OUR QUEST FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
INTRODUCTION
Firstly, thank you for your interest and I hope readers will contribute their own considered opinions and gut intuitions here intelligently, regardless of whether or not they agree with these postulations and the presentation of them. Secondly, I’m looking forward to our future interactions and building upon this model together. Thirdly, I have the flu whilst I write this so my own brain may not be optimally functioning!
Nevertheless, I promised a knowledge share and here it is.
This post is an initiating conversation in a continuum of “negotiations of intellect” (discourse) I’m engaging in with friends and detractors interested in the subject matter, as well as within myself. It’s a work-in-progress that will evolve with every substantive external influence, perceptual intake and distilled wisdom from the diverse contributors on KNOL that sanity-checks, dimensionalizes and synergizes it, over our lifetimes.
It is not intended to be the definitive or absolute end-game version, nor indeed the academic / geek version. It is the version of a young woman who appreciates the thinking of seasoned, male visions and accounts of what the Global Brain is and, yet, questions some of their central tenets and wonders whether other factors have either been overlooked or not even considered yet that would make the concept more holistic, pragmatic and realistically achievable.
I decided to make this posting today, 26 November 2008, on the day my father would have turned 65 (legal retirement age). Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2007 whilst in a coma. Throughout his life he was a true seeker of knowledge — as evidenced by his extensive book collection — and his coma once again brought to the fore for me the mystery of consciousness and whether intelligence resides exclusively as a control function of the brain or whether it permeates the whole body: intelligence as embodiment. I take faith from knowing with confidence my father was consciously aware of our presence and appreciated it, despite what the neurosurgeons’ professional opinions were. I collected mobile video evidence that proved wrong their medical position that he was “completely unresponsive” which subsequently resulted in an apology from the lead neurosurgeon in a coroner’s court, on record.
In addition to the direct experience of my father’s situation which made me re-evaluate what I know and is known about the brain, I’ve also had an interest in intelligence since a very young age; I wanted to understand why the adults said I was a “bright child, very conscious of what’s happening around her”. Being somewhat mischievous I wondered if this meant I was fluorescent and whether brightness excused me from having to eat an apple a day or to do my homework.
Contributing to this quest for pieces in the puzzle, at management school and throughout working life I’ve been exposed to most models of collective intelligence harnessing or “the networked effect of talent,” encompassing the entire spectrum from command and control to near-complete meritocratic autonomy. All such models are an attempt to find competitive edge solutions as well as means to catalyze innovation within (alas, often) bureaucratic confines, to increase collective productivity and reduce ignorance and inefficiencies.
It’s for this myriad of interconnected reasons I’m interested in the Global Brain: personal, parental and professional.
The realization of it would be revolutionary for Mankind and has serious implications.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A DEFINITION
There is no Oxford English dictionary definition for this conjunction of words. Within the microspheres of Silicon Valley and academia (notably neuroscience, experimental psychology and management sciences), it is generally accepted to be:
The “Global Brain” (GB) is a metaphor for this emerging, collectively intelligent network that is formed by the people of this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect them together. This network is an immensely complex, self-organizing system. It not only processes information, but increasingly can be seen to play the role of a brain: making decisions, solving problems, learning new connections, and discovering new ideas.
No individual, organization or computer is in control of this system: its knowledge and intelligence are distributed over all its components. They emerge from the collective interactions between all the human and machine subsystems. Such a system may be able to tackle current and emerging global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches.
Yet, at the same time it will create new technological and social challenges which are still difficult to imagine.
On the commercial side, trendwatching.com in 2007 referred to it as:
All of the world’s intelligence and experience, fully networked, incorporating not only the usual suspects like gurus, professors and scientists, but the experiences and skills of hundreds of millions of smart consumers as well. With the ’shortage of talent’ that every brand on every continent seems to fear in 2007, tapping into THE GLOBAL BRAIN seems a, well, no-brainer. This year, expect many corporations, small and big, to aggressively court the 1% of most creative and experienced individuals roaming the globe.
