Before the post itself, a little insight into how I got involved with Google Knol. A friend kindly flagged me about it, knowing as he does my interest in knowledge sharing tools. I contacted someone I know at Google London, they contacted Google Mountainview and they designated me a “Trusted Tester”. This was before Knol was opened up to the public.

Anyone who knows the way I test technology knows I tend to REALLY test it and try to take it beyond its natural parameters to explore what else it can do, doesn’t yet do and should do in the future. This is the advantage of being able to code and also understanding business models, monetization and user dynamics.

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So as my reward for winning “Best Knol, June 2009” I’ve received a few hundred translation points which is a form of virtual exchange monies on Knol. Once I have enough points, someone will help me translate ‘The Global Brain, etc’ knol into another language. Now, this is a fantastic way of fostering international relations within the Knol community and it’s obvious some of the other authors on Knol — who’ve created a type of user committee —- are doing innovative and good things on behalf of Knol’s community development, which is also beneficial for making Knol different from (and better than, imo) Wikipedia.

This is a win-win situation for Google and for users.

I have to admit that apart from writing my knols to share knowhow, I’ve not engaged in any form of community development on Google Knol so far. This is because I was so badly disappointed from the Semweb platform experience whereby I spent 10 months doing this:

· sanity-checked the company’s SemTech 2008 presentation

· produced user guides for newbies (which the company failed to do until 3 months post-launch)

· collaborated with fellow core users to help newbies familiarize with the site and troubleshoot their glitches

· generated a lot of original, witty and quality content with core users to engage the interests of users

· collectively identified areas of improvement to the system, including in “show + tell” visuals

· collectively acted as champions and advocates of the platform

· collectively fostered a positive, democratic community spirit and ethos

· provided advice to the CEO on strategy (e.g., reward users, Report This feature, marketing, code features, conflict resolution panel organized by users, benchmarking by users)

and ended up having my time wasted that I would not repeat this again. We did all this out of our collective goodwill and with the objective of good community practice……..only to have the company do this:

· closed User Feedback — not once but three times, repeating their mistakes — and (deceitfully) conjure up falsehoods about why it was closed and blaming it on users

· decimated our content and failed to restore it despite a personal promise to me by the CEO

· continuously breached our privacy in areas we’d allocated as private.

Then to add to a complete lack of respect towards users, the CEO had the gall and lack of backbone to assume a fake identity on a tech blog and say that there had been a users’ vote to exclude me from the community. Frankly, this is a complete untruth: there was no vote of any kind. I know the core users and no one accepts or is fooled by this or any falsehood(s) from the CEO.

The way the company acted also showed a lack of credit and generosity — including some form of payment — towards the core users for their contributions, their tolerance and their intelligence.

Worst of all, including innocent users in what was exclusively his and his team’s underhand work and attempted character assassination of me was simply unacceptable. The CEO and the company’s actions were as s*** and sub-standard as their homemade product launch video which made their platform the laughing stock instead of the shining star of the SemWeb sector.

Moreover, since there was bad taste, poor judgment and communication problems from a team that had difficulty understanding its own users’ communications (mano-à-mano), how do they expect their algorithm to be smart enough to semantically understand us (man-machine)?

The experience certainly highlighted to me how context, perspective, perspicacity, wit and chains of logic are still missing in semantic tech capabilities.

As for the business model side, there is no amount of marketing or PR by the company now which will undo the damage they inflicted themselves with their absurd decisions and disrespect towards the very core users who gave the platform not only distinctive and quality content, they also gave it a soul, an identity and a strive towards better realization of a Global Brain.

As for me, well……………..I would now demand a substantial consulting fee and equity in the company to bring my brainpower and skills to bear on any platform, its strategy, its content and its community management. It would be some form of compensation and insurance against any small-minded dolt(s) deciding to delete users’ content because the coders didn’t have the intelligence to double-check their algorithms in the first place.

Anyway, my relative non-participation on Google Knol is the by-product of that SemWeb platform experience. It was unpleasant and raised some stark realizations in me.  

It means that someone like me would NOT commit my collaborative fair share to the Global Brain if it was hosted by that SemWeb play because I would NOT trust companies like the SemWeb play to be good stewards of content, respect IP or foster user democracy. I would certainly not give my content or solutions away for free to companies like that again. This is then connected to the Gladwell vs. Anderson arguments on whether content will be free or not in the future.

