Birth of the Global Mind

Towards a Global Brain

Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly)
O’Reilly Media

The Long Now Foundation
San Francisco, CA
September 5, 2012

Friday, January 4, 2013

“The skill of writing is to
create a context in which
other people can think.”

-Edwin Schlossberg

Often, the shape of the emerging world is right in front of our faces, but we can’t see it because we aren’t framing it in the
right way. I’m going to talk about some things tonight that may seem familiar, but that in aggregate are adding up to
something “rich and strange.” I’m also going to give you a bit of personal history that explains how some of my ideas have
evolved, and tie together the imaginations of the human potential movement of the 1970s and the reality that has emerged
over the past few decades and is continuing to unfold.

The extraordinary convergence
of computing and human potential


What I want to give you is some context for thinking about the extraordinary convergence
of computing and human potential

Towards a global brain

That is leading us towards what we might truly call a global brain.

The Singularity?


For a lot of people in these circles this idea may overlap with the notion of the Singularity,
which in turn is tied up in ideas of massive advances in artificial intelligence, perhaps even
leading to self-aware machine intelligences.

“One conversation centered on the ever accelerating
progress of technology and changes in the mode of
human life, which gives the appearance of
approaching some essential singularity in the history
of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know
them, could not continue.”

- Stan Ulam, recounting a conversation
with John von Neumann in 1958

By the way, while this concept is often attributed to science ﬁction writer Vernor Vinge, or to Ray Kurzweil, it turns out the
earliest instance of the concept of the Technological Singularity as a point in the human future that we can’t see beyond actually
was attributed by Stan Ulam to John von Neumann, who, as George Dyson is fond of pointing out, anticipated more of today’s
most important ideas than we give him credit for.

Dystopian visions

And of course there are lots of dystopian visions of this future from popular culture, like The Terminator’s Skynet, or The Matrix.
But the future is far stranger and more interesting than that.

I have to give a small nod here to Long Now board member Kevin Kelly’s notion of “the Technium” as a new order in the tree of
life, and his idea that we might well think of “an emerging superorganism of computers.” I think he’s really onto something
there, and

“Technology is a living force that
can expand our individual
potential - if we listen to what it
wants.”

- Kevin Kelly

I urge all of you to read Kevin’s new book, What Technology Wants. But I think that what’s happening with computers is only half
of the story. To understand what I mean by that, we have to go back in time.

George Simon

My own interest in the future of human consciousness began in the 1970s, when I worked with a man named George Simon. I
was just a kid, and George was one of many people in the ferment that we now refer to as the Human Potential Movement.
When I ﬁrst met George, he was trying out his ideas on my older brother’s Boy Scout Explorer Troop. A few years later, he was
giving workshops at the Esalen Institute. (In fact, I helped teach workshops with him at Esalen when I was only 18.)

I’m going to take a little detour into this material, because I’ve had a number of people ask me over the years about the
relationship between the ideas of the human potential movement and modern technology.

A “mathematical” language for consciousness

This was the first
book I ever
published, right out
of college. I
transcribed and
abridged George’s
notebooks, after he
died in an accident.

George had the notion that you could create useful “maps” and “languages” that described the evolution of human
consciousness from far into the past and into the distant future.

Alfred Korzybski: General Semantics

His work began with some of the notions of Alfred Korzybski, a writer and thinker from the 1930s who created a movement that
he called “General Semantics.” Korzybski’s central notion was that language is a map that helps us to see the world more
clearly.

Language is a map that can help us
see more deeply

Alfalfa
Oat Grass

Orchard
Grass

Here’s a simple example from my own experience. When I ﬁrst moved to Sebastopol, I’d look
out in a meadow and see “grass.” A few years later, owning horses, I’d look into the meadow
and see Alfalfa, Oat Grass, Orchard Grass, Rye Grass. The names helped me to see and
distinguish. The distinctions are in the real world, but the names are a map that helps to
remember, communicate, and even to see.

“The map is not the territory.”