Amongst the more intellectually oriented, different people have proposed many different names for this concept of a cognitive system at the planetary level:
- hive-mind — Lion Kimbro, Wikipedia editor
- global mind — Howard Bloom
- mass mind — Howard Bloom
- noosphere — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- planetary brain — Joël de Rosnay
- social brain
- super-brain — Francis Heylighen
- World Brain — H.G. Wells
It has also been increasingly associated with and proxied to a global superorganism; equivalent terms proposed in this categorization have included:
- Cybion — Joël de Rosnay
- Metaman — Gregory Stock
- One Machine — Kevin Kelly
- super-being — Valentin Turchin
- social organism
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT
Contingent upon whichever scientist or science fiction author has been read and is considered a personal guru / hero / role model, the contemporary concept of the Global Brain is attributable to either H.G. Wells in 1938 or to Peter Russell in 1983. Numerologists may note how 38 and 83 are chiral (mirror) forms of each other. Other authors who will be highlighted in this section are Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly and Mohanbir Sawhney whose professional origins stem from the record industry, technology journalism and management sciences, respectively.
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was a noted English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher who wrote The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). In 1938, at the age of 72, he published The World Brain in which he specifically proposed:
“We could build a real ‘World Encyclopedia’ with a true ‘planetary memory for all mankind’…
..”knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest.”
As an associated point, as early as 1902 Wells had the germination of the Open Conspiracy in his writings and subsequently published the pamphlet in 1928. This Open Conspiracy would mobilize power and intelligence to create a new kind of social and political synthesis, a new world unity beyond the confines of the established political order, according to Wells.
His design for the Open Conspiracy was to create a new unity, a new organizational and social synthesis for the world; he regarded it as a necessity for “human society” to be rescued “from the net of tradition in which it is entangled and [reconstructed] upon planetary lines’(Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). New York: Macmillan, p. 549).
Interestingly, the Open Source movement has gathered pace over the last five years with the advent of the creation of the Linux operating system, P2P file-sharing from the likes of Napster, Creative Commons licenses, the work done by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and now Google’s OpenSocial tools, along with the OpenID principles. This strand too seems to have been influenced by the Wellsian vision of an open ‘World Encyclopedia / Brain’ available beyond nation states and the control of any particular party. Essentially, a free and open mind portal.
Half century on from Wells’The World Brain, the GB concept gained media exposure again with Peter Russell (1946 —), a British author and producer of award-winning films on consciousness, spirituality and business coaching, who was born in the year that Welles passed away. Russell studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University before changing to experimental psychology, subsequently studied for a Ph.D. in the psychophysiology of meditation at Bristol University, gained a post-graduate degree in Computer Science and has worked with Tony Buzan to develop mind map tools. Buzan is the founder of the World Memory Championionships.
In his 1983 book, The Global Brain Awakens, Russell proposed a Global Brain that might emerge from a worldwide network of humans who were highly connected through communications. His arguments made the observation that throughout evolution qualitative transitions to a new level of organization have been observed to occur in several instances where a system attains approximately 10 billion (ten to the tenth power) units that are tightly but flexibly coupled. Examples include the number of atoms in a bio-molecule, the number of molecules in a cell, and the number of cells in the cortex of the human brain. Since the world population (1994: 5.7 billion at the time of Russell’s writing) was within an order of magnitude of ten to the tenth and growing, the threshold for a new level of organization, by his arguments, could be reached soon. Hence, Russell saw the network of interconnected humans forming a Global Brain.
Meanwhile, Howard Bloom the music industry veteran traces the origins of the Global Brain back to the original formation of the world in his seminal books, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century, and The Lucifer Principle. In both books he explores the self-interest versus group interests paradigms and proposes a potential bridge that may enable the individual to contribute to the Global Brain on a team basis. He even mentions “global data sharing among bacteria” and explores the group mind principle on his Scientific Blogging site:
In a lab dish, E. coli can do something neo-Darwinian theory says just cannot be. Neo-Darwinism is a late 20th century, mathematically buttressed evolutionary dogma that says all evolution comes from competition between individuals, and that cooperation is simply a byproduct of selfishness.
