This is a must-read from the Times. I like these points:

* The more intelligent someone is, the more they can see a fact in terms of other things. The greatest form of intelligence is someone who can make big links between different contexts, such as the scientist F. M. Burnet, who applied the principles of evolution to the immune system. — Professor Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution;

* The marks of intelligence are alertness, perceptiveness, wit, curiosity, creative responses to opportunities and problems, and the ability to learn quickly from errors. Intelligent people tend not to be mentally lazy or pedestrian, because being smart enough to recognise that one is either or both these things makes for dissatisfaction. Intelligent people are more often than not self-motivating and ambitious and derive pleasure from putting their talents to use. The value of what results depends, of course, on whether the intelligence in question is bent to good or bad ends. — A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck (ex-Oxford); and

* I don’t equate intelligence with cleverness. I think people who are intelligent have a touch of humanity about them. Their ideas, insight and vision set them apart from others, but they also have an understanding of what makes the world tick and how their ideas can impact for the greater good. Interestingly, as the World Wide Web has evolved so has the concept of collective intelligence, which is best encapsulated in the evolution of Wikipedia. This is a new form of intelligence that could lead to new insights into our understanding of the key challenges that face us as an increasingly global society. — Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton.

It’s interesting because 6 weeks ago this is what I wrote on BBCDigRev:

CONCLUSION: we are intelligent in ways not necessarily captured by current definitions of it or tests to infer it.

I have a similar take on consciousness; we are conscious in ways not necessarily captured by current definitions of it or tests to infer it.

This article is a comment on the Channel 4 program, Race and Intelligence: Science’s last Taboo.

MY VIEWS ON IQ-EQ, TURING TESTS ETC.

I’ve commented previously on this blog about my fun+games with Elbot, the Turing test and what is defined as machine intelligence and consciousness.

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/06/23/the-global-brain-the-cloud-and-other-grea-universal-neural-kinesis-gunk/

IT’S CLEAR THAT THE QUESTION OF INTELLIGENCE FOR ME IS ABOUT WHETHER SOMETHING (MAN OR MACHINE) CAN MAKE SENSE. By this I mean contextualize with diverse, multiple and sometimes contradictory sources of inputs, be able to filter in the perspicacious quality and out the nonsense noise, DNA path the consequences of each option, spark and cross-pollinate some synergistic random creativity (from what seems to be nothing, a vacuum, a pool of ignorance, unconnected silo sources) and…….DO SOMETHING WHICH MOVES THEM, THE PEOPLE AROUND THEM AND THE SITUATION THEY’RE IN FORWARD.

Now, superficially, this may seem to mean intellectual application. It doesn’t. For me, a footballer who can make sense of his terrain, filter out the noise of the crowds and filter in his manager shouting instructions from the sidelines yards away, be aware of where the rest of his team are, who he needs to pass to to move their game forward towards a goal, what paths to take to avoid defenders on the other team and then the random magic of foot connecting with ball to curve it into a net……….is intelligent.

Moreover, Ivy League / Oxbridge / Top 10 MBA school educations and qualifications don’t necessarily equate with intelligence. I’ve worked directly with types like that and some of them are simply incapable of making sense. If they were capable, we wouldn’t have had the global financial crisis in that gravity or of that magnitude and ripple effect. Yes, the nature of markets is that they are cyclical and we are bound to have booms+busts. Nonetheless, smarter anticipatory sense-making BEFORE the crisis could notably have decreased the severity of it and the policies available to take us out of it.

What highly qualified people may be good at is using convoluted jargon and “marketing mantras” but they can be poor at decision-making in any contextualized and consequential way. Unfortunately, people like that do rise into positions of sign-off so US$ billions of savers’ capital is put at risk precisely because those people are incapable of sense-making and risk managing.

Some of them are also simply not mathematically or technically competent enough.

Now, I’ve also been interested in the BBC Digital Revolution’s upcoming documentary which charts the last 20 years of the Web, particularly what it means for our collective intelligence and consciousness. This is one of my observations there about Program 4 which is about how the Web affects our intelligence:

* Baroness Susan Greenfield shares her concerns for our brains under the web’s influence; and

* Nicholas Carr offers his thoughts on the loss of the contemplative mind.

