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Inspirations on Singularity and opportunities with Empathy

One of the areas that has kept my interest and curiousity in recent years is that of collective consciousness.  Having seen the power of online portals and how they improve collaboration it was fascinating to see how these web presences evolved - document sharing, forums, text chat rooms, blogs, wikis for example becoming mainstream and accessible to the online community / global village through proprietary, free and open source software.

During this phase of portal evolution the value of search emerged - then came the revolution in participation architectures and tagging - otherwise known as folksonomy.

Recently Ray Kurzweil was featured in the news regarding the concept of the singularity.  If you're not familiar with the Singularity then this link should help.  Until such time as artificial intelligence develops powerful empathy there may be a growing requirement for a collective human consciousness in the community, geographic and non-geographic regions, societies, organisations and associations.

Leveraging the thought-leadership of George Por's community-intelligence I'd like to see a standard emerge for exchanging 'consciousness' between Communities of Practice.

My ideas have meandered over the years (please note I no longer participate with this organisation) but I'd like to see some sort of working group, at OpenBC for instance, establishing open standards around this type of thinking.  OpenBC is slowly acquiring the participation of some of Europe's most promising entrepreneurs and technologists who would be fundamental to achieving a European Collective Consciousness.

Once that has been achieved then we could look to see how that could scale to a peer to peer model of consciousness between communities of practice.  A model that would follow would be of an organisation's various CoPs creating a shared consciousness and in turn this consciousness would be accessible via strategic partners.

OpenBC, itself, could be that organisation, so could Google, Microsoft and others.

This is not another expert system, nor a search engine, portal or social network, nor is it an attempt to usurp RSS and/or RDF, the driver of much integration and interaction between disparate data on the web, in fact I'd anticipate it would create vocabularies of RDF though. What this would be is a modular real-time mind that would be integral to decision making and deliver significant risk mitigation and impact awareness during the process of decisioning connecting the tangible with the intangible - powering automated decisioning with collective empathy - something that would help e-Government govern better for example.

What follows from this, for the commercially minded, is micro-transactions and their inherent value: how would you easily and comprehensively value transactions of consciousness?  Once again the theme of taming complexity emerges from this requirement.

I'd love to hear your views on this, learn about groups you'd think would be worth checking out and also links to any content you feel would support these enquiries.


Posted: Jun 07 2006, 02:40 PM by Ed Daniel | with 7 comment(s)
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Comments

Leon Benjamin said:

Ed,

One of the questions I'm still waiting to be asked at events I've been speaking at recently, is "what's the end game for social networks?", or rather "what are the implications of what is basically an unprecedented degree of individual connectiviy on a global scale?".

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I sense that there will be (almost by definition), a general rise in the level of awareness at an individual level, in terms of cause and effect.  In other words, people will start to realise that we cannot continue to operate within a "I win you lose" frame of reference, and so there will be more questioning of government and business motives.  And believe me, governments already fear this.  It's easy to see how 100m people could say one day "We're not buying Coca Cola anymore because you treat your employees inhumanely".  

It's a little harder to see when for example, people actually change behaviour and say "actually we're not up for people starving on a continuous, unrelenting basis", and actually do something about it.

Not sure about the singularity issue - I thought the universe is quantum in nature, that is, very dynamic and therefore unlikely to exist for long as a singularity or anything else.  But it's not my area of expertise.

You say "how would you easily and comprehensively value transactions of consciousness?". The answer is you can't and you don't.  At collectively higher levels of consciousness (of the masses), the 'transaction' proceeds within a framework where there is no giver and no receiver.  The value is in the act of sharing.  This as you know, is what I call "Winning by Sharing"


# June 11, 2006 9:51 AM

meta_darwinist said:

That is a very intriguing idea.  I think you are right about the importance of coupling automated decision making to the empathy and real-world experience of a group of people.  I think one thing that people who deal with economics or biology know is that you can never really predict all possible outcomes (e.g. all possible products/services that will be useful in a certain context/market, or all variations in form that will be adaptive in biology) and hence coming up with better ways to distribute intelligent pattern recognition and decision making sounds like a really good idea.  The world's econosphere will keep evolving as new ideas, products, and services spread throughout the whole system.  Of course the econosphere is closely coupled to governments, and as you said, collective consciousnesses would help "e-Government govern better."  I'll definitely have to think about that idea some more...
# June 16, 2006 9:56 PM

Finbar Dineen said:

"I'd like to see a standard emerge for exchanging 'consciousness' between Communities of Practice. "

A god place to start would be to define 'consciousness' and then 'Communities of Practice'. After which something might just be possible. I'm hoping that you're not thinking of 'consciousness' in its full existential sense. Which would, of course, be both futile and impossible.

