AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Monday 4 June 2012
Inescapably Connected

Technologists tend to believe that we are actually smarter for having these gadgets, and that as they permeate the texture of modern life, we will grow smarter still. That’s a collective, grand, slightly murky, we. Bernardo Huberman, scientific director of the Sand Hill Labs — a new Hewlett-Packard research center — talks about harnessing social knowledge, “studying the whole Internet ecosystem and designing novel mechanisms and institutions so that we can harvest the distributed knowledge: that such a gigantic social mind is producing.”

We don’t have to become neurons in the New World brain to feel that we’re already gaining something. I have noticed that the mobile-gadget wielder develops the odd sensation of being entitled to all sort of facts. You get in the habit of knowing things, or at least of being able to find out. It’s as if there’s a permanent mental hotline to the information specialists at the public library. Can’t quite identify Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996 or that actor up on the screen or a science-fiction story encountered 10 years ago? You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer.

But Huberman has more in mind than facts and trivia. His research consistently finds informal communities making better decisions than any of their members, knowing more and thinking better than experts. “We now know that society can work better than any individual,” he says. “There is this notion of a collective mind, a social mind, and today the Internet allows us to tap that.” We are distributing intelligence. We are creating social organisms that carry out continuous computation.

29 notes

  1. anotherwordformyth reblogged this from socio-logic
  2. socio-logic reblogged this from sociolab
  3. nikipattanaik reblogged this from sociolab
  4. sociolab reblogged this from azspot
  5. latface reblogged this from balita101
  6. balita101 reblogged this from azspot
  7. dom72 reblogged this from america-wakiewakie
  8. america-wakiewakie reblogged this from azspot
  9. azspot posted this

A GNT creation ©2007–2013