II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earth Learns: Interactive Person/Planet, Self-Organizing, Daily Collaboratiions

Last, Cadell. Global Commons in the Global Brain. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 114/1, 2017. In this special issue, a Free University of Brussels, Global Brain Institute, researcher offers an insightful prediction. Rather than the touted technological singularity as machines take over, a more likely occasion could be the beneficial fruition of a worldwide cerebral faculty. Prime aspects and movers are an intentional human facilitation, which if properly situated could provide an integral, Earthwise knowledge we need to solve intractable problems. A Global Brain Singularity will involve the Internet as a universal coordination medium, provide distributed, open-ended superintelligence, foster societal self-organization towards planetary systems, and ultimately facilitate our self-becoming. In January 2017, a world bent on divisive, fanatical planetcide could immensely benefit from these imaginative scholarly visions.

The next decade could be characterized by large-scale labour disruption and further acceleration of income and wealth inequality due to the widespread introduction of general-purpose robotics, machine-learning software/artificial intelligence (AI) and their various interconnections within the emerging infrastructure of the Internet of Things. In this paper I argue that such technological changes and their socioeconomic consequences signal the emergence of a global metasystem (i.e. control organization beyond markets and nation-states). Consequently, this paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework to aid an international political transition towards a post-capitalist, post-nation state global world. This conceptual framework is grounded within the Global Brain, which describes a planetary organizational structure founded on distributed and open-ended intelligence. The socioeconomic theory of the Commons means distributed modes of organization founded upon principles of democratic management and open access. (Abstract edits)

Laxton, Rita. The World Wide Web as Neural Net. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 64/1, 2000. There are deep parallels between the Internet and a brain as they both cogitate by a redundant pattern matching of perception and experience.

The primary hypothesis is that it can be shown that the World Wide Web’s birth, growth and knowledge acquisition patterns are remarkably similar to those of the human brain. (55)

Lenartowicz, Marta. Creatures of the Semiosphere. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 114/1, 2017. In a Global Brain issue which she co-edits, this is a paper by the Free University of Brussels systems sociologist with a recent doctorate in pragmatics, semiotics and sociolinguistics from Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Its subtitle is “A problematic third party in the humans plus technology cognitive architecture of the future global superintelligence.” Her contribution thus adds a novel quality to an imminent planetary knowledge achieved by this nascent faculty. An “individuation of the semiospecies,” via a triad of information, discourse and understanding can result. In accord with our website premise, a worldwide learning process on its own, which we desperately need, goes unnoticed. See also The Individuation of Social Systems by ML, et al in Procedia Computer Science (88/15, 2016). OK

Contrary to the prevailing pessimistic AI takeover scenarios, the theory of the Global Brain (GB) argues that this foreseen collective, distributed superintelligence is bound to include humans as its key beneficiaries. This prediction follows from the contingency of evolution: we, as already present intelligent forms of life, are in a position to exert selective pressures onto the emerging new ones. As a result, it is foreseen that the cognitive architecture of the GB will include human beings and such technologies, which will best prove to advance our collective wellbeing. Since the rapid evolution of interconnecting technologies appears to open up immense emancipatory possibilities not only for humans, but also for the intelligently evolving ‘creatures of the semiosphere’, it is concluded that in the context of the rapidly self-organizing Global Brain, a close watch needs to be kept over the dynamics of the latter. (Abstract excerpts)

Therefore, I propose a thought experiment: a re-combination of several existing theories in a way that reveals social systems (which shape and drive our world today), not humans, to be the most advanced intelligence currently operating on Earth. The resulting exploration of the hypothesis that we are continuously failing to acknowledge this posthuman superintelligence, which is already present, may open up paths for several reconsiderations related to the foreseen cognitive architecture of the Global Brain. (36)

Leuf, Bo. The Semantic Web. New York: Wiley, 2006. In order to make the Internet more user useful, searchable, interactive, self organizing, correcting and responsive, its textual basis needs to be reconceived. First proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the present work provides a good introduction to this on-going project.

