Towards a Global Brain

Towards a Global Brain
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media

TEDxSV
May 14, 2011

Saturday, May 14, 2011

“The skill of writing is to
create a context in which
other people can think.”

-Edwin Schlossberg


The extraordinary convergence
of computing and human potential


Towards a global brain


The advent of global consciousness?


A few key assertions
 We are building a network-mediated global mind
 It is not skynet
 It is us, augmented


“global consciousness is
that thing responsible for
deciding that pots
containing decaffeinated
coffee should be orange”

– Danny Hillis (via Jeff Bezos)

– http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/03/16/etech_3.html


Artificial Intelligence

“the science and engineering
of making intelligent machines”
-John McCarthy, 1956


Intelligence Augmentation
“The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it
snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts,
in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the
brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental
pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he
certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even
improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to
be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association,
rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal
the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but
it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence
and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized
private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex"
will do.”
– Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945


A device that knows
where I am better than I
do, a knowing assistant
telling me where to go
and how to get there.


Beyond information
retrieval: real time
connection with other
people and what they
know.


Man-Computer Symbiosis

“The hope is that, in not too many years, human
brains and computing machines will be coupled
together very tightly, and that the resulting
partnership will think as no human brain has ever
thought and process data in a way not approached by
the information-handling machines we know today.”

– Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on
Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. Eprint


Harnessing Collective Intelligence


wikipedia


A device with eyes and
ears, with a sense of
place, and motion, and
proximity, with memory
of what it’s seen and
where it’s been, a
connection to the people
we know and love.


The spread of sensors
 sensor platform slide


The “intelligent” devices of the future are connected to data
“We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more
data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google


“Would you be willing to cross
the street with information that
was five minutes old?”
-Jeff Jonas


Resilience


The global brain is us,
connected and augmented


Vannevar Bush’s Memex - 1945


“Your job as a parent is to prepare
your child for the future.”


If the global brain is still a child,
what should we be teaching it?
How should we be rearing it?


Predictive analytics in information applications
mirrors human learning


Our algorithms and the goals we set for them
mirror human vices and virtues


We are all Khaled Said


“Access to all the world’s information”

“How can applications be better
when they are social?”

“Changing the world by spreading
the knowledge of innovators”


How can we make the emerging global
consciousness not only more resilient,
but more moral?


“Virtue is knowing what you really want”
-James O’Reilly


εὐδαιµονία


eudaimonia


We’ve got one world. We’d better get it right.


Towards a Global Brain

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