From the webpage (under development):
The Global Brain can be defined as the distributed intelligence emerging from the planetary network of people and machines—as supported by the Internet. The Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded in January 2012 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to research this revolutionary phenomenon. The GBI grew out of the Global Brain Group, an international community of researchers founded in 1996.
MissionTim Berners-Lee’s breakthrough invention of the Web stems from a simple and easy way to link any kind of information, anywhere on Earth. Since then, the development of the web has been largely an erratic proliferation of mutually incompatibleWeb 2.0 technologies with no clear direction. This demands a new unified paradigm to facilitate their integration.
The Global Brain Institute intends to develop a theory of the global brain that would help us to understand and steer this on-going evolution towards ever-stronger interconnection between humans and machines. If successful, this would help us achieve a much higher level of distributed intelligence that would allow us to efficiently tackle global problems too complex for present approaches.
Objectives
- Develop a theory of the Global Brain that may offer us a long-term vision of where our information society is heading.
- Build a mathematical model and computer simulation of the structure and dynamics of the Global Brain.
- Survey the most important developments in society and ICT that are likely to impact on the evolution of the Global Brain.
- Compare these observations with the implications of the theory.
- Investigate how both observed and theorized developments may contribute to the main indicators of globally intelligent organization:
- education, democracy, freedom, peace, development, sustainability, well-being, etc.
- Disseminate our understanding of the Global Brain towards a wider public, so as to make people aware of this impending revolution
Our approach
We see people, machines and software systems as agents that communicate via a complex network of communication links. Problems, questions or opportunities define challenges that may incite these agents to act.
Challenges that cannot be fully resolved by a single agent are normally propagated to one or more other agents, along the links in the network. These agents contribute their own expertise to resolving the challenge, and if necessary propagate the challenge further, until it is fully resolved. Thus, the skills and knowledge of the different agents are pooled into a collective intelligence much more powerful than the one of its individual members.
The propagation of challenges across the global network is a complex, self-organizing process, similar to the “spreading activation” that characterizes thinking in the human brain. This process will typically change the network by reinforcing useful links, while weakening the others. Thus, the network learns or adapts to new challenges, becoming more intelligent in the process.
Sounds to me like there are going to be subject identity issues galore in a project such as this one.
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