Perhaps we are also approaching something more than just a vast globally-accessible knowledge repository. There is the potential to develop devices, services, and software agents that we might converse with as they were fully sentient and intelligent beings themselves. (314)

Levy, Neil. Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A Research Fellow at both the University of Melbourne and Oxford explores the ramifications of advances in neuroscience which augur for increasing abilities to influences mental states and capacities. The book is noted here for a lengthy chapter on the “extended mind hypothesis” whereof aware intellects reach pervasively beyond the body into social settings.

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. New York: Plenum, 1997. From France comes another report on the rudiments of an embryonic planetary mind arising from integrated human cognition.

Levy, Pierre. The Semantic Sphere: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy. New York: Wiley-ISTE, 2011. The latest volume by the University of Ottawa communication philosopher and Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence illumes the fulfillment over the past decade of a worldwide cerebral faculty, which is in fact the conceptual basis and occasion of this website.

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence. (Publisher)

Lightman, Alex and William Rojas. Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet. New York: Wiley, 2002. The book contains both technical details and visionary perspectives on a wireless network now enveloping the globe. When it is accomplished, anyone, anywhere should have free, instant access to the totality of human knowledge.

We are not an accident of the Universe. Our intelligence is not random. We are generators of information content in the universe. (142)

Liu, Jiming and K. C. Tsui. Toward Nature-Inspired Computing. Communications of the ACM. 49/10, 2006. Prof. Liu, a leading innovator of an autonomous, self-organizing, worldwide web intelligence, is presently Director of the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor in Canada. Check his website via Google for an extensive list of publications. Here he is joined by an IT manager from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. The broad intent of this project is to carry forth natural developmental and cognitive viability to enhance the Internet. These include autonomous agents, distributed decision-making, emergent complexity, adaptive responses, all of which are able to organize themselves.

Llinas, Rodolfo. I of the Vortex: From Neuron to Self. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. A veteran neuroscientist explains how the brain achieves “perceptual binding” by a simultaneity of communicative modules. These theories lead to speculations about whether the Internet is becoming a rudimentary species mind.

One of the few ways in which local order can increase is through the generation of such things as a nervous system that employs modularization of function. If modularization is indeed a universal to combat disorder, such a geometric and architectural solution may have happened at other levels as well. (258)

Lobo, Jesus, et al. Spiking Neural Networks and Online Learning: An Overview. Neural Networks. 121/88, 2019. TECHNALIA, Derio, Spain, Telecom ParisTech, and Auckland University of Technology (Nikola Kasabov) innovators show how human neural-cognitive facilities can be extrapolated and mapped onto internet activities and resources. That is to say, the same computational cerebral dynamics are evident in its knowledge representation, and our educational access. In regard, such methods as distributed computation, online optimization, structured prediction, data preprocessing and more occur both in our human brains and this emergent global sapience and repository.

Applications that generate huge amounts of data in the form of fast streams are increasingly prevalent, as they are necessary for learning in an online manner. These conditions impose memory and processing time restrictions, and may affect the input data distribution. There is a need for new algorithms that adapt to these changes as fast as possible, while maintaining good performance scores. Spiking Neural Networks offer a successful approach to model the behavior and learning potential of the brain, with regard to practical online learning tasks. This work merges both fields by way of a comprehensive overview, motivating further developments that embrace Spiking Neural Networks for online learning scenarios. (Abstract)

Lyon, Pamela. The Biogenic Approach to Cognition. Cognitive Processing. 7/1, 2006. A paper in two special issues, previously 6/4, 2005, on Memory and the Extended Mind. Lyon here proposes an evolutionary basis that proceeds as a self-organizing, autopoietic complex system with a propensity for increased free agency in an environment. These dual issues also explore the views of Richard Menary, John Sutton, Robert A. Wilson, and others on a situated and embodied social cognition. Google for more info. Cognitive scientists and philosophers seem to be closing in on the realization that human communities indeed have minds of their own, and if so appreciated can be a source of salutary knowledge.

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