Global Consciousness 1.0
Tue, Oct 23, 2001; by Andre Durand.
Global Consciousness 1.0 (GC1)
Concept Paper
By Andre Durand - October 2001
Preface and Acknowledgements
About eighteen months ago, I had a conversation with a very good friend, Bryan Field-Eliot, about ideas he had for a feedback and surveying system. As we all view the future through the goggles of our past, my contribution to the conversation focused on my recent foray into open source and the influence of accessibility in effecting global ubiquity. While reading the only scarcely available US magazines here in the Caribbean covering the war on terrorism, I couldn't help but revisit the conversation we had many months ago, as it became apparent to me that the future of geo-political decision making process is undergoing radical change, and input across multiple state, political and cultural boundaries is a necessity in a world where every major decision directly impacts a global society. A particularly sleepless night found me at my keyboard, in an attempt to capture as much of those ideas as possible.
Background
We live on the precipice of globalization, where our belief systems along with the fabric of our social, political and economic status are no longer separate and independent, but interconnected and influenced both directly and indirectly by one another. For the first time in the history of mankind, ubiquity of information has given rise to an unparalleled global awareness, where the interconnectedness of today's global interactive communications infrastructures promises to create a world-stage for opinion and group decision process. The net result is a 'Global Consciousness' consisting of thoughts that are nearly instantaneously transmitted, replicated and absorbed into the consciousness and thought processes of others. The purpose of this essay is to explore the tools, infrastructure and processes required to accelerate this global consciousness, whereby at any moment in time the world's thoughts, questions, problems and answers are captured and transmitted, discussed and resolved on a global level.
Assumptions and Theories
 Humans strive for equality with the same ferocity that chaos confronts order.
Life is neither fair nor balance, equality and harmony a law, but where human passion and desire lie, so lies energy and action.
Information is the tool that exposes inequality and imbalance.
Wherever information uncovers imbalance, real or perceived, there is an equal and opposite human desire to balance it.
Concept
If two minds are better than one, then two million minds are better than two. Whether making small personal decisions or world changing ones, the more processing power put to the problem the faster and better informed the resolution. In the computer world, parallel processing provides a mechanism of scaling computational power by allowing multiple processors to simultaneously compute different parts of a larger problem. If connected properly, is not each individual mind a 'processor' in the world's first real human super computer? The interstitial superhighway exists, but higher level protocols designed to coordinate and connect individual thoughts at a level contemplated in this essay have yet to emerge.
If what we think influences how we act, and what we think is increasingly influenced by what others think through a rise in the availability of information, then why not build a system designed to coordinates and channel the independent and inefficient redundancies of human thought into a system which can be used to foster better decision making and consensus building. If for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, then the bigger the action, the more carefully we need to contemplate our decisions, and the more useful this system becomes on a global stage.
The concept of GC1 is to build a system or protocol that leverages existing communications networks to facilitate the construct of a Global Consciousness. To build a communications infrastructure that coordinates the world's collective processing power to resolve the problems that challenge it, where the gravity of any particular issue draws automatically upon an increasingly larger collection of individuals to process and create resolution.
Done correctly, this system would become the backbone of the world's consciousness, and directly impact every decision of every individual, group and government in the world.
Rights
As with any idea constituting far-reaching potential, this concept can be mishandled by those that wish to manipulate the potential power of such a system. Therefore, I believe it is monumentally important that any implementation must be developed in the open, with a conscious and rigorous adherence to some basic principals and understanding of human rights. This system must be architecturally designed to thwart any potential corruption and manipulation, and capable of ensuring at least two unalienable rights:
1. Everyone has a right to live, free of fear
2. Everyone has a right to think and pronounce their thoughts without consequences, provided they in no way they violate or cause to be violated Human Right #1.
What is a Thought?
For purposes of this paper, a thought is any idea, expression or question that can be communicated in writing in a manner easily understood, distributable, archivable, searchable and or otherwise made available to others via any communications network. A thought may or may not be linked to the demographics of the poster at their choosing.
It is anticipated that this system would automatically determine which thoughts collectively interested the most people and would automatically filter to the top and thereby be made visible to more and more people.
Thoughts endure, even if they have only limited applicable life
How It Might Work
GC1, in its simplest form, might take the form of a protocol which is optimized to describe a thought, its format, its routing and the mechanisms by which it is aggregated and reported on.
Take for example a recent question such as, "Should the US bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks on NY?" This is a question that is being both asked and opinions formed by nearly everyone in the world. While different socio-political groups might answer this question differently, collectively, there is a 'world-opinion', and whether this opinion is taken into account or not by the groups or individuals responsible for action, these opinions WILL result in action affecting the final outcome. If GC1 existed today, this question, and the opinion of everyone who cared to process this question, would be collectively surveyed, instantly propagated and universally known by all.
Done right, this system would be self-regulating, distributed and architecturally designed to eliminate even the possibility of manipulation or centralized control. The system would be capable of filtering and routing thoughts only to individuals who cared to see them. The system would be able to do this for millions of thoughts simultaneously, and capable of showing which thoughts were consuming the collective 'processing power' of the world (a TOP TEN THOUGHTS worldwide for example). Over time, the system would represent an archive of the collective human consciousness, think of it as the ultimate knowledge base.
It is contemplated that the system would take on an overly simplified initial user interface, one in which the concept would be easily and instantly recognized, but which would grow over time in sophistication, providing increasingly more powerful ways to connect thoughts, survey opinion and provide feedback and actionable recommendations.
One of the major hurdles in constructing such a system is identifying ways in which only the issues, questions, concerns and/or thoughts that are of interest to an individual are ever viewed by that individual, knowing that these will change over time on a case by case basis.
The system must be easily and instantly accessible, while not intrusive so as to diminish its value or cause itself to be removed.
The system would likely collect demographic information over time in an unassuming and subtle manner, whereby this information was used to better route and aggregate thoughts into consensus and reporting.
Applications
The implications and potential applications of such a system are staggering. Corporations spend billions annually in collecting information from consumers to track preferences, trends and desires. Even more is lost each year in poorly made decisions related to products and services that ultimately fail as a result of poor intelligence.
What if General Motors, contemplating a particularly 'radical' new car design, was able to instantly survey 100,000 would be customers and automobile fanatics?
It's a well known fact that successful politics require a keen and timely understanding of public opinion. Polling, today accomplished through dispirit means, has no centralized repository and no single method of dissemination. Today's methodologies rely on "sampling", which is 'statistically' valid, but costly, time consuming and in many respects archaic by today's Internet standards.
The Connection to Jabber
While ultimately, I believe that this system, or protocol should be transport agnostic, there are some obvious connections to Jabber. I think that XML should be used as the protocol foundation, and I think that routing and 'push' to the desktop are also key elements of the a system which Jabber is particularly well suited to facilitate.
While the system and many components of it should be accessible through HTTP, the web's passive approach to content delivery is insufficiently aggressive to incubate such a system into popular use. I think the Jabber client approach is much more likely to contain the usability attributes required to introduce this system into societies daily routines.
Well, that about captures the thinking to date... Hopefully now I can get a good nights sleep!
 
Created 10/23/2001; 10:07:47 AM. Updated Friday, November 9, 2001 at 3:58:38 PM
(C) 2008 Andre Durand - Federated Identity Management
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