According to this view, all change in a genome-all change in a string of genes– is random. To survive, each genetic change has to give the selfish members of a species an edge. Yet when E. coli are given a food their metabolism can’t digest, salicin, they engineer their genome into a form that disables them. They take a big step backward. Why? So they can take their genome a step forward, re-jigger their metabolism, and turn the salicin from an obstacle in the path into a buffet.
According to neo-Darwinians, the giant step backward is impossible. How do E. coli pull it off? By using Group IQ.
A recent interview with Bloom by Jon Udell, one of Microsoft’s product evangelists, can be viewed below:
Now, no discussion about the Global Brain would be complete without also citing the work of Kevin Kelly, formerly founder and Editor of Wired magazine and a well-known blogger with his Technium series. Kelly’s argument centers on the One Machine concept:
I define the One Machine as the emerging super organism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism…
This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet’s electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment…
With that perspective a useful way to tackle the question of whether a planetary superorganism is emerging is to offer a gradient of four assertions.
There exists on this planet:
· I A manufactured superorganism
· II An autonomous superorganism
· III An autonomous smart superorganism
· IV An autonomous conscious superorganism
From the corporate perspective, another more recent book on the GB, The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, is co-authored by Mohanbir Sawhney, who is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, the Director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation and the Chairman of the Technology Industry Management Program at the Kellogg School of Management. Within this context, the GB concept refers to:
…a global network of scientists, independent inventors, academic researchers, customers, suppliers, as well as different types of innovation intermediaries who facilitate the innovation process (for example, idea scouts, innovation capitalist, etc.)…
The lead co-author, Satish Nambisan, who is Associate Professor of Innovation Management and Technology Strategy at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commented in an interview with Ideas Connection:
While The Global Brain is primarily focused on the for-profit world, I have received a lot of inquiries from non-profit organizations. Now much of my research is focused on social innovation and especially on collaborative social innovation. I think the opportunities for network-centric innovation is of a magnitude of one hundred times greater in social innovation than in for-profit innovation. Issues related to healthcare, environment, and energy —
those are big issues which require cooperation among different sectors and different countries. Those are the places where we are going to see some radical network-centric innovation models emerging in the next decade or so.
As an adjunct it may also be informative to read Professor Eric von Hippel’s excellent and freely available book, Democratizing Innovation, which proposes a world in which each of our individual intelligence matters and can contribute to a more enlightened whole via active democratic participation. Professor von Hippel is Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
So why is the Global Brain concept seeming to gather impetus (or at least a renaissance) across different sectors from anthropology to management science to bleeding edge Silicon Valley?
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A RATIONALE
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, actually articulates the need for a Global Brain in the way he explains what, potentially, the Semantic Web can and should do:
At the moment, the Internet is a stack of document pages linked via html. Through the deployment of the Semantic Web stack and the standards being continuously developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), over time the data on these pages will become independently linked to each other into a form of social graph and semantic — or contextual — sense. This will build to a point where every data item is like a node in the neural architecture of the Web.
The ultimate purpose for a Global Brain would be to cross-pollinate ideas and frameworks, innovate and find solutions to the world’s major problems:
- democratic societies
- economic stability and sustainability
- universal free education
- cures for diseases and illness
- green compliance
- holistic human existence in symbiosis with the planet
During a W3C talk given in London on 3rd December 1997, entitled Realising the Full Potential of the Web, Berners-Lee predicted:
The Web will have a profound effect on the markets and the cultures around the world: intelligent agents will either stabilize or destabilize markets; the demise of distance will either homogenize or polarize cultures; the ability to access the Web will be either a great divider or a great equalizer; the path will either lead to jealousy and hatred or peace and understanding.
The technology we are creating may influence some of these choices, but mostly it will leave them to us. It may expose the questions in a starker form than before and force us to state clearly where we stand.
We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually.
