Commentary
on Chapter Fourteen of “Weaving the Web”
The idea of human minds connected through the Internet and collectively becoming a greater consciousness, or global brain, might be far-fetched but is still fascinating. That is why I particularly enjoyed this excerpt. I actually preferred it to the “Global Brain” excerpt, whose hypothesis I believe is too far-fetched.
Based on the reading, let me speculate a little bit about how this larger consciousness might emerge. Suppose the web could actually become an expansion of your mind. That is, it would actively help you on some processes that right now happen in your brain. Some current primitive examples of this are smart spam blockers (such as Mozilla 1.3) that learn from your previous behavior what messages you will most likely consider spam and sends new ones to a junk mail folder. Other examples are search agents that make informed guesses of what you may be looking for and make suggestions (Amazon does this, based on previous queries or purchases).
Suppose these programs could become even smarter “agents”, have better communication with you through improved user interfaces and take further actions in the Internet on your behalf. Then they would be, in a way, expansions of your mind. Further down the line, suppose that there are multiple agents in cyberspace, all being extensions of other people’s minds. And now, that they start to interact. They might, for example, find people that have a common interest and make a link, or ignore people that have nothing to do with you. What if these agents were also capable of helping you brainstorm about a project you have at hand? There are, already, a variety of software packages designed to help a person’s creativity and brainstorming process, but they do not use the Internet yet. If these agents were out there on cyberspace interacting with others working on the same or similar projects, there would be an environment where links or connections between ideas and concepts are being done out of your mind and among multiple mind extensions. Would these connections be thoughts of a global brain?
Since we might be still a long way from seeing these smart programs connecting minds with cyberspace and minds with minds in a fluid way, I would like to come up with some speculations on what the current state of this global brain is, inspired on the article “Postcards From Planet Google” by Lee Jennifer (New York Times, Nov. 28, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28goog.html).
Engineers at Google have developed several interesting tools that monitor the queries they receive and their origin by IP address (an IP address is a unique number that identifies each computer or device on the Internet; the geographic location can be approximated based on it). One of their tools, Live Query, displays some of the queries that are being done right now worldwide. An example in the article goes “animación, japonese, Harry Potter, pensées et poèmes, ...”. Live Query unfortunately is not publicly available through the web, but only at their facilities. Now, let us suppose that the current Internet and its users are a primitive form of a global brain. Live Query’s results would then be what the global brain is thinking about right now; only up to a certain point, though, since it only reflects people that are looking for something. If, for example, some major event happens and people turn to Google to search more information on it, most of the global brain would be thinking about this event.
Even though Live Query is not publicly available, some other amusing information is. For example, Google Zeitgeist (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html) keeps track of the most popular searches across time, geography of categories. As an example, one of the most popular searches last week was “Elizabeth Smart”, the abducted girl who was rescued. This would mean then, that one of the things in which the global brain spent a considerable amount of time thinking about last week was Elizabeth Smart. It can also show trends across the globe: for example a graph available at (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2002.html) shows when were “Las Ketchup”, a Spanish pop group, trendy in different countries. If we make again the global brain analogy, this would be like a person that has an idea lingering around until it settles or is forgotten.
Finally, there is a website called Googlism at http://www.googlism.com/ that lets you find out what the global brain thinks of you. This website is not maintained by Google, but uses its data. When you type your name into it, it will provide you with bits and pieces of data that Google has picked about your name. This information would be analogous to what the global brain thinks about who you are.
It is impossible for now to know if when carrying out these exercises we are guessing in the right direction, or, in a very foolish way. But it is indeed amusing.