On Google Knol, at least any user’s original content can earn via Adsense, translation points and other community-generated means. The copyright belongs to them and they can assign attributions and licenses. Importantly, at least a genuine democracy operates which is influenced and managed by the authors themselves. It’s simultaneously meritocratic and collegiate, and supported by the system provider. There is an official rankings system provided by Google which is predicated on quantity of clickthroughs. However, supplementing this are peer reviews and various forms of QUALITY benchmarking by a core group of authors. They are in continuous open communication with the Google Knol technical team who try to incorporate their suggestions (e.g., the various Knol awards, peer review rules, translation services).

Some people may argue that having a core group or “Power Users” (as per Digg) runs the risk of creating a hierarchy whereby they determine what content / what knol / what concept takes precedence and ranking, and other users may feel excluded and resentful. If there is in-fighting, egotistical misunderstandings and heavy-handedness by the company later, a key user may be excluded (as in the case of zaibatsu from Digg who was ranked #3 at some point, apparently).

This lose-lose scenario need not necessarily be the inevitability of structures implemented to get the best out of a social network, its participants, their content share and collaborations.

If a platform has a group of core users who are committed to good practice, they can be the best marketing and PR possible. They can show other users by example. They can add additional filters to information streams and reduce white noise. They can provide specific context and links in the chain back to previous / related news items. They can add color and humor to what other users are seeking and interested in. They can be the ones who make the journey enjoyable because they’re prepared to share their experiences and to troubleshoot issues for other users which they’ve already gone through and overcome.

Importantly, they collectively and openly innovate. This is the optimal achievement of user democracy and connective intelligence.

Get it wrong and those core users become no more than link pushers, disenfranchised and the disengaged instead of happy content originators.

In any case, Google Knol has been heading in the right direction since beta test and official launch. This is not to say there haven’t been technical and community teething problems. Attachments did not always work out and windows would freeze. The core authors have also been through some difficult experiences together, yet this has actually reinforced their social bonds and commitment to excellence.

Before, there were two factions of them — interestingly, both factions made a beeline for me as soon as they read ‘The Global Brain’ but I kept my distance because of that negative experience elsewhere.  Both sides competed to be the arbiters of quality and ethos on Knol. Then events took a turn for the worse: one faction exposed the other’s “leader” as engaging in inappropriate behavior in order to increase his rankings, including plagiarism from another site and submitting peer reviews for himself under pseudonyms or getting cohorts to.

[Ramping of rankings is something all platforms need to be aware of and guard against to preserve platform integrity and trust in the ranking algorithm, btw. Another area the SemWeb play got wrong.]

Anyway, there was a huge uproar in the Knol community about it and the person in question had to publicly admit fault (under legal threats from the site he’d plagiarized), apologize to fellow authors and was excluded from Knol.

Subsequently, both factions have now made peace and — even more interestingly — ‘The Global Brain’ knol was voted as “Best Knol” by members of both factions, so whatever their differences they’re united in deciding my little knol is okay and passes both their benchmarks.

Credit where it’s due, I’ve now read more about the community rules they’ve put into place, guidance on benchmarking and peer reviews, tips for users, etc. and they’re doing a remarkably good job of laying the foundations for future sharing of knowledge.

It’s always the people who make something work, not the system in itself. Companies that genuinely “get” this simple truth and cultivate conducive company-user relationships (especially communications) are more than halfway to success and monetization.

This is something I’ve known for a while. After all, I did experience the Web 1.0 boom and bubble burst first-hand. In a way, maybe I did have to experience the SemWeb play’s sub-standard practices to reinforce my abilities to differentiate that from good practice.

Keep it up, Google Knol and its authors! Thanks for moving knowledge share forward towards a Global Brain.

I’m really pleased to announce that my little knol has been voted ‘Best Knol, June 2009″ by other key Knol authors. This is super-cool because the award is a form of quality benchmarking by users who are responsible for fostering the ethos and culture of Knol, and it’s also great to know that the content in the knol is helpful and appreciated. It beat the knol on ‘Twitter and Tweet from the Trenches’ — LOL!

In seriousness, hundreds of thousands of knols have been published — by highly regarded medical and academic experts as well as Joe / Jane Public with some life experiences to share — so to feature well enough in Google Knol’s metrics to be on those key users’ nomination radar and then to win it for June 2009 means something. The voters included those who’ve consistently been top viewed and top rated authors.

