Here's another example of the confusions noted in Extended Senses; Nova Spivack's blog post/essay Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind [via Future Now, again]

I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing events comprised of billions of independent information processors...

Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world - it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we will literally become part of this network - it will become an extension of our nervous systems and eventually, via brain-computer interfaces, it will be an extension of our senses and our minds. Eventually the distinction between humans and machines, and the individual and the collective, will gradually start to dissolve, along with the distinction between human and artificial forms of intelligence.

Spivack makes the same mistake as Rushkoff, the collective blunder, viewing modern technologies with a steam age eye. He tarts up his cybernetic world view with CAS language, but still postulates an object-observer system controlled from outside the system, imagining the system as a whole as an integrated entity.

The internet is not a mind, a global brain, it's an ecology of minds, a society. If truly intelligent non-human agents evolve there will be as many or more of them as there are of us. If it can happen once it can happen any number of times. Imagining a mixed ecology of human and software agents is far fetched but still much more sensible than the imagining the internet as a single, integrated mind like a human brain.

This is an important subject to grasp. The age old yearning for a god, a vast and cool intelligence we can surrender to, and the construction of human institutions modelled on this concept - from kings to politburos - has always been compelling for some but not all humans. Viewing aspects of reality through this lens always leads to grief because it is false. No one is in charge, no one can be in charge.

If there is a god then there are gods. If there are gods then there are differences, conflicts and confusion - just as there are now, even if it takes place at some post-human level.

The principle generalizes. If there is a metalanguage there will be metalanguages. Anything that happens once will happen repeatedly. Anything that happens repeatedly will happen variably. The model we should be using is the ecosphere not a single human mind. The fundamental rule of ecology is diversity - if there is more than one way to make a living there will be many ways livings are made. Anything that works will change. Nothing is constant, the field and the players are in flux, there is no equilibrium, no stasis, no durability. There is resilience.

There is also deceit. Anything that can be built can be hacked. Anything that has value will be counterfeited. Every trust will be broken, every identity will be spoofed. Every entity will have predators. Everything will get its fair share of abuse.

Just as colonies of social insects such as ants and bees are able to perform intelligent collective behaviors without centralized control, the millions, or even billions, of humans and programs roaming independently through the Semantic Web, selectively reading, writing, annotating, linking, rating, and aggregating information, will perform collective intelligent behaviors without necessarily coordinating with one another or even knowing it. In other words the individual agents in such behaviors will participate in collective cognitive processes that transcend the comprehension of any individual.

The very limited amount of truth in this isn't novel, that's how societies work now, invisible hand and all that jazz. But it is nothing like social insects. It is more like social animals, such as primates, but this really says nothing. Human societies, whether using one technology or another, are human societies. We have cortical links to networks now, we always have had them. Enhancing the senses and extending the range using technologies isn't novel. Eyeglasses did that.

A cortical link to an electronic network will have the same structure and uses as we have now. We are linked to one another. There is no "it" we are linked to, that's at best an abstraction that means little more than "us". If it comes to be that some of us are software agents that isn't inherently different, but if the software agents are significantly more capable than humans that will be very different in the same way as if superior alien life forms had come to earth.

When we get past the quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo that is the only issue here. If software agents evolve or are built somehow then we will have at long last encountered alien intelligence. If they are more than we are then things will change in ways we are not capable of either imagining or understanding. We are not going to somehow mind meld and act as a single entity anymore than we can be said to do so now. Mildly entertaining idea but wrong species, wrong universe.

This cybernetic world view - superstitious and simplistic to its core - is important to refute since it is responsible for most of the intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, political and ecological failures currently plaguing us. This isn't new of course, it has been so for eons, but it has increased importance since we have grown so numerous and powerful. It's time to mature a bit.

It seems difficult for some to distinguish between the aggregated wisdom of a society and collectivism, which is almost never wise. We see this in reviews of the work of Surowiecki's The Wisdom Of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. Surowiecki uses the C word too but in a restricted way.

"Under the right circumstances," Surowiecki argues, "groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."...

As counterintuitive as it sounds, however, the mathematics work so long as Surowiecki's three key criteria - independence, diversity, and decentralization - are satisfied. "If you ask a large enough group," he says, "to make a prediction or estimate a probability," the errors they make cancel each other out. "Subtract the error, and you're left with the information."...

Not all problems yield to this method and to work it is critical that the individuals be individuals - independent, diverse and distributed. This isn't collectivism as the word is normally used, not a consensual herd, not a mob. This is important because consensual groups are less wise than individuals.

Escalation of commitment occurs when people or organizations who have committed resources to a project are inclined to “throw good money after bad” and maintain or increase their commitment to the project, even when its marginal costs exceed marginal benefits (Teger 1980, Camerer and Weber 1999). Escalation of commitment is very similar to the sunk-cost effect. Most research is focused on individual decision making. The main explanation for observed escalation is self-justification (Brockner 1992). The idea of self-justification is that people do not like to admit that their past decisions were incorrect and, therefore, are trying to reaffirm the correctness of those earlier decisions...

