Extelligence in the context of Hyperconnectivity in the Internet of Things (IoT)
“As the Internet of things advances, the very notion of a clear dividing line between reality and virtual reality becomes blurred, sometimes in creative ways.” — Geoff Mulgan
As a technologist and a geek, I like the time I live in. Consider the following facts:
- I can learn any new technology within weeks or even days without the need of attending a physical classroom-based course.
- The entire sum of knowledge is available for me at my fingertips.
- I can contribute to the vision of the world of tomorrow much effectively, than what I could have done 10 years back.
- My quality of work is not necessarily defined by where I’m at this point in time.
In a nutshell, the human is becoming omniscient and omnipotent if you consider “knowledge is power”, and access to it readily is even more powerful.
You’d ask me, why I am bringing this up? Who even cares to introspect into this newly found power? This type of access to knowledge has become a norm, so why even bother understanding how is this created or how we consume it?
There is only one reason — This knowledge is external to us. We haven’t created it as an individual and we don’t have this entire sum total of knowledge stored in our brains. However, we have access to it whenever we want.
Actually, there is another reason. As humans, we are not strong enough to rely on ourselves to take care of all the adverse conditions. We always need to fall back on others for their intelligence and knowledge.
This is a good time to transition into setting the stage clear for creating an analogy for the IoT devices which can be compared to humans. IoT devices are highly constrained. They can’t do everything by themselves. They can’t protect themselves from attacks. They can’t always perform functions like encryption and anything similar which is processing and memory intensive. They literally have to use External Intelligence to take care of their basic needs.
Enter the powerful world of Extelligence
Extelligence is a term coined by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in their 1997 book Figments of Reality. They define it as the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media. They contrast extelligence with intelligence, or the knowledge and cognitive processes within the brain.
Although Cohen’s and Stewart’s respective disciplines are biology and mathematics, their description of the complicity of intelligence and extelligence is in the tradition of Jean Piaget, Belinda Dewar, and David A. Kolb. Philosophers, notably Popper, have also considered the relation between subjective knowledge (which he calls world 2), objective knowledge (world 1) and the knowledge represented by man-made artifacts (world 3). [ Wikipedia article on Extelligence]
Other terms which are closely related to Extelligence are — External Intelligence, Hive Mind, Group Intelligence, Collective Knowledge, and so on.
The Waggle Dance
Bees are very intelligent creatures. They work tirelessly towards finding the source of nectar and then converting it to honey. They at the same time take care of 100s of housekeeping activities in the beehive.
One question always puzzled a lot of scientists — When few bees find a source of nectar, how do they tell this back to the rest of the swarm.
The answer lies in the Waggle Dance — the name refers to the dance-like movement of honey bees after their return to the beehive. This is the direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates direction; if it moves vertically the direction to the source is directed towards the Sun. The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance.
Bees are also known to be using the sun’s position as a navigation tool to guide them to their hive. We can say they have Trigonometry embedded in their DNA.
These are few of the ways nature has blessed the bees with extraordinary ability to use the collective knowledge of the swarm. In this mode of working as a team, Communication and External Knowledge play a major role, and can many times help them survive.
At the pinnacle of Extelligence, bees demonstrate, the entire hive work as a single organism. Moreover, it seems to have a mind of its own, and hence the term “Hive Mind”.
Blurring Boundaries in the Hyperconnected World
Hyperconnectivity is a term invented by Canadian social scientists Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman, arising from their studies of person-to-person and person-to-machine communication in networked organizations and networked societies. The term refers to the use of multiple means of communication, such as email, instant messaging, telephone, face-to-face contact, and Web 2.0 information services. [ Wikipedia article on Hyperconnectivity]
We were already using all these means of connecting with each other and with machines, we rely on. As if that wasn’t enough, the Internet of Things (IoT) came in the picture. IoT devices are becoming part of our lives to such extent that we can’t ignore them.
Bringing Extelligence into IoT Devices using an IoT Middleware like ROOF (Realtime Onsite Operations Facilitation)
ROOF is an IEEE Standard in progress and is being worked on under IEEE P1931.1.
ROOF is a federated networking and computational paradigm for the Internet of Things (IoT) that is always available for Realtime Onsite Operations Facilitation (ROOF). It’s an IoT Middleware that aims to solve some of the pressing problems of IoT deployments today: Interoperability, Usability, Scalability, and Security for the constrained devices of IoT while allowing the innovation in building the IoT applications.
It can help in designing realtime, scalable, secure and innovate IoT applications by augmenting the power of IoT devices. This is done by creating a framework for external intelligence and knowledge which IoT devices can use.
In this Spatiotemporal Event Handling model, bring an IoT Middleware removes the necessity of the IoT devices to directly talk to the Fog or to the Cloud. This reduces the complexity of the IoT devices and of the entire network. Moreover, bringing an IoT Middleware like ROOF helps bring the Extelligence factor to the devices where they can delegate most of their non-functional tasks.
Conclusion and tl;dr
Extelligence or External Intelligence is a powerful form of knowledge or intelligence. This “sum of human intelligence” or “collective knowledge” is the currency for success for today’s citizens in the hyperconnected world.
The principle of Extelligence applies to the constrained IoT devices as well. IoT devices, when they get help in terms of external intelligence and knowledge, tend to outperform their tasks.
An IoT Middleware like ROOF can make the IoT devices and their use cases much more powerful by adding the Extelligence factor.
Special Thanks
I’d like to thank Syam Madanapalli for the excellent figures he has created as part of our IEEE P1931.1 working group activities. That took off one thing from my mind while writing this article.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