One of Korzybski’s best-known statements - “the map is not the territory” - is echoed in this famous
painting by Magritte. Korzybski focused on aberrations in thinking - racism for example - as
the result of “bad maps” that guide us astray because we mix up the word with the thing, and
don’t go back to underlying experience.

Korzybski’s
“Structural
Differential”
was a training
device to help
recognize the
process of
abstraction


The real world is
represented by a
parabola because it’s
open ended and
effectively infinite


Our individual
experiences leave
out much detail of
the events that
triggered them.
And none of those
experiences are
identical.


We label our
experiences.
The problem
is that many of
us get lost in
labels and forget
they aren’t the
underlying reality


The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The “Supramental” God as “etc”

In typical 1970s syncretistic style, George mashed Korzybski’s ideas up with those of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian thinker who spoke
of a future expansion of human consciousness that we could do spiritual practice to grow into. George equated Korzybski’s
inﬁnite parabola with Aurobindo’s “supra-mental consciousness” and said “God is “etcetera” - that which we haven’t yet been
able to bring down into human consciousness.

There’s really something out there

A C

“Beingness” “Identity”

B D

“Experience” “Map”

George represented this idea (and some others that he took from Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo) in this “map” of the perceptual
process. There’s an outside reality

We take it in

A C


B D



Socratic dialogues, then and now...

A C


B D



We become the sum of our experiences and the stories

A C


B D



Knowing where you are in the process helps you to
correct your map

A C


B D


Even though this may seem like wacky stuff, a lot of the techniques I learned from George, to separate from the existing
language and received thinking about any given topic, have served me well over the years. It’s by trying to see with fresh eyes
that I was able to “remap” free software into open source, to reframe what was happening in the software industry around
concepts like “Web 2.0”. I wrote about this in a piece called “Remaking the Peer-to-Peer Meme”

This process occurs at a species level
as well as an individual level.

But here’s the point about all this that’s relevant to the topic at hand tonight:

Collectively, we are the sum
of all that has gone before us.


Human consciousness is still evolving


In Homer, there is no word
that corresponds to what we
think of today as either “body”
or “soul.” There is no sense
of individual choice; all
decisions are the influence of
the gods.

By the Athenian Golden Age
four centuries later, the outline
of the “modern” mind as we
know it today was clear.

In 1972, I went to Harvard to get a degree in Classics. I was particularly interested in understanding the transition to the modern
mind. Famous classicist Bruno Snell had written a book entitled Discovery of the Mind that fascinated me.

The “bricoleur” or
“handyman” vs the engineer

In many ways, the “modern” mindset is, at bottom, an engineering mindset. You discover the rules of the world and you put
them to work.

“Reality is an activity of the most
august imagination”
- Wallace Stevens

When I imagined the next stage of human evolution, it was much more of an aesthetic vision. The poet Wallace Stevens said
“Reality is...” and in his work, he explored the notion that reality is something we create, and that ultimately, our creative task is
to build shared visions that are not strictly true. “Reality is the beginning, not the end, the naked alpha not the hierophant
omega...”

1975 Harvard Honors Thesis:
Mysticism vs logic in Plato’s dialogues

I explored some related ideas in my 1975 honors thesis at Harvard. My notion was that some long standing questions about the
sources of mystical imagery in Plato could be resolved if you understood that concepts that we now comfortably replay were,
when ﬁrst conceived, powerful and numinous, entirely worthy of the exalted language that Plato bestowed on them.

Socratic dialogues, then and now...

A C


B D


Wow! OK. Got that.


The next stage is a kind of global consciousness

George had the idea that the next stage of human consciousness was global, in contrast to the development of individuality over
the last three thousand years.

The 70s were full of mystical
imaginings about this future
state

He wasn’t alone. Teilhard de Chardin and many others also speculated about a future global mind. Chardin called it “the
noosphere”

The Harmonic Convergence

And this kind of thing persisted well into the 80s. I imagine many of you remember the so-called Harmonic Convergence of
1987 that was supposed to usher in a new age of shared consciousness.

New age mumbo-jumbo?


