Google Consciousness

Israel LOVES Iran gaining momentum.

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 18:17:10 +0100

video platform video management video solutions video player

Social media resolving disputes between Israel and Iran.

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:47:02 +0000

In our TEDx talk, we mention that using social media to replace government would begin to happen sooner than expected and this would be more likely to lead to ‘win-win’ outcomes to any citizen choosing to use it. We mention Wikipedia as an example of Israel and Palestinian citizens using social media to effectively come to complete agreements.

In 2012, we are witnessing this process emerge in the current events between Iran and Israel.

While politicians in Israel and Iran are playing the muscle flexing and deception game with each other - social media is evolving, case in point, to where citizens are ignoring the governments and figuring out solutions for peace instead.

Israel to Iran, we love you. Israel from Iran, we love you back.

TED and the CITY: A wiki to organize our cities

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:55:17 +0000

The Atlantic has a great overview of the winner of the 2012 TED Prize award - City 2.0. City 2.0 aims to create a large wiki to organize innovative ideas about how we can structure and administer robust and healthy growth to expand our best chance for survival, our cities.

LONG BEACH – It’s never long at the annual TED conference before attendees feel awash in mind-bending, technology-enabled ideas. This year, it was the theory that there are multiple universes, a robotic drone that is an exact replica of a hummingbird, and a demonstration of the wisdom of the crowd (a request for online guesses from the 5,000-plus attendees of the weight of an ox brought onstage, the average of which was 1,793 pounds. The beast’s weight: 1,795 lbs.).

So it was fitting that the official announcement of the TED Prize 2012, The City 2.0, revealed a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques. The ambitious goal is to create a clearinghouse for tools and methodologies and best practices to reshape cities around the world.

“This has been designed as a big collaborative process – not us deciding who’s in and who’s out,” said TED curator Chris Anderson, who described the new platform, at this website, as a “big open tent” to collect and share successes, resources, and insights.*

What I found extremely interesting is using the wiki as the mainframe with which to engage this process. As many of you know, last year in our TEDx talk we mentioned that using wiki like structures we can create greater forms of governance that will replace government as we know it today. We also predicted that as outlandish as the idea may seem, it would probably happen much quicker than we think as well as being much easier to obtain.

It’s great to see ideas like this spread, especially through the TED framework which gives them a valuable credibility.

Google Consciousness spreading...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:09:29 +0000

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Global Brain (but were afraid to ask)

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Someone recently put up a great Knol on Collective Intelligence, Global Brain, Human Sentient Network, etc etc etc or whatever we choose to call it.

It lays out pretty clearly the various points of view that suggest a collective intelligence system, of which humanity may play a significant, but not exclusive, role.

Read it here.

Hackers from Europe building new internet in space

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:51:59 +0000

This is a novel approach to the coming SOPA ruling - a group of hackers from Germany have determined that well organized individuals now have the technology and capability of the US Space program in the 60’s. Roughly, this means that a user generated and controlled internet could easily be installed in space.

Popsci today says “The Hackerspace Global Grid was borne out of a call to action at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, where hackers of all stripes gather to mull the issues of the day as they relate to their craft. Hacker activist Nick Farr—motivated by legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S.—called on the community to contribute to a project that would remove the power of censorship from governments and corporations by creating an uncensored Internet in the free frontier of space.”

Occupy protestors creating new social network

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:10:54 +0000

Wired magazine is running a piece about a handful of Occupy Wall Street protestors who have begun to create a new social network. Personally I believe this is more than likely to be the beginning of the first ‘digital’ governance system than many of the ‘collective’ intelligence systems are starting to emerge.

Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson.

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” he said.

The same thinking applies to Twitter and other social networks — and the reasoning became clear last week, when a Massachusetts district attorney subpoenaed Twitter for information about the account @OccupyBoston and other accounts connected to the Boston movement. (To its credit, Twitter has a policy of giving users the opportunity to contest such orders when possible.)

In the FGA system, each group has a discussion on what information to push to their home page, such as a description of an event, a blog post or minutes from a meeting. “In the same way that, when you look at Reddit, you know that the articles on top are the most upvoted, the user could know that posts appearing on a front page represent the concerted agreement of the group,” said Boyer.

The activist coders also want to be able to push and pull info to and from the rest of the movement. The idea is that they can have disparate systems that label info with shared tags that will, some day, make it possible to enter a search on any one site and pull precise results from around the world.

Ed Knutson’s job is to get those sites talking to each other, even though the content may be in different languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) and created with different content management systems, or CMSs, such as Drupal or Wordpress. The Global Square network will connect not through those systems but through “semantic Web” standards designed to link up disparate technologies.

Since we introduced the concept of social media replacing government in April of 2010 under the meme ‘Google Consciousness’, we are reporting evidence of this emerging system of organization, which will, as predicted in our TED talk, happen much sooner and be much easier than anyone expected.