Each semantic application techco in Silicon Valley is interpreting the potential of building the GB and harnessing knowledge differently — everything from Freebase’s attempts to create a semantic Wikipedia to True Knowledge’s and Powerset’s ambitions to deliver on a semantic search engine that understands the context of queries rather than the keyword statistical methodology supposedly deployed by Google.
[The fact is that Google uses a matrix of sophisticated technologies to deliver its search capabilities, but that’s the subject for another dedicated Knol post.]
To date, none of the semantic technologies I’m aware of are working exclusively towards resolving the world’s major problems. This is interesting because it shows that silo self-interest (competitively commercial) rather than global altruism may already be at play.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: CURRENT LIMITATIONS
There are five key areas where improvements are necessary before the Global Brain can be achieved:
(1.) technological tools which enable sense making. The qualification, quantification and tracking of arguments over time, memory recall specific to an event, the DNA of decision-making and a series of interconnected parties — and not simply taxonomies to correlate one keyword to another in a social semantic graph — are still to be developed and provided;
(2.) resolution between the neo-Darwinism “individual selection” and the “group selection” framework. This is necessary to explain and justify why and how culturally diverse people would proactively contribute to the Global Brain — either of their own free will, peer pressure, survival of brain trust teams, via altruism or some interest which mixes individual and group interest considerations.
(3.) The consciousness complex. Increasingly intelligent agents are being built — such as the first synthetic avatar, Edd, in Second Life or those that win the Loebner Prize 2008 because they appear to pass the Turing Test, as in the case of Elbot. Elbot is the brainchild of Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, and was developed by his team.
* Elbot article in Computer Weekly
(4.) Inclusion and accounting for cultural contributions and differences. Gender, religion, age and other demographic criteria all affect our inherent being, how we think, navigate social situations and interact with others. If the Global Brain is being built by a particular demographic (male, middle class, middle-aged, Caucasian, tech geek, monoglot) then it is already pre-oriented and biased towards a non-global structure and has inadvertently codified exclusion in its model(s).
(5.) Perceptual and humor frameworks. These affect interpretations of meaning and context. I’ve blogged about this previously and am currently developing a Media Perception Matrix in Javascript with some semantics which may provide further insights.
It may be worthwhile to state here that the Global Brain limitations arise from several sources.
Firstly, studies on the brain are ongoing and as yet incomplete so any attempts to construct a global network of data neurons that function and free associate like the brain are bound to have missing pieces and synaptic connections; we can’t wholesale copy or do a “brain upload” of what we don’t fully know yet. Secondly, since the GB is a metaphor rather than a definition there remains a tremendous amount of ambiguity about its potential, purpose, direction, velocity and ultimate truth. Thirdly, healthy debates continue over some of the tests which may be applied to various constituents of the Global Brain (including how to define and measure intelligence — is it via IQ tests which are known to be culturally biased; how equivalent to human intelligence is the artificial intelligence being incorporated into networked algorithms; and home to effectively manage and co-ordinate productive participation, assuming the “collective humanity versus self interest” dichotomies are resolvable.
Let’s turn briefly to the element of Artificial Intelligence which supplements human intelligence in the GB construct and how machines are defined as “intelligent”or otherwise.
The Turing test was first explicated in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Instead of posing the question, “Can machines think?” Turing devised an equivalent of the ‘Imitation Game’ for machines. In this scenario, a panel of judges assesses from printed text responses whether the responder is a human or a machine. If the machine fools a third of the panel then it is considered to have passed the Turing test. In the original ‘Imitation Game’ it was a party piece much like ‘Charades’ in which a single judge has to guess whether the responder is a man or a woman according to typed our replies they provide to a series of gender-neutral questions such as, “What is the color of your hair?”
Turing’s 1950 paper is being interpreted in different ways by Artificial Intelligence experts and designers. Its limitations have been duly noted and expanded upon with the creations of Eliza, a computer program designed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, and PARRY, developed by the psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, in 1972. The transcript of the interaction between Eliza (The Doctor) and Parry (The Patient) in 1973, linked over ARPANET makes for interesting reading:
* Eliza + Parry play at psychiatry
Regardless of its flaws, the Turing test remains the benchmark for assessing a machine’s ability to at least imitate the human process of thinking and proxy being intelligent.
