General Theory of Information Paves the Way to a Secure, Service-Oriented Internet Connecting People, Things, and Businesses

Abstract

Two foundational issues are hindering the realization of the full potential of the Internet in connecting people, things, and businesses with the highest levels of stability, safety, security, and performance. First, the symbolic computing model on which the information technologies that support the Internet, is 70 plus years old and is based on Alan Turing’s observation of how humans compute numbers using symbols. New insights from the general theory of information (GTI) provide a path to go from symbolic computing to supersymbolic computing based on knowledge structures and operations on them to improve the stability and safety of computing structures. Second, the Internet evolved from a vision that "envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site" and the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure required to support stable, safe, secure and highly available services such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality were add-ons. In this paper, we take the cue from biological systems that manage their stability, security, and resource optimization to accomplish their goals and apply the tools of GTI to propose and explore a service-oriented Internet architecture that improves the process operation & management in connecting people, things, and businesses with improved safety and security.