Over all the language of this post is far too nebulous. Given that most people are struggling with the 'Semantic Web' what more really can you be asking for?
# June 27, 2006 9:12 AM

Ed Daniel said:

Hi Finbar,

Agreed - the language is a bit absorbing at times.  There are good definitions of what communities of practice are like over at George Por's site : www.community-intelligence.com

The shared-consciousness idea has similar results as the work carried out at wikipedia in that knowledge is created at a single point on the web - accessible via urls.

These days many people are starting or already have social and business profiles in a variety of online communities - the ability to move profiles is brittle at best.  

In a peer 2 peer community with an open identity standard communities can form and people can subscribe and unsubscribe to communities, services and data.  External communities can integrate services and data, sometimes people too.  That's sort of what I'd like to have take place.  You might say its re-inventing the wheel yet this way it can also put control of content and syndication back in the author's hands.

So why do it?  Knowing what is out there (Google) is one thing, knowing what to do with it (Insight) is entirely another - seamless access to specialised communities of practice would allow for better decisioning.  Each practice benefits from the other's intelligence - this could easily and is applied in companies.

I hope through all of this innovation will follow.

# July 3, 2006 12:17 PM

Anders Abrahamsson said:

One drawback that is mentioned in some of the comments here, that I would like to elaborate upon a bit. Collective Consciousness in the far end cannot be grasped. Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual flavours of intelligence is hard enough to grasp, but the transformational experience of e. g. the flow that takes place at the "open space meeting" offline is primarily and predominantly transferred and processed on a "quantum level", that any kind of text syntax (or whatever symbolic language human-created) cannot grasp fully. E. g. - how can a p2p process on the net flow with sense of intuition, especially since the "law of two feet" is not visible, immediately, in a Virtual Community of Practice? With a strong sense, you can sense someone "leave" anyways, but "being online" is not the same as "being present". Levels of communication are: Information, Communication, Transfer. Text on the Net is dominated by the first level there - Information. And yes, information about people is one thing, knowing you have changed the course of history in an Interaction and that Transaction leading to Transfer and Transformation, I believe is only done offline, non-verbal, and the knowledge is predominantly intuitive. I hope my text (sic!) makes sense, it is hard to explain something that only can be sensed, in the end. Experienced first hand. Directly. Instant. You know what I talk about, Ed. E. g. when we met in London in January 2005... Peace, Anders -- Sustainopreneurship* Facilitator RE:LOVE THE WORLD *Sustainopreneurship = Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Sustainability
# July 24, 2006 2:03 PM

Ed Daniel said:

Maybe, Anders, or maybe not.  Do we all collectively feel pain when we view the tragedies taking place around the world.

There are certainly some senses that are obscured via the process of net-based knowledge flow but I envisage in time that 'empathic' tagging will emerge as a communications feature - this has already begun with TXT / Instant Messaging 'smilies' and other such textual emotive contexts.

Yes, most information in its current form is dull per se - enlivening this could well be one of the goals of 'creative technologists'.

Thanks for the feedback!

# July 25, 2006 6:07 AM

Anders Abrahamsson said:

Yes, Online communication that drives to offline interaction in between creatives, whatever flavour, skill and knowledge, can certainly find out the answers - collectively - when meeting up! I was just drawing a line to the "extremes", that it cannot be met "all the way". As we know now :). Peace, Anders (and that .txt has its drawbacks to communicate properly was illustrated by all the carriage returns disappearing when my comment came out from moderation today ;) <--- emoticon ...)
# July 25, 2006 8:09 AM