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# (PDF) The Global Brain Institute Vision

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The Global Brain Institute Vision
Francis Heylighen

2013

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Abstract

The following provides background and context for the creation of a "Global Brain Institute" (GBI), summarizing the scientific theories and research that will form the focus of this new institute. After defining the subject as the emergence of distributed intelligence supported by the Internet, it quickly summarizes the history of research in this domain, and then focuses on the present situation as investigated by the ECCO research group. The document suggests that the impact of this research remains limited because of lack of funding and infrastructure, and proposes to solve this problem by creating a Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The text concludes by sketching conceptual foundations for a future theory of the global brain: the global brain would emerge by self-organization in order to coordinate human and machine activities via the directed propagation of challenges from agent to agent across a global medium. It would thus play the role of a nervous system for the planetary organism. Motivation Tim 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 incompatible Web 2.0 technologies with no clear direction. This demands a new unified paradigm to facilitate their integration. The present document proposes to develop a theory of the global brain that would help us to understand and steer this ongoing evolution towards ever-stronger interconnection between humans and machines. If successful, this would help us achieve a much higher level of distributed intelligence, thus allowing us to efficiently tackle global problems too complex for present approaches. Definition of the Global Brain The global brain (GB) is the idea that all people of this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect them form the equivalent of a nervous system or "brain" for the planet Earth [1], [2]. While this idea may initially have been formulated merely as a metaphor, globalization together with the explosive development of the worldwide web are turning it into an increasingly realistic model of the present information society. Indeed, the growing network of social, communication, and economic links make individuals, organizations, machines and even ecosystems across the world ever more interdependent. Moreover, the storage, exchange and propagation of information across this networks provides it with a level of knowledge and capability for intelligence that far surpasses that of any individual or organization. An extrapolation of these accelerating changes trends points towards a "metasystem transition" or "singularity" within the next few decades [3], [4]. This is the emergence of a new level of distributed intelligence that is as yet difficult to imagine, but that will radically alter the human condition.

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Key takeaways

The proposed Global Brain Institute aims to advance the theory of distributed intelligence.
The global brain concept suggests humanity's interconnectedness can facilitate better problem-solving capabilities.
Research by the ECCO group has produced innovative algorithms for collective intelligence.
Current funding limitations hinder broader impact and recognition of global brain research.
Brussels' international character and VUB's innovative history make it an ideal location for GBI.
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Foundations for a Mathematical Model of the Global Brain: architecture, components, and specifications (GBI Working Papers No. 2012-05). GBI Working Papers. Retrieved from http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/TowardsGB-model.pdf Heylighen
Evo Busseniers

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The global brain can be defined as the distributed intelligence emerging from the network of all people on this planet connected via the Internet and related technologies. The present paper proposes the foundations for a mathematical model of the self-organization of such a network towards increasing intelligence. The assumption is that the network becomes increasingly efficient in routing the right information to the right people, so that problems and opportunities can be addressed in the most efficient way possible by coordinating the actions of many people. The network develops by the creation and strengthening of useful connections, and the weakening and eventual elimination of counterproductive connections. People can be modeled as agents that try to maximize their benefit by processing the challenges (problems and/or opportunities) they encounter. Challenges propagate from agent to agent across a weighted, directed network, which represents the social connections between these...

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Human Cognition and the Advent of a Global Knowledge Base
Kevin Kvalvik, Susane Garrido

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This focuses on the effect of the Internet's evolution and the subsequent developing availability of a globally comprehensive knowledge base. The impacts of this are seen in the twin lights of the macro/anthropological view and the micro/cognitive view. Garrido and Kvalvik examine the impact (on an evolutionary scale) of sharing the human knowledge base uniformly, over the coming years, to all of those who have access to any simple PDA. Alternately, they will discuss how current theories of brain function-from Gardener's multiple intelligences, and the cognitive science definitions of Michael Imbert and Steven Pinker , to Minsky's "Society of Mind"-assist us in understanding the scale of change that a hyperlinked planet may represent. With this dual anthropological/cognitive perspective they discuss possible effects and consequences of this significant shift in, education, technology, and culture. The dual authorship of this work is itself a result of an electronic connection of Brazilian author, Susane Lopes Garrido, at Unisinos (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos) in Sao Leopoldo and Kevin Kvalvik, Harvard graduate, presently at Univ. of MT, Western.

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Programming the global brain
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Considering how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain.