The Global Brain etc. is obviously a topic that matters to me. We’re at the extremely early stages of the conception and realization of it, and it’s important to recognize how far we still have to go in our journey ahead as well as the challenges we need to identify and figure out how to overcome.

I’m mindful that our intelligence, perspicacity and contextualization abilities evolve over time. For example, what and how I think and perceive now is more nuanced and reflective-refractive-re-engineered than as a child — although there are instances where I believe my thinking on certain topics was sharper aged 12-17 than they were at any other time to-date in my life.

‘The Global Brain’ knol is a continuous distillation and synapse between different discrete concepts that have fascinated me since childhood. I just decided to put it down in a written record so that this generation (and my children’s) will be able to trace developments of the Global Brain and its associations (the Semantic Web, Turing test, man-machine congruences as much as disconnect etc.) and challenge whether the various constructs are valid, cogent, consistent, democratic and also whether they’re including the appropriate elements which will result in us, collectively, solving the world’s major issues by harnessing man-machine hybrids.

It’s possible that my concepts, insights and vision of the Global Brain etc. are completely wrong. It may even be the case that I don’t complete the journey and my contributions don’t help crack it. Nevertheless, I am prepared to put it onto public record that in my early 30s — here and now and of sane mind, wholly uninfluenced / aided / abetted by drugs of any kind — this is how I was considering and perceiving the subject matter and doing my little Twaining of it.

My main hope is that the knol will help us move the GB’s realization towards a good direction and with good speed. Already, thanks to David Price’s efforts with the Debategraph interface, what I wrote about the Linking Open Data diagram means that the landscape of participants in the Semantic Web is being re-shaped and conceived anew. This is another of our small steps of progress.

The next re-shaping which is sorely needed will be the evolution from the Rubik cube form of the Semantic stack towards a series of protocols which are much more organic and more closely proxy how DNA and neuro-transmitters actually work.

Perception and problem-solving is not about systematic processing alone or even semantic categorization. It’s about synergizing sense-making with sensory emotions, imo.

As I mentioned in a previous post (thanks to a flag by Rick “fish-head”), Forbes.com released their special report on Artificial Intelligence in June:

* · http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/22/singularity-robots-computers-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09_land.html

One article comments about how computers are no more intelligent or semantically-capable of understanding what we mean even in searches than they were 40 years ago. This may be because some of our definitions to date about what thinking is has overly concentrated on the PROCESS of thinking which then affects the way we convert this into computer algorithms. Perhaps the way to approach creating smarter systems is to assess how smart people make sense of and synergize the inputs their senses are subject to and also how those smart people randomly apply humor / relativity / emotion perception / experience-based prioritization rather than risk-based prioritization, and more in the ecosystem of their brains to generate innovative and creative solutions which may appear “off-the-wall” / “avant garde” but end up as the orthodoxy.

A few years ago I did suggest to a well-known tech entrepreneur that what would be seriously interesting is if we could continuously MRI the brains of the top 1000 talents in the world (Nobel Prize / Academy Award / Turner Prize / Pulitzer Prize / etc. nominees) and discover patterns in their brain activity when working at their optimal and at their troughs. Then we might gain better insights into how to improve collective and connective intelligence.

Unfortunately, MRI scans at the moment tend to focus on those with medical conditions: typically, brain cancer, depression or trauma to the head. Instead of unhealthy brains alone we should also be tracking healthy brains operating at top functioning capability, imo.

Of course, the logistics of that study would be fairly challenging so it’s not surprising the tech entrepreneur and I didn’t take it any further than merely a random idea I had! Who knows, now with the development of the EmotivEPOC we may actually have some form of tracking human thoughts and electronically converting them:

There’s another interesting Twaining of discrete concepts: MRI scanning smart people to track their brain activity and a headset which is used in virtual reality games. Hmmn…..

The Global Brain…………collective work-in-progress…………Here’s to its future, :*).

