Summary: Spivack’s observation that the web is saturating the world (rather than just enabling a super fast web that the world and humans can enter) reinforces the idea that our system as a whole is amplifying its total intelligence and capabilities, rather than just supporting the digitization and “upload” of everything. It’s a basic, yet profound distinction that fundamentally changes how we expect the future to unfold.
Nova Spivack has posted some interesting thoughts up on his personal Twine, noting that “The Web is starting to spread outside of what we think of as ‘the Web’ and into ‘the World.’” He points out that “the digital world is going physical”, an idea that opens up an array of new futures previously not imagined by thinkers who’ve largely focused on digitization and inner space as the inevitable human destiny. Spivack concludes that “Beyond just a Global Brain, we are really building a Global Body.”
This thinking resonates with me because it moves away from a human-centric view of the future (digitization is good because we can live forever) in favor of a more systems-centric explanation (the system as a whole is getting smarter for its own reasons). It also makes sense in the context of an ongoing discussion I’ve been having with good friend and EvoDevo systems thinker John Smart about the direct relationship between A) our collective drive to tunnel toward Inner Space (nanotech, chemistry, energy efficiency, etc.) and B) our drive to expand into Outer Space (exploration, space travel, universe mapping, manufacturing, resource discovery).
An increasingly intelligent, self-orgainzing web that furthers growth of both the Global Brain, a concept originally advanced by Francis Heylighen in 1995, and what Spivack calls the Global Body, seems like the necessary tissue connecting our Inner Space and Outer Space focused appendages. In other words, the web that Spivack observes is not only concerned with creating better simulations, but also with expanding reach and bettering physical capabilities.
This jives with the idea that the point of the game of life, including the human-created web, is to ensure the survival of our global system via knowledge gathering and expansion, and less with the species-centric view that the future is solely about digitizing ourselves and escaping our biological chains. If in fact we are living in a system that purposely or automagically (to borrow a term from another futurist colleague, Jerry Paffendorf) seeks to increase control over its perceived environment (COPE) in order to ensure survival and expansion, then the creation of a web that serves this system, rather than just its human components, seems perfectly rational.
From this perspective, a merger between the web and physical world makes a lot of sense as it accelerates the input, sorting and output of information, resulting in increased system quantification and knowledge generation. In other words, a world-as-web + web-as-world boosts both our collective intelligence and capabilities.
Of course, this sort of thinking steadily pulls us down the rabbit hole to a place where the physical world can be viewed as web and the web as increasingly physical. But, then again, we’re due for some serious paradigm shifts, aren’t we?
“The web is going to wake up. It is already awake because we are awake and we are a part of it.” – Nova Spivack, Singularity Summit 2008
With their recent blogologue concerning the evolution of consciousness, Kevin Kelly of Wired fame and Nova Spivack, creator of Twine, are spearheading a shift away from the commonly held view of a future in which Strong AI grows in a box, to one in which the Cloud or the Planet is the box. Both are striving to broaden the context in which terms like technology, information, intelligence, communication and consciousness are defined. This is a very necessary step as most of the recent theory and development has been dominated by reductionist AI and technology thinkers who seem to view such phenomena in a vacuum.
Clearly, technology, information, intelligence and consciousness (TIICC) do not exist in a vacuum. In his latest post, Kelly expands his definition of the emerging Technium to include the concept of meta-system transition (advanced by Turchin and Heylighen) that Spivack advocates. Thus, both are now in agreement that TIICC are dependent on the system, which is a very positive development, but also brings them out onto a slippery memeslope.
Because there is no such thing as a closed system (as Godel taught us), it is near-impossible, or perhaps fundamentally impossible, to create functional, highly-useful definitions of TIICC. Kelly and Spivack both concur with this reality:
Is the universe a giant computer rigged to generate life in multiple galaxies? Does it harness the power of both evolution and development for some specific purpose?
These are some of the questions that will be tackled next week at the world’s first ever Evo Devo Universe Conference held in Paris, France.
Organized by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, the conference will bring together some of the most progressive cosmologists, complexity theorists, systems thinkers, and philosophers currently “exploring and critiquing models, hypotheses, and questions relating to the extent and interaction of evolutionary (or quasi-evolutionary) and developmental (or quasi-developmental) processes in the universe and its subsystems.”
In other words, it’s a world-class pow-wow for the thinkers who are working to uncover the rule sets that govern information, physics, chemistry, and all universal processes. And it will probably catalyze the birth of some important new theories and research paths in the months to come. For example, it is possible that someone presenting at this conference will pave the way for a more comprehensive information theory that accounts technology and plays nicely with existing scientific laws.
Here’s what conference organizer John Smart, futurist and systems theorist (and good friend), had to say about the event as I caught him just before he left for San Jose airport yesterday:
Evo Devo Universe keynote speakers will include:
James N. Gardner, a complexity theorist and science essayist, with a background in philosophy and theoretical biology.
Francis Heylighen, a systems theorist and cyberneticist focusing on the evolution of complexity.
Laurent Nottale, a cosmologist and pioneering theorist in scale relativity and fractal space-time.
Systems theorist, futurist and Acceleration Studies Foundation Executive Director John Smart presents a near-term scenario in which new comm technologies enable remote peer networks to effectively bond with and support mental patients, assisting in socialization and treatment from a safe distance.
Such “Symbiont Networks”, as Smart calls them, could be highly effective drivers of mental health, among other things, as they augment standard treatment that can consist of heavy medication and little face time for certain individuals.
Here’s a short clip from my recent interview with John in which he describes a Symbiont Scenario:
Detractors of the Symbiont Scenario will likely critique the “dehumanizing” aspects of distance communication and also point their fingers at unintended consequences. But, though I agree it’s highly probable that whole new classes of disorders (like autism, ADHD, etc) will continue to emerge as we co-evolve with the changing environment, I also fundamentally believe that because there’s no such thing as standing still in an environment of accelerating change it is incumbent upon us to use new technologies to help people, and our system, to self-actualize better.
Organized by the