Tim O’Reilly’s September 2012 Long Now talk on “the birth of the global mind” offers plenty to mull over. Here’s the video.
These notes are all from the q&a with Stewart Brand, following the talk:
The thing I worry most about is that we’re not applying our collective intelligence to hard, interesting problems. We’re applying them to trivialities. … We need to celebrate the people who are using this new superpower for good. …
The main point I’m trying to make is that when we think about this (concept of) artificial intelligence … it’s us. We are becoming a multicellular organism in a new way. …
You want to build systems that are affordances for collective intelligence. …
The financial crisis is a sickness in the global brain. … I look at Goldman Sachs and say, “There’s one of the avatars of the global brain gone wrong.”…
If you look at the way that spam is regulated on the internet: That’s the beginning of an immune system response to a pathogen. … You recognize the signature of something new and hostile, and you fix it. If you compare that to how government regulation works — it’s badly broken. … Ultimately, the financial system needs to be algorithmically regulated, the way that spam is regulated on the internet. …
We don’t necessarily have a democracy any more, we have a plutocracy. …
We have to move away from the notion that politics has anything to do with governance.