2003

Fast forward to 2003.

Paradigm Shift: A Change in World
View That Calls Everything You Know
Into Question

I was giving talks about the implications of the web for the future of the software
industry.

Killer Apps of the Internet

I pointed out that the “killer apps” of the internet were all information
applications.

Not Just Software: "Infoware"
• Editorial content as part of the user
interface
• Users help to build the product
• The product changes every day
• The Internet, not the PC, is the
platform

The internet was the
platform.

Software as Service
Von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk

But perhaps most importantly, in contrast to the previous generations of software, people are still inside the application. Story of Jeff Friedl and regular
expressions for Yahoo Finance! I used the image of von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk to illustrate this idea. For those of you who don’t know this story,
in 1770, Ludwig von Kempelen introduced what purported to be a chess playing automaton. In fact, it was a hoax, because a human chess player was
hidden inside.

42
By 2004, my colleague Dale Dougherty had come up with a new name for this new era in the software industry. He called it Web 2.0, to signify the second
coming of the web after the dotcom bust. I told a big story about this, and what distinguished the companies that survived the bust from those that had
failed. The heart of my idea was

Using the Internet as a Platform

43
those that survived were using the internet as a
platform

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

44
for harnessing collective
intelligence.

So, maybe there was something to
that 70’s vision after all...

But it happened through technology instead of through some kind of mystical union.

So let’s go back to the beginning, and think about what collective intelligence is, and how our mechanisms for achieving it have
evolved.

“time-binding”

Alfred Korzybski had a wonderful concept that we can start with. He described language, perhaps the greatest and most
important of all human inventions, as “time binding” - a way of taking something out of the here and now, packaging it up and
passing it down through time and space.

You can look at the evolution of human
consciousness as the evolution of our ability to
transfer ideas and information from mind to mind


Spoken language


Written language


Mass media


The internet


But what’s different now is the way that electronic media speeds up that process. Using twitter, we can instantly learn about
trending topics around the world, and share in the responses of others. Hashtags in particular are a great example of a principle
that Danny Hillis once articulated.

“global consciousness is
that thing responsible for
deciding that pots
containing decaffeinated
coffee should be orange”

– Danny Hillis (via Jeff Bezos)

– http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/03/16/etech_3.html


At our Emerging Technology Conference in 2005, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recounted a conversation he’d had with computer
scientist Danny Hillis, in which Danny said [quote above]. Now this is nothing new. Speech, the written word, printed books and
newspapers, the telephone, radio and television are all technologies for passing knowledge from mind to mind.

We are all Khaled Said

This new real time mind-sharing capability can be used to organize large numbers of people for political purposes, as we saw in
last year’s uprisings in the Middle East.

Technology-enabled cooperation can be very simple, as with a wiki. Here’s for example, is the initial wikipedia page for the
great earthquake that hit Japan last year.

Within a short time, through thousands of edits by thousands of interested individuals, it turned into a full-featured
encyclopedic account of the earthquake and its aftermath. Let’s watch that in action.

“Wikipedia is not an
encyclopedia. It is a
virtual city, a city whose
main export to the world
is its encyclopedia
articles, but with an
internal life of its own.”

Michael Nielsen

But this technology of collective action and man-machine collaboration can be used for immense social good. For example, after
the devastating earthquake in Haiti last year

Mission 4636

After the Haiti earthquake a whole set of new tools for cooperation were deployed to coordinate the activities of volunteers. For
example, the Ushahidi crowd-reporting platform was used to report people in need of rescue via SMS to a special shortcode, the
collaborative OpenStreetMap project was used to quickly map shanty towns so that rescuers could be sent to the right location,
and crowd work platforms like Crowdﬂower, SamaSource and Amazon Mechanical Turk were used to translate reports from
Haitian Creole into English via volunteers in Haitian diaspora communities thousands of miles away. These applications show a
man-machine symbiosis including smartphone-wielding humans as sensors, remote processors (translators), and as augmented
actors, guided to the locations where they were needed, and told where to dig.

