First, there have already been some experiments in which people steer a
cursor on a computer screen simply by thinking about it: their brain waves
associated with particular thoughts (such as "up", "down", "left" or
"right") are registered by sensors and interpreted by neural network
software, which passes its interpretation on to the computer interface in
the form of a command, which is then executed. If such direct brain-computer
interfaces would become more sophisticated, it really would suffice that you
just think about your dog licking mirrors to see the documents explaining
that behavior pop-up on your screen.
Second, the search process itself should not require you to select a number
of search engines in different places of the Web. The new technology of net
"agents" is based on the idea that you would formulate your problem or
question, and that that request would itself travel over the Web, collecting
information in different places, and send you back the result once it has
explored all promising avenues. The software agent, a small message or
script embodying a description of the things you want to know, a list of
provisional results, and an address where it can reach you to send back the
final solution, would play the role of an "external thought". Your thought
would initially form in your own brain, then be translated automatically via
a neural interface to an agent or thought in the external brain, continue
its development by spreading activation, and come back to your own brain in
a much enriched form. With a good enough interface, there should not really
be a clear boundary between "internal" and "external" thought processes: the
one would flow over naturally and immediately into the other.
Integrating individuals into the Super-Brain
Interaction between internal and external brain does not always need to go
in the same direction. Just like the external brain can learn from your
pattern of browsing, it could also learn from you by directly asking you
questions. A smart web would continuously check the coherency and
completeness of the knowledge it contains. If it finds contradictions or
gaps it would try to situate the persons most likely to understand the issue
(most likely the authors or active users of a document), and direct their
attention to the problem. In many cases, an explicit formulation of the
problem will be sufficient for an expert to be able to quickly fill in the
gap, using implicit (associative) knowledge which was not as yet entered
clearly into the Web. Many "knowledge acquisition" and "knowledge
elicitation" techniques exist for stimulating experts to formulate their
intuitive knowledge in such a way that it can be implemented on a computer.
In that way, the Web would learn implicitly and explicitly from its users,
while the users would learn from the Web. Similarly, the web would mediate
between users exchanging information, answering each other's questions. In a
way, the brains of the users themselves would become nodes in the Web:
stores of knowledge directly linked to the rest of the Web which can be
consulted by other users or by the web itself.
Though individual people might refuse answering requests received through
the super-brain, no one would want to miss the opportunity to use the
unlimited knowledge and intelligence of the super-brain for answering one's
own questions. However, normally you cannot continuously receive a service
without giving anything in return. People will stop answering your requests
if you never answer theirs. Similarly, one could imagine that the
intelligent Web would be based on the simple condition that you can use it
only if you provide some knowledge in return.
In the end the different brains of users may become so strongly integrated
with the Web that the Web would literally become a "brain of brains": a
super-brain. Thoughts would run from one user via the Web to another user,
from there back to the Web, and so on. Thus, billions of thoughts would run
in parallel over the super-brain, creating ever more knowledge in the
process.
The Brain Metasystem
The creation of a super-brain is not sufficient for a metasystem
transition[10]: what we need is a higher level of control which somehow
steers and coordinates the actions of the level below (i.e. thinking within
the individual brains). To become a metasystem, thinking in the super-brain
must not be just quantitatively, but qualitatively, different from human
thinking. The continuous reorganization and improvement of the super-brain's
knowledge by analysing and synthesising knowledge from individuals, and
eliciting more knowledge from those individuals in order to fill gaps or
inconsistencies is a metalevel process: it not only uses existing,
individual knowledge but actively creates new knowledge, which is more fit
for tackling different problems. This controlled development of knowledge
requires a metamodel: a model of how new models are created and evolve. Such
a metamodel can be based on an analysis of the building blocks of knowledge,
of the mechanisms that combine and recombine building blocks to generate new
knowledge systems, and of a list of values or selection criteria, which
distinguish "good" or "fit" knowledge from "unfit" knowledge. (see my
research project on knowledge development[11]).
___________________________________
| Table of Contents[12] | Search[13] | Annotate[14] | Help[15] |
*** References from this document ***
[1] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/NUTSHELL.html
[2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COPYR.html
[3] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
[4] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUP-META.html
[5] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/.html
[6] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/*THINKING.html
[7] http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/
[8] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/*LEARNING.html
[9] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be:8080/STARTWEB.html
[10] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MST.html
[11] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/FHProject.html
[12] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html#SUPBRAIN
[13] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/index.ind
[14] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Hypercard.cgi$annotform?SUPBRAIN
[15] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/howweb.html
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen Systems Researcher
PO, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B -1050 Brussels, Belgium
Phone: +32-2-629 25 25; Fax: +32-2-629 24 89 (**new numbers!)
Email:fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be; URL: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html