Here’s an example of how serendipity and strange kinesis happens in Twain’s world. Tomorrow I’m going to a women’s tech event and these are some of the sessions I signed up for:

· Google’s MapReduce (distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers);

· How HP are dealing with Cloud Computing and the Law; and

· Financing your start-up

This was completely separate and several weeks prior to three events which happened today that I had no influence or control over:

(1.) Fish-head (aka Rick who’s a brilliant 3DMax-conversant marketer) sent me a link to Forbes.com’s special Artificial Intelligence report:

For those interested, here’s last year’s IEE Spectrum special on The Singularity, which is related as you’ll see later:

(2.) Wall Street & Technology, a site I used to track religiously — when I was a banker responsible for an investment portfolio that included consortia trading platforms, posted an article on IBM’s Websphere’s Cloud Computing and Low Latency Messaging Capabilities:

· http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/advancedtrading/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100846&cid=RSSfeed_TechWeb

(3.) Terrestrial television showed a documentary, Another Perfect World, which explored several metaverses from Second Life to Eve to Lineage (US, Iceland and Korea-based, respectively). Now, for those who aren’t aware Second Life operates on a P2P framework and there are cluster servers involved here too. There are also all sorts of issues involved with bandwidth, i.e. world creations take up a lot of server space which makes the system slower than it should be and……..occasionally crash.

If we join the dots between items (3.) and (2.) we start to see that IBM’s architectural breakthrough will have a knock-on effect on the likes of Second Life and reducing bandwidth load.

It’s then related to item (1.) because a key motivation of Artificial Intelligence developments is to enable machines to simulate similar processes to the way human brain works. Those processes and their content are transmitted via nodes and connectors. The pursuit of AI (or “thinking machines”) is tied in with the creation of the Global Brain where each one of us can call up to the “Thinking Cloud” and get answers.

See what I mean by strange kinesis in my world? This is “Twaining”.

THE TURING TEST: TWAIN’S TAKE

Can machines think? This was the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 and what the Turing test provides parameters for us to find out. Previously in my Global Brain knol, I’ve written about my encounters with Elbot, which came close (25%) but………..no cigar to passing the Turing test (30% threshold). Here’s a reminder of how my very first question flummoxed Elbot.

At point of site activation, Elbot asked me, “What mood are you in?” I typed in “indifferent”.

Elbot then asked, “What put you in this indifferent mood?”

I typed in “You.”

Elbot replied: “Fatal Error 42: Omission of Superfluous Input.”

Yes, this was funny but my question was also posed with a purpose.

A real-life person upon reading the text of me writing “You” would probably have become either self-conscious, defensive or displayed some form of ego, super-ego and identity. These complexes are as much a part of human consciousness as the sensations we experience during waking life, our dreams in our sleep and the mysteries within us which are as yet inexplicable like pre-cognition and genius.

A probable human response to my feigned indifference would have been another question like, “We just met and hardly know each other. What have I done to make you indifferent towards me?” or “*&^#%! Who do you think you are?! How dare you be indifferent to me! Do you know how lucky you are to be part of this Elbot experiment and how clever the maker is?!”

Instead, Elbot couldn’t compute and crashed.

For me, Elbot — although an improvement on previous attempts — is not conscious. It wasn’t aware of the context of my question. It wasn’t able to decipher it aurally for clues. It wasn’t able to see whether I was smiling or grimacing. It wasn’t able to pick up and smell any pheromones which would indicate my interest instead of my indifference. It wasn’t able to shake my hand and determine whether it was a firm grip (interested) or loose grip (indifferent), and so on.

When we consider the Turing test, it’s vital we remember that the stipulation is the machine and the human provide and are provided with TEXT-BASED content. There are no oral, aural or other sensory clues which are what helps make humans conscious and aware of ourselves relative to others and our environment(s).

In the Forbes’ article, Professor Kevin Warwick suggests that questions of a topical or local nature can help us better distinguish between whether the answer is from another human or a machine. For example, questions about the weather or what color the wall is painted. Then we can assess whether the machine’s answer is plausible and would be offered by a human.

This is all very well, but here’s my issue with the Turing test. It sets out to answer the question, “Can machines think?”

The more perspicuous answer we should seek is:

“CAN MACHINES MAKE SENSE?”

To date in IT development (including the Semantic Web), the definition of thinking machines or smart systems is predicated on their abilities to do the following:

· link (as in hyper-text)

· connect (as in social nets)

· compute / calculate (as in Deep Blue and Wolfram Alpha)

· choose (as in what to display at a specific time-geolocation)

· sort, filter and prioritize (as in eBay lists of items)

· rank (as in YouTube videos)

· re-direct (as in cookies in browsers)

· visually represent (as in Flickr on Google Maps)

· synch (as in iPhone with iTunes store and Apple Macbooks)

· stream (as in videos and IM channels)

Now, some of us would argue that all of those attributes are the same as thinking so if a machine can do those things then it must be as — or even more than — intelligent as a human.

