From Collected Intelligence to Collective Intelligence

Transcript

hello everyone oh let's disco hmm is this the look yeah okay let's see hello Toronto hello everyone thank you for the warm welcome I've been actually looking forward to this day for panel around four years and the title of the talk is collected intelligence moving towards collective intelligence and I'm super excited to give this talk at Ryerson University since it's a place describing itself at the intersection between mind and action and this resonates deeply with us because with Akasha what we want to actually do is explore the applications

and implications of a permanent web for a better home of mine this is a connection with the original declaration for the independence of the cyberspace in 98 what that's like twenty years ago two decades so as Jason said two years ago on May 3rd 2016 we unveiled Akasha and open the sign up for the Alpha and to our surprise in less than a month we had over 2,000 people signing up which was very encouraging and a sign that there are many people interested in truly decentralized social network and around six months ago we also presented at DEFCON our first token experiment and it's worth mentioning that we didn't

start designing the social network around the token we actually took an experiment driven research and approach and try to have the token experiment as a module inside the platform so fast-forwarding please work fast-forwarding fast-forwarding until two weeks ago we also released Akasha the web version which is accessible from mists and all the browsers that are capable of running the Mathematica extension and it's worth mentioning that this web version has the ITSs part completely rewritten in IPS SGS in order to enable peer-to-peer browser

communication we take centralisation quite seriously in this project and before moving on and talking about the future plans and what we want to do with the the token layer i'd like to okay let's see so in 1993 for some context this is when the mosaic browser was first released it was still the very early days of the internet very few people knew what it means even fewer actually used it and Charlie McGee published this paper around the same time called the age of imagination coming soon to a civilization near you and in this in this paper he mentions that the transition might be less than

25 years away and when you add the numbers this is actually 2018 so we live in the future now and one of the points is trying to make in the first paragraph is that this transition will be different from the other transitions we had because it is accelerating accelerating right to the Information Age to another massive transition in the way we humans work and play and then he goes on and presents like the system of systems of communication as evolutionary scaffolding in the sense that the most successful groups throughout human history have one thing in common when compared to their competition they had the best system of communication so this

is not about the best army or the best web plans it's about the best systems of communication and the faeces fittest communicators had a larger percentage of people with access to higher quality information greater ability to transform that information into knowledge and action and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge among the members of their group and this is something that currently we have reached I think the limits of what our current communication systems can do and let's take a look with this in mind at the current humanity's most popular system of communication and this see this is Shawn Parker co-founder of Napster and the

first president of Facebook talking a bit about the thought process that went into designing phase technology maybe now no knowledge oh oh yeah this is like those those calls when you try to like talk with people and solve like the most crucial like scalability and stuff and like maybe maybe we'll fix

also voice-over-internet before like solving all the problems no no wait it worked before we give it a try so should I just skip or let's see now it's gonna the thought process that went into

building these applications Facebook being the first of them to really understand it that thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible yeah not the creepy at all and follow exploiting a vulnerability in in human psychology and I just I think that we you know we the inventors creators you know and it's it's me it's mark it's the you know Kevin Systrom and Instagram it's all of these people understood this consciously and we did it anyway yeah quite a diva laughs at the end but so

now moving on like this is not visible to everyone but there are visible problems like for example the latest congressional hearings we had oh man like wait Mark Zuckerberg being you know interviewed and here and actually this is from today Facebook has this event called f8 and during this event Mark Zuckerberg says it will take around three years to fix Facebook but today I'm going to argue that it's quite hard close to impossible to fix something that relies on advertising and this is an article published in the Atlantic by

Ethan Zuckerman it's that's actually his name and this is the guy that wrote the code lines for the first pop-up ad in the history of the internet and basically the whole articles reads like I'm sorry our intentions were good and I'd like to draw your attention on this code at the bottom saying that demonstrating that you're going to target more and better than Facebook requires moving deeper into the world of surveillance so that's moving deeper which means we're already there it's not moving into the world of surveillance it's deeper how bad it can get and on the same line of thought the default internet business model

following this pop-up ad was advertising which led to this emerging the surveillance capitalism which kind of corrupted the original vision of the internet being this new medium of expression empowering humanity you know all the good stuff and turned into this mass surveillance creepy thing that we are dependent on to communicate with the people we want to and the deeper implications of today's problems are not over two billion people are being dictated what to think and we have numerous studies and experiments conducted part by Facebook ities itself and over three billion people we're talking about half a planet here so that's quite a lot routed daily to what

they are allowed to know so that's every click you get to find from a search result and and so on and it kind of makes you wonder where will it go from here right when our privacy is being eroded and invaded on a daily basis our freedom of expression diminished in our collective memory outsourced in the hands of just a few corporations that don't always have our best interests at heart and I know it's mattered but may fort be with you and and it's almost like we are witnessing in real time this building of an information that star capable of you know enslaving or even