The Google Autonomous Vehicle

Collective intelligence shows up in unexpected places, such as the Google autonomous vehicle. This car is thought-provoking
on a number of levels.

2005: Seven Miles in Seven Hours

You see, back in 2005, the car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge went seven miles in seven hours.

2011: Hundreds of thousands of miles in ordinary traffic

Yet only six years later, Google announced a robotic car that has driven over a hundred thousand miles in ordinary traffic.

Artificial Intelligence?

“the science and engineering
of making intelligent machines”
-John McCarthy, 1956

Was this a triumph of artiﬁcial intelligence, like IBM’s Watson beating human Jeopardy champions?

“We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more
data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google

It was surely that. But there’s another important factor that is easy to overlook. Google’s former chief scientist, Peter Norvig,
says that the algorithms aren’t any better. Google just has more data. What kind of data?

AI plus the recorded memory of augmented humans

It turns out that the autonomous vehicle is made possible by Google Streetview. Google had human drivers drive all those streets
in cars that were taking pictures, and making very precise measurements of distances to everything. The autonomous vehicle is
actually remembering the route that was driven by human drivers at some previous time. That “memory”, as recorded by the
car’s electronic sensors, is stored in the cloud, and helps guide the car. As Peter pointed out to me, “picking a traffic light out of
the ﬁeld of view of a video camera is a hard AI problem. Figuring out if it’s red or green when you already know it’s there is
trivial.”

The global brain is us,
connected and augmented

So, in a surprising way, the Google Autonomous Vehicle is another unexpected example of Harnessing Collective Intelligence.
It’s another miracle of computer-mediated human cooperation!. This is a thread that runs through all the great inventions of
the web, from Google itself, Wikipedia, social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are all technologies for harvesting and
coordinating the products of thousands or even millions of minds, increasingly in close to real-time.

Man-Computer Symbiosis

“The hope is that, in not too many years, human
brains and computing machines will be coupled
together very tightly, and that the resulting
partnership will think as no human brain has ever
thought and process data in a way not approached by
the information-handling machines we know today.”

– Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on
Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. Eprint

JCR Licklider, the legendary DARPA program manager who funded the original development of TCP/IP, wrote about this idea in
his 1960 paper entitled Man-Computer Symbiosis. He wrote:

A few key assertions
§ We are building a network-mediated global mind
§ It is us, connected and augmented

The google vehicle is only the latest of a long series of developments that show how we are augmenting ourselves and
connecting ourselves into something bigger. We are building a network-mediated global mind. It is not the “skynet” of the
Terminator movies. It is us, augmented

This picture is a routing map of the internet. It’s striking how much it looks like a map of the synapses in a human brain. It’s
nowhere near as dense yet, but the imagery is suggestive. But there’s a lot more here than just imagery. The global brain is a
human-computer symbiosis.

Feedback Loops

“Half the money I spend
on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don't know
which half.”

- John Wanamaker
(1838-1922)

That leads me to the whole topic of feedback loops. It isn’t just that this information is going mind to mind. We are increasingly
taking this information and creating electronic feedback loops, which might include humans in different ways. Increasingly,
technology is solving what we advertisers call “the Wanamaker problem” after 19th century department store magnate John
Wanamaker, who said [quote above] What Google did with pay-per-click advertising was to solve the Wanamaker problem, by
building a business model that only charged advertisers when consumers clicked on their ads, and harnessing collective
intelligence to predict which of those ads would be most likely be clicked on.

We’re now seeing this same idea spread to other areas of the economy. For example, these kinds of feedback loops enabled by
data are part of what the US government is trying to do in healthcare with Accountable Care Organizations.

“Only 1% of healthcare spend now goes to diagnosis.
We need to shift from the idea that you do diagnosis
at the start, followed by treatment, to a cycle of
diagnosis, treatment, diagnosis...as we explore what
works.”
-Pascale Witz, GE Medical Diagnostics

Personalized medicine requires new kinds of diagnostic feedback loops. Pascale Witz of GE Medical Diagnostics explained how

In the city of San Francisco, you’re seeing something similar, where all the parking meters are equipped with sensors, and
pricing will ultimately vary by time of day, and ultimately by demand. I’m calling these systems of “algorithmic regulation” -
they regulate in the same way our body regulates itself, autonomically and unconsciously. All of the technology “smart city”
initiatives need to be seen as ways of instrumenting not just the physical city but the social life of the humans who live in it.