It’s been theorized that the Web will turn (or is turning?) us into non-thinking drones and rewiring our brains negatively. There may have been similar theories when the radio and the television happened.

What we’re showing in this thread is that actually the Web can INCREASE contemplation — with each contextualization by diverse contributors which elicits another contributor or reader (or the BBCDigRev team) to reflect and respond with a supporting / alternative / questioning position towards positive ends.

Positive ends being some type of preservation of the Utopian ideals of the Web first imagined by TBL and others’ genius AND also factoring in the corporate inclusion in the economic model — along with tools for corporate altruism, increased and incentivised online collaboration, and how WE should own its value ecosystems rather than any govt, corporation or Skynet wannabe.

So perhaps the basis of Program 4 shouldn’t be whether the Web is affecting our identities but rather how we’re shaping the Web and each other via online interactions.

INTELLIGENCE + IQ
============

Can we define intelligence without ambiguity or capture it precisely in IQ tests? Answer: NO.

The definitions of intelligence vary, culture by culture, individual by individual. In Chinese cultures someone who can cook well is said to be intelligent as much as if they can pass exams. In Western culture, is David Beckham’s ability to somehow instinctively figure out where his foot needs to hit the ball to bend it into the net not as intelligent as a Professor of Mathematics’ calculations of that projectile (force, velocity, rate of acceleration et al)? In Russia, are the oligarchs who engaged in illegal activities and are now in prison intelligent or is the guy who earns a regular salary and is free to take care of his family intelligent?

Relativism applies.

Besides which, IQ tests as a test for intelligence are quite silly. First of all, they only test for our visual-spatial reasoning — of the kind, “Can you figure out which is the odd one out?” That’s easy. If it’s one of those images with dots and crosses or a flag with stripes, we just have to see whether it’s a reflection / translation / rotation / inversion of the dots+crosses. If the number of dots+crosses changes, then it’s about an algebraic pattern.

They don’t test for our aural abilities to distinguish between people’s voices and their intent. They also don’t test for our actual manual dexterity or the aptitude of our olfactory senses. These too are signs of intelligence. The aural aspect of intelligence is particularly important in Oriental languages where the tone and accents of the vowel can determine whether we’re calling our mothers “Mother / a horse / hemp / measles / a nuisance.” Manual dexterity is a sign of intelligence — look at the artistry of pastry makers, sculptors, fashion designers, glass blowers. That doesn’t get captured in these IQ tests which are supposed to be a measure of intelligence. Ditto the intelligence of the “Noses” in the cosmetics and perfumes industry or even the intelligence of someone being able to smell out changes in the weather or where a piece of fish was caught.

CONCLUSION: we are intelligent in ways not necessarily captured by current definitions of it or tests to infer it.

So returning to machine intelligence because it has implications for Web intelligence. If, for example, we wanted to test a computer’s intelligence using standard IQ tests it would probably pass and be able to match the reflections / translations / rotations / inversions of images. Likewise, it would be able to complete all the computational mathematics ones readily — like “What’s next in this sequence? 2, 3, 5, 7?” Easy, they’re all prime numbers so the next one is 11.

Could a machine as readily get the words differentiation in the IQ test — of the kind, “Which is the odd one out? Dog, dolphin, bat and kangaroo.”

At the most, the machine could identify that they’re all mammals. Then it would apply binomial tree logic to distinguishing that the first is the only one with 4 legs, a dog + a dolphin can swim, a bat is the only one that can fly and a kangaroo carries its joey in its giant pouch, and the dolphin + the bat both have the same maximum hearing ranges (approx 150 Hz).

If you ask an Englishman, they may say, “The dog because if we read the word backwards it says “god” and that’s the only one of the options which can be read and spelt both ways. It’s a palindrome.”

If you ask an Australian, they may say, “The dolphin because it’s the only mammal which exhibits an ability for culture (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7475).”

If you ask someone Chinese, they may say, “The bat because it’s the only one in this group not known to have previously been eaten by Man.”

If you ask an African, they may say, “The kangaroo because it can only be found in one land — Australia — but the others can be found in many countries.

So, clearly, our inherited tests for intelligence are flawed and if we apply the same types of tests to machines then we will only end up with a definition of machine intelligence which is flawed.

