The Emerging Global Brain: OMG I missed the Singularity? Interview with Francis Heylighen ~ Francis Heylighen started his career as yet another physicist with a craving to understand the foundations of the universe – the physical and philosophical laws that make everything tick. But his quest for understanding has led him far beyond the traditional limits of the discipline of physics. Currently he leads the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels, a position involving fundamental cybernetics research cutting across almost every discipline. Among the many deep ideas he has pursued in the last few decades, one of the most tantalizing is that of the Global Brain – the notion that the social, computational and communicative matrix increasingly enveloping us as technology develops, may possess a kind of coherent intelligence in itself. I first became aware of Francis and his work in the mid-1990s via the Principia Cybernetica project – an initiative to pursue the application of cybernetic theory to modern computer systems. Principia Cybernetica began in 1989, as a collaboration between Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and the late great Russian physicist, dissident and systems theorist Valentin Turchin. And then 1993, very shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the HTML/HTTP software framework and thus created the Web, the Principia Cybernetica website went online. For a while after its 1993 launch, Principia Cybernetica was among the largest and most popular sites on the Web. Today the Web is a different kind of place, but Principia Cybernetica remains a unique and popular resource for those seeking deep, radical thinking about the future of technology, mind and society. The basic philosophy presented is founded on the thought of Turchin and other mid-century systems theorists, who view the world as a complex self-organizing system in which complex control structures spontaneously evolve and emerge. The concept of the Global Brain has a long history, going back to ancient ideas about society as a superorganism, and the term was introduced in Peter Russell’s 1982 book “The Global Brain”. However, the Principia Cybernetica page on the Global Brain was the first significant online resource pertaining to the concept, and remains the most thorough available resource for matters Global-Brain-ish. Francis published one of the earliest papers on the Global Brain concept, and in 1996 he founded the “Global Brain Group”, an email list whose membership includes many of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence. In the summer of 2001, based partly on a suggestion from yours truly, Francis organized a workshop at the Free University of Brussels – The First Global Brain Workshop (GBrain 0). This turned out to be a fascinating and diverse collection of speakers and attendees, and for me it played a critical role, in terms of helping me understand what other researchers conceived the Global Brain to be. My own presentation at the workshop was based on my book Creating Internet Intelligence, which I had submitted to the publisher the previous year, which outlined my own vision of the future of the Global Brain, centered on using powerful AI systems to purposefully guide the overall intelligence of global computer networks. In our discussions before, during and after the GB0 workshop, Francis and I discovered that our respective views of the Global Brain were largely overlapping yet significantly different, leading to many interesting conversations. So when I decided to interview Francis on the Global Brain for H+ Magazine, I knew the conversation would touch many points of agreement and also some clear issues of dissension – and most importantly, would dig deep into the innards of the Global Brain concept, one of the most important ideas for understanding our present and future world. Ben: The global brain means many things to many people. Perhaps a good way to start is for you to clarify how you conceive it – bearing in mind that your vision has been one of those shaping the overall cultural evolution of the concept in the last decades… Francis: The global brain (GB) is a collective intelligence formed by all people on the planet together with their technological artifacts (computers, sensors, robots, etc.) insofar as they help in processing information. The function of the global brain is to integrate the information gathered by all its constituents, and to use it in order to solve problems, as well for its individual constituents as for the global collective. By “solving problems” I mean that each time an individual or collective (including humanity as a whole) needs to do something and does not immediately know how to go about it, the global brain will suggest a range of more or less adequate approaches. As the intelligence of the GB increases, through the inclusion of additional sources of data and/or smarter algorithms to extract useful information from those data, the solutions it offers will become better, until they become so good that any individual human intelligence pales in comparison. Like all complex systems, the global brain is self-organizing: it is far too complex to be fully specified by any designer, however intelligent. On the other hand, far-sighted individuals and groups can contribute to its emergence by designing some of its constituent mechanisms and technologies. Some examples of those are, of course, the Internet, the Web, and Wikipedia. Ben: What about the worry that the incorporation of the individual mind into the global brain could take away our freedom? Many people, when they hear about these sorts of ideas, become very concerned that the advent of such a “cognitive superorganism” above the human level would reduce their personal freedom, turning them into basically slaves of the overmind, or parts of the borg mind, or whatever. One standard counterargument is that in the presence of a global superorganism we would feel just as free as we do now, even though our actions and thoughts would be influenced on a subtle unconscious level by the superorganism — and after all, the feeling of freedom is more a subjective construct than an objective reality. Or if there is a decrease in some sorts of freedom coming along with the emergence of the global brain, one could view this as a gradual continuation of things that have already been happening for a while. It’s not clear that we do – in every relevant sense — feel just as free now as our ancestors did in a hunter-gatherer society. In some senses we may feel more free, in others less. Or, you could argue that the ability to tap into a global brain on command gives a massive increase in freedom and possibility beyond the individually-constrained mental worlds we live in now. What’s your take on all this? Francis: For me the issue of freedom in the GB is very simple: you will get as much (or as little) as you want. We do not always want freedom: often we prefer that others make decisions for us, so that we just can follow the lead. In those situations, the global brain will make a clear recommendation that we can just follow without too much further worry. In other cases, we prefer to think for ourselves and explore a variety of options before we decide what we really want to do. In such a case too, the GB will oblige, offering us an unlimited range of options, arranged approximately in the order of what we are most likely to prefer, so that we can go as far as we want in exploring the options. A simple illustration of this approach is how a search engine such as Google answers a query: it does not provide a single answer that you have to take or leave, it provides an ordered list of possibilities, and you scroll down as deep as you want if you don’t like the first suggestions. In practice, the search technology used by Google is already so good that in many cases you will stick with the first option without even looking at the next ones. In practice, this means an increase in individual freedom. The global brain will not only offer more options for choice than any individual or organization before it, it will even offer the option of not having to choose, or of choosing in a very limited, relatively unreflective way, where you look at the first three options and intuitively take the third one, thinking “that’s the one!”. Of course, in such decisions you would have been influenced to some degree at an unconscious level, but only because you didn’t want to make the effort to become conscious of it... Continues @ nexusilluminati.blogspot.au/2011/04/emerging-global-brain.html By Ben Goertzel
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 10:32:13 +0000
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