The idea of the social life of the city as captured by technology becomes clear in this visualization done by Wired Magazine of 24
hours of 311 calls from the city of New York, showing what issues citizens are contacting their government about. This same
kind of ebb and ﬂow comes increasingly from the data exhaust from our devices.

§ sensable city/sense networks/sandy pentland

Projects like MIT’s Senseable City Lab are exploring how the data exhaust from millions of network-connected citizens can be
used to shape the patterns of cities. We will see more of this in future. It’s an important frontier of man-machine colaboration

This shift requires new competencies of companies and governments. The ﬁeld has increasingly come to be called “Data
Science” - extracting meaning and services from data - and as you can see, the set of skills that make up this job description are
in high demand according to LinkedIn. They are literally going asymptotic.

The importance of real-time

“Would you be willing to cross
the street with information that
was five minutes old?”
-Jeff Jonas


Intelligence Augmentation
“The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it
snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts,
in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the
brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental
pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he
certainly ought to be able to learn from it. ... One cannot hope thus to equal
the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but
it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence
and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized
private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex"
will do.”
– Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945

I want to turn to another aspect of man-machine symbiosis, this time in terms of information retrieval. In 1945, Vannevar Bush
wrote a famous and inﬂuential article called “As We May Think” that in many ways preﬁgured the ideas of the World Wide Web.

A device that knows
where I am better than I
do, a knowing assistant
telling me where to go
and how to get there.

The current state of the art of this kind of near-miraculous information retrieval can be seen in today’s smartphones. For
example, a smartphone equipped with mapping software knows exactly where you are. But note that the information being
retrieved is generated by human beings, often through collective activity.

Returning to IBM’s Watson, we see that it too is a product of man-machine symbiosis. After all, the documents that it “reads” to
perform its feats of apparent intelligence are human documents. In the three seconds it has to come up with a Jeopardy
question, it has time to read and process the equivalent of 200 million pages. And now that speed of information retrieval is
being used for more than parlor tricks, as IBM works to train Watson to act as an assistant in healthcare. The average physician
is able to read the latest research in his ﬁeld perhaps ﬁve hours a week; Watson’s ability to read everything and suggest
potentially relevant answers makes it an ideal assistant. “Watson makes suggestions, not decisions,” says IBM’s Dr. Randy Kohn.

This is the real opportunity for new information retrieval UIs like Google’s Project Glass - in specialized settings where access to
a computer can be seen as a powerful kind of human augmentation. I expect it to be used in professional settings before it
becomes popular as a consumer device. (In social settings, it will require even more profound resets of behavior than the
“always-on” mobile phone.)

We can already see signs of this in the Apple Store. If you squint a little, you can see the Apple Store clerk as a cyborg. Where
most stores (at least in America) have used technology to eliminate salespeople, Apple has used it to augment them. Each store
is ﬂooded with smartphone-wielding salespeople who are able to help customers with everything from technical questions to
purchase and checkout. Walgreens is experimenting with a similar approach in the pharmacy, and US CTO Todd Park foresees a
future in which health workers will be part of a feedback loop including sensors to track patient data coupled with systems that
alert them when a patient needs to be checked up on. The augmented home health worker will allow relatively unskilled workers
to be empowered with the much deeper knowledge held in the cloud.

What does the economy of the
future look like?

This leads me to an interesting question. What does the economy of the future look like?

In their book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make the case that jobs aren’t coming back, as
even low-cost outsourced jobs are being automated. Imagine a future of Google automated vehicles, and you can see new
classes of people out of work - taxi drivers, truck drivers, etc. This is being replicated across huge swaths of the economy.