Evidently, this isn’t the case yet; no machine has even passed the Turing test much less tests where a robot can make sense the way we do with touch, taste, sight, hearing and smelling abilities to complement our neural, moral, memory, humor and relativism ones. We’re several years from The Terminator and Skynet (aka “The Cloud”).

Personally, I don’t want machines to be able to simply think. I want them to be able to MAKE SENSE. If we look at ourselves as a species, 99 percent of us can think (some form of brain activity / electrical impulses) with less than 1 percent of us incapable of thought because of coma or brain damage. However, not all 99 percent of us are making sense. If we were there would be none of the following:

· wars, crimes and non-natural deaths;

· climate change dangers;

· global economic crisis; or

· any other man-made catastrophe which stops, sets back or sabotages human development, achievement and advancement.

Hmmmn, and it’s now really late and I have a looooooooooooong day ahead of me.

Twain brain starting to switch off for sleep now. I’ll return to this “GUNK” another day soon.

LOL. G’night.

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TURING: A CHILD TWAIN HERO

Alan Turing is undoubtedly a genius whilst I am being a Devil’s Advocate at worst and marginally bright at best. I have a lifelong admiration for Turing, actually. I first learnt about him and the Enigma machine when the Royal Society of Mathematics invited me along to their master classes for “gifted” children. One of our first exercises was to create our own code machine.

I’m no longer a “gifted” child. My (older, male) colleague at the bank who had a Harvard degree and Cambridge PhD in robotics wrote in my review that I was “prodigious”. One important thing I’ve learnt is that it’s not in the words others use about us that we discover who we are. It’s in the doing, the discovering and the democracy of collectively making sense that we realize it.

G’night!

Further to my suggestion on my ‘The Global Brain’ knol:

http://knol.google.com/k/twain/the-global-brain-the-semantic-web-the/31fjy9fjsu1×2/19

that the Linked Data community should consider tidying up their LOD diagram and cross-pollinating it with the debategraph visualization tools, David Price has produced this initial version (please click on the image and you’ll be directed to the debategraph site):

Anyone committed to the advancement of the Global Brain, the Semantic Web and collective sense-making, please visit the debategraph site and help to populate and sanity-check the above graphic.

In seriousness, the debategraph’s systematic and dynamic wiki is a step in the right direction compared with LOD’s current static messy spore:

Bravo to David Price!

* http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=18702&sc=small

and definitely the Semantic Technology 2009 organizers should consider inviting the debategraph team to their event (14-18 June 2009, San Jose, http://www.semantic-conference.com/) to swap notes and move collective sense-making and semantic discern forward!

Oh and you may all like to know that my ‘The Global Brain’ knol has just been awarded the “Top Viewed Knol Award” (my first) to add to its “Top Pick Knol” designation. I’m really proud of this because “Top Pick Knol” is given for knols of the highest quality and it’s good to know that its quantity dimension is doing well too!

I just posted an additional section on my Google Knol:

* http://knol.google.com/k/twain/the-global-brain-the-semantic-web/31fjy9fjsu1×2/19

to take into account the latest iteration of the Linking Open Data diagram which in its current form looks like this:

I’ve updated my version of it from March 2008 and this now looks like so:

Personally, I’d like to see the Linking Open Data contributors utilize Debategraph’s tools to generate a diagram with flow- connections that look like these:

Strategically, it will be a lot better for the Linked Data crowd if they do adopt debategraph’s approach to representing the LOD universe in more visually appealing and easy-to-navigate clusters rather than its present shapeless and confusing spore model.

In any case, I’ve written about it at length on my knol because it does concern me a wee bit that those at the bleeding edge of the formation of the Semantic Web (which will lead to, hopefully, the Global Brain) are showing signs of ad hoc, unstructured and not necessarily clear thinking — which is manifesting in their own LOD diagram, btw.