Solutions?

Well, first, develop better Web tools which enable us to understand US and each other with more insight. Some attempt towards this is starting with the Semantic Web and initial forays into structuring data for contextualization. More, though, needs to be done on the perception, culture and values dimensions but at least it’s a positive evolution for the Web.

Second, discern what the value dimensions are within these diverse cultures.

Third, create more sophisticated collaboration tools that can harness those cultural variances for collective hopes and aims.

It’s also important to note that an increase in functional processing power of machines may not be the same as an increase in the intelligence of machines.

Again, it comes down to what is our definition of intelligence and is it culturally cross-applicable.

Anyone interested in how technologists define intelligence can read about it here:

*http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/NatureOfIntelligence

Anyone interested in how biologists define intelligence can read about it here:

* Handbook of Intelligence, Robert J. Sternberg —
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handbook-Intelligence-Robert-Sternberg-PhD/dp/0521596483

* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6803/abs/407470a0.html

AND FINALLY……ABOUT THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS + TECHNOLOGY
=============================================

Here’s some food for thought. Ever since it struck there’s been reams of academic argument from the Smith/Friedman schools versus the Keynesian schools. We have the likes of Paul Krugman (Noble Prize for Economics), Joseph Stiglitz (also Nobel Economics), Nouriel Roubini and Niall Ferguson getting into intellectual fisticuffs over the economic models we’ve inherited and how to apply them now.

It’s apparent by now that the Presidents and Prime Ministers are taking their leads from these economic giants.

However, what’s interesting is that the Internet, climate change and the interdependence of nations did not exist in the days of Smith or Keynes in the shape they do now. This seems to be escaping the attentions of the heavyweight economists of today. TECHNOLOGY is facilitating trade and driving it. Electronic systems created by the banks and companies to produce, market, distribute and sell products+services to us are also interdependent — not simply government policies.

So perhaps it may be a good idea to evolve the Smith vs. Keynes models into ones which DO INCLUDE technologies (the Internet, mobile, haptics), climate change and systems interdependency.

Otherwise, if we keep using old tools and economic frameworks which haven’t kept apace with technological advances we shouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years time there’s another recession and risk of stockmarket collapse and values eradication.

See? It’s about a lot more than Chris Anderson’s “theory of free” or “freemium” or whatever. It’s about the whole and holistic economic ecosystem we’re creating online that provides us with tools more sophisticated and current than Smith or Keynes alone.

********

Yes, we’re all in it together moving forward :*).

Yes and I don’t believe that the likes of Twitter or Facebook will be regarded as the apex of Web development. As much as they’re useful and have their own validity, there’s still MUCH MUCH MORE AMAZING INNOVATION, COLLABORATION + SENSE-MAKING AHEAD.

At some point, that’s likely to include a re-imagination and re-configuration of code with some form of pictographics like Chinese and more haptics. I see inklings of how pictographs would level the code playing field; there’s something written in Squeak which allows children aged 11-15 to learn about code in a purely visual way rather than as lines of tags and text.

For true democracy, we’re not only talking about as it applies to adults and people from the same cultures or “intelligence” or “edu-economic status” as us. We’re talking about….EVERYONE.

Who knows? Maybe someone will get an Epiphany/enlightenment soon and figure out a way of incorporating Chinese into RDF in a way which is more than a call to an image file of a Chinese character.

For me, right now, I just want to replace 5-star rating systems with something smarter and more meaningful.

360-2020

The reason for my interest in contextualization and consequentiality is that I don’t believe the Semantic Web is sufficient. Within my lifetime, I’d like to experience the realization of an intelligent CONSCIOUS WEB.

If we can structure content not simply to be able to categorize the simple stuff like people, places, companies, location etc. in RDF, but to actually differentiate QUALITY sense-making content from the noise and also discern the ways people are perceiving and valuing that content, then we will become a whole lot more Enlightened and intelligent.

Even more intelligent is when the on+offline tools to contextualize and consequentiality path the wealth of our content and productivity will enable us to derive more evolved economic models and social ecosystems that advance — rather than atrophy — our species and our humanity towards others.

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.

*************************

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!

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!