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From Human Computation to the Global Brain: The Self-Organization of Distributed Intelligence
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Distributed Intelligence Technologies: a survey of future applications and implications of the Global Brain
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This paper surveys a wide variety of potential applications of distributed intelligence technologies. These are systems that tackle complex challenges in a distributed manner, by collecting, processing and routing information and actions that are spread across a global network of human and technological agents. The eventual integration of all these systems is expected to produce a distributed intelligence at the planetary scale, the Global Brain. Supporting technologies for such distributed problem solving include Wikipedia, the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid. These and future extensions will facilitate the propagation and coordination of information, knowledge, energy, physical objects, actions and personal identity. By extrapolating from existing applications such as social media, data mining, online shopping and MOOCs, it is argued that these technologies can in principle satisfy all our material, health, safety, social, achievement, cognitive, and even self-actualization needs.

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H.G.Wells & World Brain-Critical Reassessment.pdf
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What exactly are the Wellsian World Brain or World Encyclopaedia ideas to which reference is so often made? What did they mean for Wells? What might they mean for us? This article examines closely what Wells says about them in his book, World Brain (1938), and in a number of works that elaborate what is expressed there. The article discusses aspects of the context within which Wells's conception of a new world encyclopaedia organization was formulated and its role in the main thrust of his thought. The article argues that Wells's ideas about a World Brain are embedded in a structure of thought that may be shown to entail on the one hand notions of social repression and control that must give us pause, and on the other a concept of the nature and organization of knowledge that may well be no longer acceptable. By examining Wells's ideas in some detail and attempting to articulate the systems of belief which shaped them and which otherwise lie silent beneath them, the author hopes to provoke questions about current theorizing about the nature of global information systems and emergent intelligence.

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The global brain as a new utopia
Francis Heylighen

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Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes” postmodernist relativism. This general pessimism and apathy is fed by an increasing amount of bad news about wars, terrorism, ecological catastrophes, global warming, rising xenophobia and inequalities. Yet, objective statistics ...

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Global Commons in the Global Brain
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The next decade (present to ~ 2020–2025) 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’ (IoT). 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) and may require a qualitatively new level of political organization to guide a process of self-organization. Consequently, this paper proposes and attempts to develop a conceptual framework with the potential to aid an international political transition towards a ‘post-capitalist’ ‘post-nation state’ global world. This conceptual framework is grounded within sociotechnological theory of the ‘Global Brain’ (GB), which describes a potential future planetary organizational structure founded on distributed and open-ended intelligence; and the socioeconomic theory of the ‘Commons’, which is a paradigm describing distributed modes of organization founded upon principles of democratic management and open access. In the integration of GB theory and Commons theory this paper ultimately argues that an appropriate international response to the emerging technological revolution should include the creation of networks with both automated and collaborative components that function on ‘Global Commons’ (GC) logic (i.e. beyond both state and market logic).

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World-Brain Systems
Sebastián Alejandro González Montero

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Abstract The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of academia in broader society. What is academia’s role beyond being a business and providing qualified professionals to other businesses? What kind of organization and ethos is consistent with academia’s proper role in society, considered as a higher-order cognitive system? Design/methodology/approach – Society as a whole is modeled as a viable system, with subsystems dedicated to self-production in the here and now (systems 1-3) and subsystems engaged in exploring the outside and future of the system and in consolidating an identity and an ethos (systems 4 and 5). The role, ethos and proper organization of academia are derived from this model and from cybernetic considerations on the proper architecture of system 4 and system 5 cognitive systems. Findings – To fulfill its role as part of society’s system 4 and system 5, academia must include areas that are sometimes considered redundant or an expensive luxury, such as the humanities or basic research. The humanities must strive to catalyze broad community participation as part of their contribution to system 5 and must strive to produce bridge languages between communities and disciplines to increase the connectivity of the World Brain. The publish-or-perish ethos of academia must be replaced by an erotic spirituality, understood as desire for otherness. Originality/value – This paper integrates broad philosophical considerations on the role of academia with the use of cybernetic models of viable systems and of distributed cognition, yielding practical guidelines for the organization of academia. Keywords Cognition, Education, Philosophy, Citizenship, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis Paper type Conceptual paper