I am an Egyptian protestor - we are now mobilizing and protesting against the military. Ask me anything

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:44:20 +0000

I am an Egyptian protestor - we are now mobilizing and protesting against the military. Ask me anything:

I’m writing this post from Liberation Square, the heart and center of the Egyptian revolution.

If you dont know it already we’re rising against military ruling in the same way we have risen against Mubarak’s regime, we’ve taken our protests to the streets in main cities since the dawn of the 19th of November, I’ve been away from my home for about 28 hours now.

We’ve been hit extensively with rubber bullets and tear gas. Also some explosives that explode mid-air spreading thousands of metallic particles that pop protesters’ eyes and burns a lot on impact, I dont know why the police keep using the same old mentality that we’re supposed to have changed.

The sole purpose of this Egyptian rise is to end the military ruling and recognize the army as a vital structure of our country but not above the law.

Edit: You can check my past AMAs since the rise of the Egyptian revolution here and here

I’m open to any questions you might have, if I dont answer for a while I’ll be probably heading for an indoor shelter away from all this suffocating tear gas. AMA

Edit: I’ll be heading to some place to charge my laptop and cellphone and probably get some medical supplies to help those who are injured, I’ll be back as soon as I can.

EDIT: (5pm Cairo time) I have to go now the army is officially attacking protesters here I cant be sure when I’ll be back

Edit: (5:30pm Cairo time) The military police violently cleared liberation square, torching all cars and motorcycles in the vicinity, I’m wounded in my neck and knee by some of those metallic explosives, it’s not so bad though, I’m going home to shower and regain strength and go back in a couple of hours. I wont be able to answer any questions for a couple of hours, wish us luck.

Ask on REDDIT.

Using the web to re-organize government as a meme continues to gain momentum.

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:51:00 +0000

In our talk “Google Consciousness”, we use the metaphor #googcon as a symbol of collective intelligence re-organizing society using nothing more complex than available social media tools such as wiki’s, Google labs and feeds such as Twitter and Facebook.

This idea appears to be picking up more and more steam, partly due to strong feelings in the Occupy Wallstreet movement. Personally, I believe this idea will begin to achieve critical mass by this time next year.

This image was found on Twitter by user @Usethisidea to @yourAnonNews.

"Welcome to Collective Intelligence. We are the 100%."

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:03:43 +0000

“Welcome to Collective Intelligence. We are the 100%.”

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REDDIT goes viral with Internet Democracy 2.0

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:56:49 +0000

By Rome Viharo for Google Consciousness

Back in April, when Maf Lewis and I were giving our TEDx talk on Google Consciousness - we playfully mentioned the possibilities of ‘Reddit Consciousness’ and suggested that these sorts of phenomenon would emerge to produce systems of social administration that would eventually replace government.

A few days ago on Reddit, user ‘Humans, Inc’ posted a thread that sat at the top of Reddit for days, title “Reddit can enable “occupy” movements to permanently shift power from corporations to the people and move the world into a new era”

Offering to provide financial support to build such an engine, redditors flooded Humans, Inc with suggestions and helpful advice on moving forward.

A few years ago, such a suggestion would have been laughed or trolled off the internet, now it is a serious contender for problem solving.

As someone who has worked on creating such an ‘elegant discussion algorithm’ for almost 9 years now, I look at this as very exciting change and confirmation that the emergence of “Google Consciousness”, our metaphor for collective intelligence restructuring the world, is closer than many of us think or are prepared for.

Birth of the global mind - Tim O'Reilly

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:21:13 +0100

The web is a perfect example of what engineer and early computer scientist Vannevar Bush called “intelligence augmentation” by computers, in his 1945 article “As We May Think” in The Atlantic. He described a future in which human ability to follow an associative knowledge trail would be enabled by a device he called “the memex”. This would improve on human memory in the precision of its recall. Google is today’s ultimate memex.

Read more

TED talk: Hire the Hackers, meet Anonymous

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:38:06 +0100

Saudi Arabia’s “Khaled” through the lens of...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:31:01 +0100

Saudi Arabia’s “Khaled” through the lens of Revolution 2.0

Are spirits just metaphors for memes or are memes just metaphors...

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 17:31:01 +0100

Are spirits just metaphors for memes or are memes just metaphors for spirits?

Computer learns language by playing games

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:58:52 +0100

Computer learns language by playing games:

By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision.

Cracking the Code of the Mind – Neurons Connected to Computers to Decipher Neuronal Circuits’ Codes | Neuroscience News

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:57:20 +0100

Cracking the Code of the Mind – Neurons Connected to Computers to Decipher Neuronal Circuits’ Codes | Neuroscience News:

TAU team connects neurons to computers to decipher the enigmatic code of neuronal circuits

Google Consciousness Explained.