destroying this information based society taking the shape of our human civilization and it kind of makes you again question what information society means and a quick search would lead you to this Wikipedia page that explains that an information society is a society where the manipulation of information is a significant economic political especially political quite recently and cultural activity profoundly changing all aspects of social organization including economy education health warfare government and while added democracy and to qualify as a citizen in this information society it's those of us who use the internet regularly and

effectively which pretty much is everyone in this room and most likely those who watch this presentation you know online and the point here based on the previous slides is that we are living in a collected information society it's not just an information society it's like collected by this information dead star and again like if we think about what is actually what is actually information please don't touch the buttons there what is information again a quick search would lead to this Wikipedia page defining information theory and this is a big contribution to

this field what was made by Claude Shannon in 1948 that's like 70 years ago quite ahead of this time and its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space the invention of the CD feasibility of mobile phones development of the internet and even the understanding of black holes this is quite quite a profound discovery that influenced our society and one of the core ideas in this is that information is different from the meaning and Claude Shannon and later on Weaver made this distinction to solve two problems one from an engineering perspective and the second from a Phillies philosophical perspective and so to give you an example on how this works we have the

911 so this is the information basically it's just two numbers but depending on the cultural operating system so to speak this can be decoded and processed differently called through noisy semantics and the information is 911 the input and we process it searching for meaning and then the output would be the meaning itself so in this case the meaning could what depend if you are a member of the NASA this might have especially importance to you because the Mars Global Surveyor reached Mars 97 if you're a part of Catalunya this would be the national day and if you're you know a US citizen this I trigger some twin tower attack memories and not good at all but the idea is that the same information can be

decoded differently and another way to look at this presentation is that the information source would be the words that I compose in my mind as I speak and I encode them through some ways that reach your ear and the medium to reach the channel of communication will be this this room itself and then when you receive the signal that Soundwave actually do you go to the decoding them in your mind to extract the meaning of the message and when we look at the current state well this is actually on the same page with the information society and shows the global information storage capacity did this goes only until 2007 but if if it looked this is around 300 terabytes in total analog

plus digital and according to some predictions we are headed toward something like 40,000 exabytes in 2020 so it's exponentially increasing and again accelerating in its growth but this is not just about hoarding data and information this is also about making sense of this information right and we have the emergence of collective digital information processing and you know Google in 19th and actually blocker in 99 introduced this blogging as a service so to call that lowered the barriers of entry for people it was easier now to share your thoughts with others later on it was purchased by Google and so on

but moving on we have like this boom of application here in 2002 2006 and one of them that was I mean it's still influencing today's like digital meaning processing is deep which introduced the dig or burry function which is now let's say reincarnated in Reddit and like this likes in YouTube and many others around the web and now when you overlap the two like the previous one with a growth of information and this you can see some correlation I mean it's still hard to decide if it's cause and effect on which influence the other well one thing is clear the environment in which these

applications emerge is quite different from the one we leave today the complexity and the amount of data is a lot bigger than what it was and the you know the dark side of this story is that as an information based society we are now dependent on these proprietary closed information processors that use the information to just you know come up with the best way to serve you spam to make you buy something or to you know manipulate into doing something that you're not really interested in doing and when when we look at how the information can be processed we have to we have to two ways so well it's either

centralized information processing or decentralize information processing and each of them can be they're sequential or parallel and it could be argued that the early pioneers trying to figure out how to navigate these flocks of information we're using a centralized sequential information processing it's almost like in the early days when we figure that we can use this dealer to navigate the river and you see all the people are very obedient and waiting for the master to take them where it is you can replace the master with the proprietary information processors and then when we move on to our more recent days come there are more more recent days we have like this decentralized

sequential information processing like in 2014 we had scenario which was kind of like a Facebook then we have steam in which is sort of like a read it and then we have Leroy and ppthe which is sort of like a Twitter right and wheat Akasha in 2016 we try to combine like multiple ideas but the problem with this approach is that we end up using this new technology to apply the best idea from 15 years ago when the environment was a lot less complex the information environment so today I'm going to speak about how we can get past this stage and this is actually a picture of the earth one of the earliest automobiles and the

steering wheel was not a concept that was there from the beginning we had to go through some iterations in finding this new concept to maneuver this new vehicle but you can see that this is something we keep doing as a civilization we copy what was working in the past and trying to you know make it work even if the medium of the technology is completely different and today I'm going to talk about the centralized part and information processing and what I mean by this is that instead of having one a single signal one a single signal we can have open the layer and tap into this

collective intelligence and when I say collective intelligence is this emergent intelligence manifesting at a group level and and it has like these three pillars one is coordination one is cooperation and one is cognition so the coordination is at our communities and coordinating collective action which I think this event at con qualifies this is an ad hoc community and coordinated collective action we are here and then the cooperation is open-source software yayyy Tyrian peer-to-peer business yeah helium and the network of trust you guessed it yay helium so then the one that is a bit trickier to fit and to understand is the cognition and in here when we zoom in we can see that the