One might expect that irrational behavior would be corrected in groups. However, many studies suggest that groups make riskier decisions than the mean of decisions made by individuals. In fact, escalation of commitment is found in group decision making (Bazerman et al. 1984). Members of a group strive for unanimity. A typical goal for political decisions within small-scale societies is to reach consensus (Boehm 1996). Once unanimity is reached, the easiest way to protect it is to stay committed to the group’s decision (Bazerman et al. 1984, Janis 1972). Thus, when the group is faced with a negative feedback, members will not suggest abandoning the earlier course of action, because this might disrupt the existing unanimity.

Surowieki uses the word collective to mean something like the mean of decisions made by individuals, not group decision. If the global brain Spivack longs for did arise it would be a fool at best but more likely insane and self destructive. When we look closely at the ant colonies that so captivate him they have very few actions that use the collective behavior directed by chemical command he admires. The same is true for other social insects. Collective behavior is only used for brute force tasks. Important and complicated tasks and decisions are done by individuals. From an external perspective it is possible to determine the mean of decisions made by individuals and call that collective wisdom, but that's a confusing use of a word most often used to mean something very different

Technologies that enhance the speed and scale of networks don't lead to collectivism, they lead to enhanced independence so long as coercion is forbidden. It increases the diversity of opinions and information available to each because there is access to distant distributed sources not tainted by local consensual views arrived at with limited information.

The threat of collectivism, consensual tyranny, is always present. It always has been and occurs at each social level - family, tribe, village, city, nation etc. But it only thrives in coercive environments. So long as dissent is at least protected from the tyranny of the majority, better yet celebrated as a social good, then collectivism will not occur. It's unnatural - if there is more than one way to make a living there will be many ways livings are made. Anything that works will change.

Making our peace with these natural tendencies - truths if you will - instead of fighting them will help the social mind in all its distributed diversity flourish in the age of large scale networks. It is to every individual's benefit as well as society as a whole to support diversity and prevent the collectivist bullies from ever gaining power. They will always be with us, it is a never ending task to be wary of them, and they can't be educated or purged in some way since they are natural too. The tension between collectivists and independents is evolutionarily stable. If it ever comes into existence, and it has, it will endure.

If non-human agents emerge in networks they may be different than humans, not have these tensions between collectivists and independents, but I doubt it. These tendencies seem to occur in every life form at every scale and level of complexity.

UPDATE: Aug 5,2004

This TNR review of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds explains the points used above, as well as other things.

Surowiecki does not make the implausible suggestion that all crowds are wise. To qualify as such, a crowd needs to satisfy three conditions. It must be diverse; its members must be independent; and it must have a "particular kind of decentralization." Each of these conditions is designed to ensure what most interests Surowiecki, which is the emergence and the aggregation of information that group members have. Diversity is important simply to ensure that the group has a lot of information. If a crowd consists of nearly identical people, it is unlikely to be wise, because the group will not know more than the individuals of whom it is composed. Independence is necessary to ensure that people say what they know rather than hide it. Surowiecki is alert to the fact that groups often go wrong if members simply follow one another without pooling individually held information. Hence he notes, correctly, that organizations often do best if each individual behaves independently and does not pay a great deal of attention to the acts and the statements of others. "The smartest groups," he writes, "are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." The worst-performing investment clubs in the United States consist of people who like one another, socialize together, and show a great deal of consensus. The best performers consist of people who do not see each other much and welcome dissent.

In calling for independence, Surowiecki emphasizes the serious risks associated with "information cascades," which occur when people neglect what they know and pay attention instead to the signals given by others. (In social science, such cascades have been found to arise not only among ordinary people choosing restaurants, sneakers, and political candidates, but also among doctors making diagnoses and even federal judges deciding cases.) The problem with information cascades is that group members are likely to do far worse than they would if everyone disclosed his or her private information. By pointing to the dangers of bad cascades, Surowiecki signals the importance of starting with a "wide array of options and information" and of having at least a few people who are willing "to put their own judgment ahead of the group's, even when it's not sensible to do so." Much of the time, Surowiecki writes, groups do best if their members pay little "attention to what everyone else is saying."

hat about decentralization? Of Surowiecki's three conditions, this is the least intuitive. He attempts to clarify it by focusing on the war against terrorism. To wage that war successfully, of course, a great deal of information must be assembled. Surowiecki is critical of the widespread idea that what is needed is more centralization. Good solutions are far more likely to follow, he argues, "if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the same problem." Surowiecki seeks processes in which independent people, all armed with their own knowledge, are able to attend to problems "while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information into a collective whole." The Iraq war is Surowiecki's example. Local American commanders had considerable latitude to act on their own, but they were also able to communicate rapidly, thus allowing successful overall strategies to develop from a multitude of local judgments. Surowiecki concludes that successful wars "may depend as much on the fast aggregation of information from the field as on preexisting, top-down strategies." (The problems that have arisen since the end of formal hostilities raise obvious difficulties for Surowiecki's claims; perhaps information on the ground is not being properly aggregated, or perhaps American officials don't have enough information on the ground to stop continuing attacks.) For intelligence relating to terrorism, Surowiecki argues that what is needed is aggregation, not centralization. And here Surowiecki returns to the ill-fated and roundly condemned Policy Analysis Market, suggesting that it "was potentially a very good idea."

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