Well, I suppose if I had a voice and a story like Susan “SuBo” Boyle, the Global Brain knol would have hit ten thousand views within 24 hours rather than two years — LOL. That will teach me about whether I should go for mass common denominator material or high-end, abstract niche topics like artificial intelligence consciousness — double LOL, :*).
In any case, even though the viewership is completely dwarfed by SuBo’s 300 million YouTube views for an obscure collaboration network comprised mostly of MDs, academics and techies a ten thousand view count is a fairly good result.
Anyway, this knol remains a philosophical grounding to the applications I’m developing themselves. Today I’m having lunch with the guy who led development of Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Answers. We’re going to swap notes on data objects and microformats and how inefficient existing ranking systems are which then affect the order in which search items appear on lists etc. etc. etc.
Am I loyal to Google or to Yahoo? Neither. I’m loyal to improving data efficiency, context and clarity on the Web.
Today I found out that my ‘The Global Brain, the Semantic Web, the Singularity, 360-2020 Consciousness….’ knol has not only been designated a Top Pick Award, it’s also receiving an “Honorable Mention” as one of the best top picks amongst the hundreds of thousands of knols written to-date. I’m really happy and glad that the knol is adding perspectives to others online and that its popularity has remained consistent throughout the last 12 months.
According to the Knol community panel who track the Google statistics:
“Winners are produced by the most objective criteria: Google’s secret algorithm that evaluates a combination of reader page views, ratings, reviews, comments and even how quickly each Knol gains popularity. Statistically, these are the best Knols of the month. Google calls them “Top Pick.” There are no conflict-of-interest human votes, no juries of questionable judges.”
When I originally started the knol on 26 November 2008, it was in honor of my father (he would have turned 65 that day had he survived his coma which, sadly, he did not). During the first few days and weeks hardly anyone read the knol — the topic matter is so niche, obscure, not about baking cakes — but still I felt that it was important to explore the very serious and substantial issues of the Global Brain, what online consciousness is, what human consciousness is, how we can harness the Web for more constructive purposes and what we need to evolve about online tools, to enable us to reach an Enlightened/Conscious Web.
So from those small beginnings and first steps this has happened:
* exposure to the amazing talents and knowhow of other writers from all over the world (most of them qualified medical and business professionals)
* recognition from Knol’s community of authors
* respectable viewing metrics
* a documentary in which I was interviewed about online consciousness
* a personal philosophical framework which informs what I’m doing with the 360-2020 system
A certain CEO from a Semantic Web play once wrote that my writings had “NO effect on viewer metrics” and that no one even read what I wrote because I was “crazy” and a “spammer”. Quite apart from that being libelous, defamatory and a total untruth — since I have the screenshots to prove my postings on that SemWeb platform garnered good view counts — Google Knol now proves him completely wrong (again).
Now, should we rely on Google’s algorithms which are an industry-standard, out there and publicly available for everyone to see or should we rely on the intentionally hurtful words of a CEO who decided to hide his own platform’s view counts from even inside the community and who is known to spin user metrics out of proportion?
Hmmn……….
That was not a pleasant experience but certainly one I learnt from. When someone who claimed to be your friend, does a shocking volte face, spreads falsehoods and tries to smear your reputation, STAND UP FOR YOURSELF AND LET YOUR WORK & THE QUALITY OF IT DO THE TALKING. Even if those who would spread falsehoods outnumber you in quantity and even if they may seem to have the power+influence to silence you (by deleting your content or excluding you)…….YOUR QUALITY & CHARACTER WILL CUT THROUGH THEIR CRAP, somewhere, somehow, sometime.
Quality hands of aces, kings and queens trump s*** decks in the long-run, and all smart players know this.
My position now — particularly following the global financial crisis — is that the ignorant, incompetent, disrespectful and unconstructive CEOs and leaders should step aside and let the quality ones come to the fore to get business, value and societal creation models to operate more effectively (or they risk getting steamrollered by the rise of the QUALITY BRIGADE anyway).
Er………probably not. I’ll present the case from a 360-2020 perspective on Google’s search strategy as well as other channels and products which support this core business.
Firstly, I’d recommend that readers go to Google’s site and read through their recent earnings reports carefully and also refer to my post on GOOG’s Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC).
Next, please watch this Google Tech Talk with VINT CERF on “Shifting to a Global Consciousness” and then compare whether MS or Yahoo! have imagined or associated with the global consciousness or global brain concept much.
Answer: lots of great innovation from MS Labs wrt haptic interfaces and connective communications but little on global consciousness. Ditto Yahoo! whose BOSS semantic API is interesting, but again not about the Global Brain.
Now take into account Google’s commitment to global consciousness aka the Global Brain on 2 core platforms:
(1.) Google Knol
(2.) Google groups
Then add in what it’s doing in the renewable technologies space (facilitation and investment).
As for the core business, please consider also these key search strategies from Google:
* video search, leveraging from YouTube
* social search with the imminent Google Wave
* semantic search in the upcoming Google Squared
* mobile search on multiple devices (Google is currently responsible for almost 98 percent of mobile search)
That’s a matrix comprising horizontal and vertical leverage synching search capabilities, btw.