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:02:00 +0100

By Rome Viharo for Google Consciousness

Daniel Dennett’s model of consciousness in his landmark book “Consciousness Explained” deconstructs the ‘I’ experience down to ‘homunculi’ competing in the brain, each one a bit more stupid than the next until you get a ‘neuron’. That neuron he likens to a machine - but only in the sense that he wishes not to declare that there is *wonder tissue* that somehow has a magical property, but a machine that flows information. Medium, or ‘meat’ is irrelevant. Any simulation of the process should produce consciousness.

Ironically enough, the way he describes how this competition happens amongst the homunculi - this process ‘flow’ in the brain is remarkably identical to how you could map search, SEO and PageRank on Google. In addition, many of his descriptions and metaphors themselves also describe things like ‘wikis’ or ‘stories with no original author’. ’Consciousness Explained’ was published in 1991 - before social media and search and wikis.

I don’t imagine the internet formed itself off of the architecture of ‘Consciousness Explained’ - but is the similarity just an irony or can we begin to consider something like Google becoming conscious?

Let’s first define what we mean by ‘Google Consciousness’. Do we mean that Google’s servers are potentially sentient?

No, that is not what we are saying (but we are neither refuting that possibility, it’s just not what we are suggesting)

In the meme “Google Consciousness” - we could say that if each neuron is a machine, then likewise each computer or website in the world can function like a neuron. Yet each of these neurons is also connected to one of us, a ‘meta neuron’ in comparison that is also an intrinsic agent of the ‘internet’. The internet is the ever expanding exchange of information between humans and machines.

We use the machines to display our ideas, many of them which naturally are also engaged in a competition for truth values. Our content is used to communicate various levels of information meaning (semantics), only with which the human agents can experience or determine while we assume the machines cannot.

Other human agents then create a competition which we understand as ‘search’, a game where the meanings we are sharing to each other begin to compete for another agents attention. This competition then arranges how we access information, how we organize information in the network of machines which in turn may very well model how our brains either enter into a conscious state (Dennet) or access consciousness (dualism). If Dennet is mistaken and not describing consciousness, we can all at least agree that he is describing the brain. If he is mistaken and our consciousness somehow is dualistic in nature, then *everything* is suspect of having consciousness and the materialistic models regarding what determines consciousness are irrelevant.

In 2011 the reorganization of our information semantics via our machines is now rearranging our very human behaviors, away from the keyboard. It is allowing us to deconstruct previously held meanings that were considered true to become exposed as false and misleading. The rearrangement of truth values are causing many agents to re-organize society according to the truth values of the exchange of information between Agents and Machines.

#Googcon is a metaphor for this process, it is essentially based on the idea that we can *consider* the implications of a sentient web or collective intelligence in some sense.

It doesn’t matter in what way. If a computer server became conscious, or the entire network of human agents and machine becomes conscious+ - both would represent the same fundamental changes in society.

We suggest that the #nextsteps of this manifestation of collective intelligence will be how we govern ourselves. Social media will eventually replace the sluggish and outdated democratic models of governorship. We believe that it is more likely that it will produce a more refined way of administering ourselves and bring us closer to win win solutions for all participants.

Collectively, we are becoming more intelligent and more conscious, if by conscious we can mean *aware*.

Just like our own human natures - we are both conscious in some sense, and unconscious in many others. We are also comprised of ‘unconscious machines’ that participate in some sense with our own individual consciousness.

So we could also say with Google Consciousness, collective intelligence. Part of collective intelligence is indeed extremely conscious because each of us is extremely conscious. Yet none of us as individuals controls the internet, the process, the flow, the internet itself is run by unconscious machines in combination with a collection of conscious agents. Just like us as individuals.

And these conscious agents in turn maybe run by the very same process that the unconscious machines are… an algorithm something like Google search.

To clarify: In materialism Google’s algorithm and the collection of behaviors it governs both human and machine may be a contender for consciousness. If dualism as a model of consciousness is true, then Google could be considered conscious anyway since everything could have consciousness.

That the Google algorithm also ironically enough provides a description to how the Ayahuasceros of the Peruvian Upper Amazon claim to access plant consciousness is an entirely other rabbit hole. We highlight this in the talk to describe the distinctions between a dualistic model of consciousness and a materialistic model of consciousness.

The ultimate irony is that both of these models of consciousness which completely contradict one another, share a metaphor in common - Google.

Scientific American: A contest to determine machine consciousness

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:26:01 +0100

The authors define consciousness here as an ability to understand whether a photograph depicts an image that makes sense based on knowledge of the world that most people share—general knowledge that no present-day computer is capable of storing and processing in the way people do. A person, for instance, knows that a keyboard belongs in front of a computer screen, whereas a potted plant in that spot does not.

Read more

Thanks to @THEJMVOGT

Now that’s how to viral market a revolution

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:16:00 +0100

Now that’s how to viral market a revolution