Inspirations on Singularity and opportunities with Empathy

Ed Daniel — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 13:40:00 GMT

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.

In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence... : RDF

Inspirations on Singularity and opportunities with Empathy