of self awareness you would give the machine "itself" -

What fundamental knowledge and goals would you give a machine in this case?

How would you describe to it its relationship to people?

How would it "feel" about not being human? How would you set up its "feelings"? How would it handle those "feelings"?

Finally, would you set it up to be capable of generating goals on its own?

Would it be capable of generating its own search techniques? Affecting its physical capacities?

Then you come to IO systems. What kind of "physical capabilities" would you give it? Might it not develop on its own "phyiscal capabilites" of its own?

How would it interact with people? How would it understand them?

What kind of capabiities might be available for an effort like this? What people might try to gather them together, and why?

I myself wonder how it might handle comet and asteroid impacts. Would it "want" to survive?

Read others SF, or write your own, or act in the real world and live? Dan Goldin said many times that SF held no fascination for him, as he lived in a fascinating world everyday.

ah well, there's always Aibo. Maybe it would "want" a "dog".