I think both Bruce Buchanan's reaction above, and the previous reaction
from J. Weldon to which my first reply was addressed, are completely off
the mark with respect to my proposal. Both seem to think I am proposing
some grand technological project for which I need a lot of money to start
implementing it. My proposal was not a project or plan, i.e. something I
believe must be done, but a description of something I believe *is already
happening*. So, far from me any thoughts of convincing politicians or
others to pump huge amounts of money into building a prototype Super-Brain:
I see that Super-Brain taking form at this very instant, using the
resources and brain-power which presently exist in the academic,
governmental and commercial world.
This may be difficult to believe for people who are not experienced with
the most advanced tools of the Internet (WWW, knowbots, agents, semantic
indexing, etc.). Yet, I am convinced that once you would have experienced
the power of these tools, all this would seem much less like science
fiction and more like everyday reality. My own experience at the forefront
of these developments is that things which were science fiction 5 years are
now common. The growth, both qualitatively and quantitatively, of the
computer networks is staggering, and cannot be stopped. It may seem like a
lot of hype if all you know about Internet is how to use email, or how to
type in a few difficult to understand UNIX commands in a shell account via
modem, but things look very different with a graphical, high speed
interface. I am of course privileged to have a direct Internet connection
via the university, but so have hundreds of thousands of other people, and
the cost of that is coming down quickly.
My general impression is that very few people (if any at all) have a good
understanding of what is going on in the networks. The public and
politicians in particular have an almost complete lack of comprehension. So
don't expect any politicians to determine the future shape of the Internet.
In practice, all the new developments have arisen in a spontaneous manner,
with some researchers here adding some ideas to what some others had been
doing there, and so on, until a system appeared that nobody had predicted
or planned. The only safe prediction you can make is that everything will
change.
>Without adequate discussion
>such a scheme should hardly get off the ground, and will likely never pose
>practical questions with respect to implementation.
Much as I applaud discussion of such developments, I believe it is
ludicrous to suppose that without broad social discussion things will not
get off the ground. WWW is originally an initiative of one person (Tim
Berners-Lee) who convinced a few others at his institution (CERN) to set
something up. Others learned through the Internet about that initiative,
saw the power behind the idea and started applying it at their end of the
line. Once a treshold was reached where enough people were using the WWW
protocols, the systems became self-feeding, more users attracting even more
users, and it took off as a rocket, engulfing the whole Internet within the
period of a year. No politicians were involved at any stage, and the
discussion was limited to a few technically minded volunteers who agreed
about standards for extending the protocols. At present, you hardly can
open a magazine without seeing somewhere a photo of a computer screen
showing a WWW document, and all politician who want to appear up-to-date
will mention the development of Internet and WWW as a great good.
>At any rate, if there is genuine interest in this kind of technological
>advance, are such factors as policies and values not worth serious
>consideration?
Yes, they very much are. My point was that *even without explicit policies*
these developments will take place, and much faster than you would expect.
The value problem is very much at the heart of my vision of the
super-brain. I will discuss that problem in a later mail, as it is too
complex to expound here.
The societal impact at any rate will be enormous, but I don't believe it
can be in any way controlled by politicians. In order to control some
development, you first need to understand it and have some idea of where it
might be heading. Nobody has such understanding at the moment, and
politicians perhaps least of all.
If that understanding is to come from somewhere, it will be from us,
cyberneticians, who try to integrate a grasp of basic principles with
practical use of the newest communication technologies. It was with that in
mind, that I wanted to initiate a debate on PRNCYB-L, starting from my
"from WWW to super-brain" proposal. I would be interested to hear the
opinion of some people who are experienced with WWW and related
technologies.
_______________________________________________________________________
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