Maybe I should simply pretend not to notice these things and let the LOD spore grow and grow, more and more shapeless and more and more confusing…………….sort of akin to knowing there are neural deficiencies in a third party and letting them descend into Alzheimers, Parkinsons, manic depression, schizophrenia etc. and not intervening because it’s not “politically correct” to intervene and “Who asked you, anyway?!”.

Then again……If we do mean to build a HEALTHY and high-functioning Global Brain then maybe the honorable and altruistic thing to do is point out the Linked Data crew should structure their LOD diagram by cross-pollinating with debategraph?

Right? Ah well, I’ve now incorporated it into my knol in any case!

* http://knol.google.com/k/twain/the-global-brain-the-semantic-web/31fjy9fjsu1×2/19

Tomorrow the world will witness the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America and I am SO glad the Americans elected someone who’s smart, articulate and inclusive. Mostly, I’m glad that, although he’s provided the satirists with a wealth of material, George W. Bush will no longer be President.

Here are some of his most famous gaffes:

* Top 20 gaffes by Bush — Times Online

* Watch George Bush’s finest gaffes — Guardian

* Top 10 George W. Bush Moments’ — The Letterman Show clips on YouTube

The historians will doubtless pore over Bush’s legacy and books will be written, including by the soon-to-be former President himself. For me the most external signs of his contribution to the world stage is the current global financial crisis.

This morning it was announced that the UK government will pump in GBP tens of billions more to get the credit facilities to where it is badly needed — SMEs. The previous GBP37 billion has supposedly been hoarded by the banks into their capital reserves and not allowed to trickle down into small businesses or people applying for mortgages and other loan arrangements, thus delaying any recovery. Compounding this capital flow stagnation is the very real underlying concern that the toxic mortgage CDOs may prove to be more difficult to value than previously thought.

NO ONE has a grasp on the enormity of the potential losses on these risky commercial papers.

My mind whizzes back to university classes on Net Present Value metholodogies, then to Equity Valuation Modelling courses which formed part of my banking training and next to in situ application of DCF, mark-to-market and other frameworks I used to manage a Strategic Investments portfolio of technology companies. I wrote the Strategic Investments policy paper at the bank, made the write down recommendations on underperforming assets after getting updates from various CEOs and CFOs and co-authored Private Equity term sheets.

I have some insight into the approaches that different parties will take to evaluate the full risk exposure any government would have — particularly now that there’s talk on both sides of the Atlantic of the creation of a “Big Bad Bank” into which will be transferred and ring-fenced all the troublesome mortgage CDOs. The sensible move would have been to do this back in Q1 2008 and to have sent in independent auditors on behalf of the government(s) to conduct valuations on the mortgage CDOs in tandem with the banks’ own writedowns. A much clearer picture of the extent of the toxicity and what taxpayers could potentially become liable for would have emerged sooner and enabled government(s) to step in and restore general market confidence with other more effective measures rather than simply print more money and underwrite bad bank loans.

As it is whichever parties are now mandated to evaluate each bank’s toxic assets has an even steeper mountain ahead. They’ll have to account for the cash injections already as well as the erosion of goodwill and the volatility of interest rates during the course of this last year.

There will need to be some serious roll our sleeves up and THINK these valuations through carefully before any further action is taken which increases taxpayers’ burdens further. It is beyond a joke and a gaffe that ordinary people are now acting as insurers to the financial institutions instead of banks and asset management companies providing them with assurance that their savings and investments are growing and ensuring their financial here, now and future are safe.

Here too the economic historians will write reams.

From my perspective, the responsibility of the banks, the regulatory agencies, the ratings agencies, the professional advisors (mgmt consultancies, accountants, lawyers, etc.) et al aside, soon-to-be former President Bush and his Administration also contributed to the current dire global economic situation by their overly laissez-faire monetary policies.

Bye-bye Bush and here’s a huge “Hurrah!” and hope for the return of BRAINS and sense everywhere!

This is a quick post to say my piece is now live. I’ve tidied up the article and also included an insight on my encounter with Elbot, the winner of the 2008 Loebner competition:

 
The Global Brain opening post also now incorporates an ingenius YouTube video that provides a modern take on the Turing test:

 
I am quite proud of my piece because it’s more comprehensive and has more perspective than the Wikipedia version:

* The Global Brain on Wikipedia

ENJOY!

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:

• http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3836.html

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.

* GSOH + The Global Brain

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”:

* http://arxivblog.com/?p=413

 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!