Incidentally, I’ve watched the media reports on the likely effect of the MS+Yahoo tie-up on Google’s share of the share market and heard all sorts of mistakes from the journalists and analysts providing commentary. Importantly, none of them mentioned the key search strategies I list above, which SO obviously point to Google keeping apace and ahead of its competitors in the search space!
On the BBC, one Internet analyst said that the combined MS+Yahoo share will be 25 percent whilst Google’s is 75 percent. “Okay…………….,” says Twain who immediately thinks the analyst’s made a mistake so goes and does her own analysis and discovers……
According to comScore, Google’s share of US search market was 65 percent in June 2009 whilst MS+Yahoo combined was 28 percent. According to Hitwise UK for the month ending 27 June 2009, Google was responsible for almost 91 percent of search traffic in the UK whilst 5.3 percent was atrributable to Bing+Yahoo combined.
This is an example of how it’s important to do our own analysis, cross-verify what the media presents us as “facts” and independently connect the dots and make sense of what we’re presented with. This is true when we watch major news channels as much as when we due diligence a balance sheet or when we work on complex transactions. Attention to detail, interconnecting silo information and cross-verification is a form of risk management which prevents corporate busts and global financial crisis.
Cause + effect, as I noted previously.
In any case, more information on the MS+Yahoo search sharing deal is available here:
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.
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.
The Google Docs embed of my ‘Comedy genres — a Twain guide” hasn’t worked as well as it should; Docs isn’t converting the text and fonts correctly so I’ve sent a message to the Knol Help team whether it might be possible to embed the Scribd version instead.
I’ve been busy as usual. Firstly, I’ve created the favicon which is now inserted into each web browser so that the browser too is distinctively ALWAYS THE TWAIN (@T):
Tomorrow, I’m going to include a counter on the site to show how many visitors have arrived @ ALWAYS THE TWAIN.
On another practical side, in the search for a new mouse, I’ve ordered this one whilst I wait for my Christmas gift of a WACOM kit:
Today I spent most of my time getting to grips with Google Maps API again and wondering how to do a dynamic RSS feed with geocode into something like JACKSphere with Papervision3D and some Flex. Well………..I happened upon this brilliant desktop and website application:
There’s also a cool 3D version that makes use of Google Earth to showcase live dynamic updates of flickr photos posted all over the world, with their times and geocodes:
I have seen something similar by a German Flash developer a few years ago — albeit it was with news rather than Flickr photos and I’m sure someone will do a videoplayer version soon.
As well as working out how to code this (Adobe Edge and other Adobe tutorial sites do a tutorial on dynamic RSS and Papervision3D), there’s also localized drag+drop within AS3 that I’m investigating. The objective is to create an environment in which rss newsfeeds flying in and are also dockable at certain grid points. A bit tricky code-wise but……..hey……….life is for positive experimentation!
I’m simply happy to be focussing on my own interests rather than trying to make someone else’s vision work and wasting my time, IQ, goodwill and skills.
I feel extremely L-I-B-E-R-A-T-E-D!!!
GOOGLE KNOL
The ‘Global Brain’ posting is almost at 200 views in 3 days which is a LOT more than any single posting on a certain semantic service can dream of. Plus Knol has versioning. Plus there’s comment moderation. Plus a whole stack of Google goodies to make producing quality content fast, easy and user-friendly (such as the ability to insert YouTube videos, spreadsheets and other documents).
Most importantly, I don’t get bothered by trolls / vampires / rats and I don’t have to defend Google Knol or do anything which isn’t my job. I also don’t have to feel angry or insulted by their marketing strategy or how I monetize my content because I can choose to earn through AdSense in and around my knols.
All-in-all, I can just be happy to produce and share quality knowhow and relevant links. This is what I’m about, so Knol is serving my needs quite nicely on that side for now.
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:
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.
“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 TheLucifer 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 ofWiredmagazine 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
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 necessaryto 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.
(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:
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.
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”:
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 readingCandideby 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:
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:
Over the next fortnight I’ll be writing about the main constituents of the Global Brain and publishing that here as well as on Google Knol (http://knol.google.com/k/the-global-brain-singularity-and-360/31fjy9fjsu1x2/19#).
Topics which will be covered in the full posting (release date: 26 November 2008) include:
(i.) origins of the Global Brain and associated concepts
(ii.) historical context of collective human intelligence
(iii.) major schools of thought on the Singularity
(iv.) key proponents and detractors such as Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Hawkings, Richard Dawkins, Pierre Levy, Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg, and Anthony Berglas
(v.) relationships with Moore’s Law, Aasimov’s science fiction, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and other creative efforts
(vi.) consciousness paradigms from Confucius to Clay Shirky
(vii.) current and theoretical technological models on achieving the Singularity
(viii.) economic implications and GAIA revolutions
(ix.) gender and cultural identity within the Global Brain matrix
(x.) human existence and potential neural saturation post-Singularity
As part of this piece, I’m currently reading ‘How the body shapes the way we think’ by Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard, published by MIT Press Books.
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