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References (55)
F. Heylighen, "Conceptions of a Global Brain: an historical review," in Evolution: Cosmic, Biological, and Social, eds. Grinin, L. E., Carneiro, R. L., Korotayev A. V., Spier F., Uchitel Publishing, 2011, pp. 274 -289.
F. Heylighen, "The global brain as a new utopia," in Zukunftsfiguren, Suhrkamp, Frankurt, 2002.
F. Heylighen, "A brain in a vat cannot break out: why the singularity must be extended, embedded and embodied," 2012.
F. Heylighen, "Accelerating socio-technological evolution: from ephemeralization and stigmergy to the global brain," in Globalization as evolutionary process: modeling global change, vol. 10, 2008, p. 284.
H. Spencer, The principles of sociology, vol. 1. D. Appleton and company, 1898.
P. Teilhard De Chardin, The phenomenon of man. Collins London, 1959.
V. I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere. New York: Copernicus, 1998, 1926.
P. Otlet, Monde: Essai d'Universalisme. Brussels: Mundaneum, 1935.
V. Bush, "As We May Think," The Atlantic Monthly, Jul. 1945.
D. Engelbart, "A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man's intellect," Computer-supported cooperative work: a book of readings, pp. 35-66, 1988.
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The "global brain" is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by the people of this planet together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them together. The different approaches leading up to this conception, by authors such as Spencer, Otlet, Wells, Teilhard, Russell and Turchin, are reviewed in their historical order. The contributions are classified in three major approaches: organicism, which sees society or the planet as a living system; encyclopedism, which aims to develop a universal knowledge network; and emergentism, which anticipates the evolution of a suprahuman level of consciousness. The shortcomings of each perspective lead us to propose an integrated approach, based on evolutionary cybernetics. Its selectionist logic allows us to analyse the process whereby initially selfish individuals self-organize into a synergetic system functioning at a higher level of intelligence, making use of an advanced version of the worldwide web.

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The global brain can be defined as the distributed intelligence emerging from the network of all people and machines on this planet, as connected via the Internet. The present paper proposes the foundations for a mathematical model of the self-organization of such a network towards increasing intelligence. The assumption is that the network becomes more efficient in routing the right information to the right people, so that problems and opportunities can be addressed more efficiently by coordinating the actions of many people. The network develops by the creation and strengthening of useful connections, and the weakening and eventual elimination of counterproductive connections. People are modeled as agents that try to maximize their benefit by processing the challenges (problems and/or opportunities) they encounter. Challenges propagate from agent to agent across a weighted, directed network, which represents the social connections between these agents. A challenge is defined as the difference between the actual situation encountered by the agent, and that agent's need (i.e. the agent's desired situation). Challenges, computed as the difference between a situation and a need, have a variable state represented as a sparse vector, i.e. a list of real numbers most of which are 0. Negative numbers represent problems or deficiencies, positive numbers opportunities or resources. Agents deal with challenges by multiplying the corresponding vector by their processing matrix, thus producing a new situation vector. An agent's processing matrix represents its skill in relaxing the different components of the challenge towards 0 (i.e. reducing the difference between situation and need). The degree of relaxation defines the amount of benefit extracted by the agent. Agents receive challenges either randomly from the challenge generator, or selectively from other agents, after these agents have extracted some benefit. Challenges are transmitted along the links between agents, with a probability dependent on the strength of the link. This strength evolves through a reinforcement-learning rule: the more benefit sending and receiving agents extract, the stronger their link becomes. In this way, the network self-organizes in a way similar to a neural network, while increasing the total amount of benefit extracted by all agents collectively. The intention of the simulation is to explore the space of parameters and propagation mechanisms in order to find the configurations that maximize this collective benefit extraction, which we define as the distributed intelligence of the network. Some of the parameters and mechanisms to be explored are the following: the capacity of the challenge queue (buffer memory) from which an agent selects the most promising challenges for processing; the criteria (challenge intensity, assumed processing skill, trust in the sender…) that an agent uses to select the most promising challenge; the relative proportion of rival and non-rival components of the challenge vector, where a rival component represent a material resource whose value is consumed by the processing, while a non-rival one represents an informational resource that maintains it value; the agent "IQ", defined as the ability of the agent's processing matrix to reduce the challenge intensity; the agent "mood", determined by the sequence of its most recent successes and failures in benefit extraction, which affects its willingness to take risks; and an agent's "preference vector", defined by its track record in accepting or rejecting challenges. In a later stage, we also envisage to include market mechanisms, in which agents "pay" others with raw benefit in order to receive promising challenges, and reputation mechanisms, in which the reliability of an agent with which the present agent has no experience yet is estimated on the basis of its relations with other agents. FOUNDATIONS FOR A MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF THE GLOBAL BRAIN: ARCHITECTURE, COMPONENTS, AND SPECIFICATIONS ..

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The Global Brain: Beyond The Correlationist Paradigm In Architecture
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