However, we have not yet reached the stage where a machine is conscious in the way humans are and the Turing test avoids opening up this avenue for discussion — and so shall we, for now.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: A NEED TO TIME TRAVEL AND BE CROSS-CULTURAL
Moreover, it may be the case that the GB concept pre-dates every currently accepted literature since the majority of this literature focuses on Western paradigms and predominantly English-language sources. HG Wells, Teilhard de Chardin and now Kelly have become integrated into the Western meme for GB in the same way McDonalds has for hamburgers. Yet McDonalds did not invent the hamburger and nor did they originate the rearing of livestock to produce them.
Critically, there are resources in French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and the other major languages which have not yet been plumbed for their gold nuggets on the Global Brain and the possibility that, conceptually, it has existed since homosapiens first wandered this Earth and that, technologically, the frameworks that offer solutions may already be emerging from those sources.
As a preliminary example, there is research from
NCKU VP Feng : Global Brain Movement: An Asia- Pacific Perspective
There is also analysis by Nathalie Villa, Assistant Professor of Computing, Université de Perpignan in France, who examined land records from 1260 to 1340 to establish what is, in her analysis, to be the world’s oldest social network and some attempt at a “group mind”:
The concept of “group minds” can also be traced back to food webs in ancient society:
* http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060102&ct=1
Additionally, the human propensity to merge thinking, develop “group minds”, physically collaborate with a unified mindset or to try to move towards one universal set of rules (global consciousness) for any particular society is a priori evidenced in:
(i.) physical structures like the Mayan temples;
(ii.) the founding of every major religion;
(iii.) the formation of laws — Plato’s republic, Corn laws in the UK, the American Constitution and more;
(iv.) the cessation of the Warring States in China and the creation of what Song Qi Huang, the First Emperor of China, as “one country under one sky” (and inherent in the characters the concept of “one mind, one dream”); and
(v.) the creation of both the Elizabethan and Victorian Empires via exploration and unification.
Therefore, we can note continuous historical attempts towards convergence, “one over everything and anything” principles and practices (one Head of State ruling over multiple territories) and a certain amount of challenges along the way (persecution, heresy, the Reformation). In the same manner there is an emergence of thought and will to create ONE UNIFIED GLOBAL BRAIN.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN: OPTIMAL AND FREE OR BOUNDED BY DEFICIENCIES?
According to Howard Bloom, during an interview in 1997 to discuss The Lucifer Principle, he refers to the analysis of Gerald Edelman and notes:
50% of the brain cells are killed off through apoptosis in the first year of life. Those which don’t match the challenges in the baby’s environment are the ones to go. It is the principle of “to him who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away” at work.
Later in adulthood, studies have shown that at any time point a proportion of our brain is *dormant* (“under-exercised”may be preferable) whilst the other is machining away — depending on the task at hand. For example, if we’re reading Candide by Voltaire in French we access our left hemisphere and if we’re making a mathematical estimate we access our right lobes.
Academic research postulates we are using only 10% of our brain processing power and others contradict this postulation:
* http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain.
In simple mathematical terms, if we are building these networks and machines based on applying (100 — N) % of our thinking abilities and only 10% of people actively engage on the networks / machines we’ve built…………………..
By the time we form the Global Brain will it be really optimal or will it actually be factorially less efficient than the brains of the most intelligent people in the world?
TO READ THE FULL POSTING WHICH WILL INCLUDE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND THE SINGULARITY, PLEASE VISIT GOOGLE KNOL, as of 26 NOVEMBER 2008:
* The Global Brain on Google Knol
Thank you and I hope you enjoy reading about my journey of discovering more about the Global Brain!
Tags: @T, always the twain, consciousness complex, Edd, Elbot, Eliza, Eric von Hippel, google knol, HG Wells, Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly, Mohanbir Sawhney, One Machine, Parry, Peter Russell, sense making tools, The Global Brain, Turing test, Twain, World Brain
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