cognition pillar is made out of market judgment and predictions of future events in politics and technology and you know when when you think about what is market judgment this screen might be familiar right the coin market cap view although the judge I know if it's rational or emotional or speculative but it's a type of judgment right it's a feedback of reflecting the interactions between the market so what we want to do now is to test this approach and we use this token called essence and we call it like a multiverse within a token because it's not using one token to suit

to signal with it and then we have like inside the cachet we can imagine this coin market kept like section and in this case instead of measuring the the transaction also we have the users that chose to color their essence into a particular like happy or joy and it's worth mentioning that these are placeholders and this is a general purpose signaling mechanism but basically instead of choosing you know what which one goes to the moon we look at the number of entries comments and and the change in popularity of the signal itself and to give you a a try here the interesting part in this is that the actual interaction of the users

with each color would generate a curated feed in the form of this so this might feel familiar but actually these represent the upvotes of entries and the comments and the chat rooms and the users that use this essence so we start to look at the the essence not as just a thing that goes from zero to moon but actually has something useful in marking like you have with social insects the path around so it makes it easier for people to find the information and in here you can have this look at four four tags in which the blue dots represent the hashes which would be the content in supporting information and then each of these colors could be used to mark these

content differently depending on what's relevant for this the color itself so in this case it could be relevant some hashes in another some other hashes in another some other hashes and when you when you overlap them you have this emergent understanding which is not possible when you have just one signal and this is something completely new I think because it also allows to separate decouple the information from meaning so well on one side you have the information itself and then on the other you have the creation and moderation of the information and the colouring of the essence you know even it's not rocket science we try to make it as easy as possible and is a screen of the wallet in which the user can switch back from a colored

essence to the main essence token so to speak so this is like a from framework for generating various signals and to put it all together and trying to rush it now so I'm not going over this is the dashboard which might look familiar for those of you who have tried the application and by the way those who want to give it a try we have also at Bethel at Akasha dot world the web application available and in here you can see that we have this color bar which reflects how this entry is actually received in different communities or you know groups that align a common goal to create the best information and when you go into an

article and you want to vote to express your feeling to mark the content depending on what you won this is your balance of essence and you can select from multiple - - to vote to express your feedback on that particular entry and another interesting side effect of this is that in the comment section you know the discussion surrounding the content you can have this semi permeable let's say mechanism that allows you to highlight certain conversation that have been voted with a particular signal so it's not like just limiting and you know horse classes but you can also see how the rest are perceiving in the bigger picture and let's see another very

interesting part is the the reputation so until instead of having just one signal like in the black mirror with the curl trying to gain stars you have this multi-dimensional reputation where you can be very popular in a community and relatively unknown in another and let's see yes this is like a decentralized attention market in itself which allows the creation algorithms to evolve so it's not up to us anymore to come up with a perfect curation algorithm and and moderation but we open this layer to the community to come up with their own ideas on how we can make this and work and this is how I think we can tap into this market judgment because we

can use it as a feedback mechanism and this is also putting into the channel and Weaver's model of communication in which the feedback constantly improves the the channel and you know rigidly removes the the noise and that's the the cognition of of it so the opportunity ahead is to explore alternative business models that are based on computational storage and cognitive surplus move away from this advertising and spying on the users approach and the potential is there because the Italian community jump from 10,000 in 2015 to almost a million and this is a screen we had just a couple of days ago and it kinda makes you wonder because in 2016 200 millions stopped using Facebook mainly because

security concerns but only 1% of that if they would be looking for an alternative that would triple the Italian community and that also points the scalability and other pressing problems elephant in the room that Joseph whom we'll talk in a bit and we also have plasma and I assure many others so just to wrap it up this is the transition that was talked about 25 years ago and I think this is the way in which we can ensure that the larger percentage of people will have access to higher quality information and a greater ability to transform that information into knowledge and action and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge to the members of their group and in conclusion that's a lot of work to do a lot of play - it depends on how

you look at it and we invite everyone to play and to discover to tap into our collective imagination to co-create a better communication system that is an ecosystem in service of humanity designed to transform information into knowledge and action and the work player had is that we need as much help as possible on the talk and in incentives layer on the identity high reputation and on the scalability and architecture and just in conclusion this is a quote from the matrix I really didn't come here today to tell you how this is going to end I came to paint a picture of how this can begin and ultimately I think this will happen because it's not information that wants

to be free its us and it can begin as a massive redistribution of power knowledge and wealth the greatest that humanity has ever seen those of you who are interested during the fun at Akasha that world and thank you for your attention [Music] nice job Mihai the hot and sweaty essence would be really large right now