§ Income inequality

Yet as Nick Hanauer pointed out in his TEDU talk earlier this year, the economy depends on wide income distribution. Cost
cutting via robotics may be a capitalist’s wet dream, but that system ultimately breaks down.“Customers create jobs!” Nick says.
Without people who have enough money to buy a product or service, no company can succeed, no matter how much capital it
raises or how brilliant the ideas of its entrepreneurial developers.

“the Adhocracy”

In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow posits a future in which nanotechnology provides prosperity for all, and
the ﬁnancial economy has been replaced by an “attention economy.” I think that’s fairly utopian, but there’s also a lot of truth in
it. We *are* heading towards an attention economy. You can already see signs of it on Kickstarter and YouTube.

Kickstarter is a great alpha release of Cory’s attention economy, and a giant hack for mapping it onto the ﬁnancial economy:
“Do you care enough about my project to fund it? Can you help me bring it into reality?”

There are also some really interesting lessons from YouTube, which I think may actually be closer to coming up to a native
business model for social media and the attention economy than Facebook or Twitter.

A huge amount of what happens on YouTube is what Yochai Benkler calls “peer production.”

For example, my three year-old grandson loves to watch Thomas the Tank Engine train crash videos made by other kids.
This one has nearly 24 million views. Not bad for an amateur production.

So I went down to Vidcon, which is the gathering place of the Youtube creator community, and it was like going back to the early
days of the Beatles! Literally thousands of screaming kids as various YouTube stars came out on stage! The attention economy
is live and well on YouTube.

Here’s the line of screaming fans waiting to get autographs from 20-something British YouTube star Charlie McDonnell.

Vidcon was crawling with agents who used to be focused purely on Hollywood talent.

But what’s really important and interesting is the business model. You may not know that when a viral video gets uploaded
that uses copyrighted music, instead of taking it down, Google runs ads against it, and forwards the revenue to the
music publisher. You can see the result of the ContentID match on the lower right.

What blew my mind though is that I heard one story about a major pop star who makes more money on YouTube
than on iTunes, and more than half of that comes from “unofficial” videos that use her music as a soundtrack,
rather than from her own official tracks.

The Clothesline Paradox

If you put your clothes in
the dryer, the energy you
use is measured and
counted, but if you hang
them on the clothesline to
be dried by the sun, the
energy saved disappears
from our accounting!

I refer to these kind of sharing economies as “clothesline paradox economies.” I remembered this great piece about alternative
energy that I read back in 1975 in
The CoEvolution Quarterly, Stewart Brand’s successor to The Whole Earth Catalog. It’s called The Clothesline Paradox,
and it made the point that ... It struck me that open source is a lot like sunshine. It disappears from our economic
accounting.

But in fact, these sharing economies produce value that crops out in unexpected ways.

Lisa Gansky’s site The Mesh documents almost 7000 companies exploring variants of the sharing economy.

I think that one of the big near-term future areas for economic exploration and thinking is going to be about peer production
and its interaction with the ﬁnancial economy. Maybe eventually we’ll transition over to the full attention economy as forecast in
Cory Doctorow’s book, but that’s further out than I can see.

None of us can really predict the future. We can just see things in the present that others haven’t noticed yet, that tell us
something about how the future is unfolding.

And the economics isn’t really the point. I recently met Rodney Mullen, one of the fathers
of street skating. He has this wonderful TEDx talk in which he talks about the skating community, and how its members
give to each other.

He talks about how fame and money lose their allure. He quotes Richard Feynman saying
"The Nobel Prize is the tombstone of all great work," and relates it to his own career as a skater,
having won all possible awards, built a successful business. He goes on to say... [next slide]

"there's an intrinsic value to creating something for
the sake of creating it…

"there is this beauty in dropping it into a community
of your own making and seeing it dispersed and
seeing younger talent take it to levels you could never
imagine, because that lives on"

-Rodney Mullen


“Reality is an activity of the most
august imagination”
- Wallace Stevens

Remember what I said earlier?

Birth of the Global Mind

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