Introducing the Global Brain
How ideas spread in 2035
A postcard from Gracey about fake news and real knowledge
June 30, 2035
There are two major differences between knowledge in your world and knowledge in our world:
- The primary knowledge focus in your world is on people, events and scores; our primary focus is on ideas.
- Knowledge in your world flows through a series of influencers; in our world we are able to tap directly into the source of knowledge.
Throughout the history of Western civilisation, all inventions came about because of a desire to reduce the friction involved in moving ideas around and moving physical goods around. Papyrus letters and ink, the printing press, ships, airplanes, trains, newspapers, satellites, TV and radio, telephones, telegrams, mobile phones and the Internet were each new inventions that progressively reduced the friction involved in moving things around. The process of sharing news a hundred years ago with someone on the other side of the world took at least 2 weeks. You had to write a letter, which would be delivered across the ocean via ship and finally taken to the recipient’s door on horseback. Nowadays you can share news with anyone on the planet instantaneously.
With each new leap forward, the method by which news was shared became cheaper, faster and smaller. Today you can share news from the palm of your hand using a smartphone with more computing power than all of NASA had in 1969. In our world, progress has allowed us to remove the technological device completely and we simply tap into the Global Brain directly. We are able to communicate with anyone instantly and we can access any knowledge immediately. You are learning how to do this by using filesharing applications and a concept you call The Cloud. The Cloud is slowly evolving and will soon become The Global Brain — a repository of all the world’s knowledge, accessible by anyone, anywhere.
In your world you are required to interact with technology by typing. A few devices are able to recognise your voice, but many of them are unreliable and the interaction often proves frustrating. In our world, our thoughts connect directly to technology and there is no delay between our request and a response.
Making sense of life in your world is somewhat challenging because you are constantly bombarded with a maelstrom of inconsequential and irrelevant facts and figures: random news events from around the globe, weather and traffic reports, financial analyses, social media updates from people you follow and political talking heads repeating ill-conceived opinions ad nauseam. Micro-snippets of information are the order of the day. One of the characteristics of left brain thinking is to examine each idea or news event as an isolated incident, and so seeing patterns in your world requires a lot of effort.
It’s a common fallacy in your world that everyone only uses 10% of their brain. The reality is that you’re only able to access 10% of the world’s knowledge. Even the most well-educated and intelligent people in your world know very little. That’s because of how the spread of ideas is affected in your world by two factors:
- Influencers (also known as middlemen), and
- The principle of Style over Substance.
In your world it’s assumed that the best ideas — the one’s that are most logical and useful — are the ideas that win. It’s commonly accepted that your national, cultural or religious history evolved because of a process of the best ideas bubbling to the surface. However, even sociologists accept that there’s questionable evidence for this assumption. In short, ideas in your world are spread by people with influence, and what is best for people with influence isn’t always what’s best for everyone else.
In addition, the people who have the best ideas often don’t possess the skills of being influential. As you’ve seen in your own politics, a charismatic senator or presidential candidate often has far worse ideas than their brilliant, but awkward, rival. In your world, the spread of an idea depends on the social power of the initiator.
You see the same thing happening in business in your world, where a product no one needs is marketed so well that it overcomes a healthier, cheaper alternative that fails to excite or compel customers to buy.
When it comes to evaluating ideas in your world, the effects of influencers and style over substance have kept many of your world’s best ideas hidden, and this is significantly slowing your progress. The good news is that you will break through fake news, filter bubbles and cognitive bias as soon as The Global Brain is launched.
The Global Brain maps all of the world’s ideas and shows their connection to other ideas. Anyone can submit ideas quickly and easily and ideas can be sorted by topic, recency, impact and evolutionary progress potential. The visual map is interactive and anyone can navigate and explore to any depth they’d like. There are no influencers in the process of spreading ideas and each person’s Daily Briefing introduces them to new ideas relevant to their level of wisdom. The Global Brain helps us spread ideas and advances our society quickly.
Summary
Your knowledge systems are built and designed for the transmission of facts and figures about people and events. Knowledge in this format has served a left brain dominated society effectively for hundreds of years, but as we developed our right brains, we needed a knowledge system that spread ideas. The Global Brain was our solution.
Questions to Explore
- How do ideas spread? Ask Google
- What is the difference between gatekeepers and platforms of knowledge? Ask Google
- Has social media democratised knowledge? Ask Google
- Has a search engine ever abused their dominance? Ask Google
- Has a social media platform ever secretly manipulated information to influence moods? Ask Google
- What is the Dr. Fox Effect? Ask Google
- What is the strength of weak ties? Ask Google
- How can one break out of online echo chambers? Ask Google
- How does a brain computer interface work? Ask Google
- How can Santiago’s theory of cognition be used to provide a feedback mechanism for a self-regulating society? Ask Google
Global Brain Videos
This talk by Peter Russell in 1983 from his book by the same title, explains how The Global Brain is the natural next step in humanity’s evolution.
What do 24,000 ideas look like? Ecologist Eric Berlow and physicist Sean Gourley apply algorithms to the entire archive of TEDxTalks, taking us on a stimulating visual tour to show how ideas connect globally. This is the essence of The Global Brain.
David Cox, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Computer Science at Harvard, explains how his lab is working with others to reverse engineer how brains learn, starting with rats. The fast-advancing fields of neuroscience and computer science are on a collision course. By shedding light on what our machine learning algorithms are currently missing, this work promises to improve the capabilities of robots — with implications for jobs, laws and ethics.
Postcards from 2035 is a series of profoundly simple interlinking ideas describing life in a highly desirable society, where everything and everyone is advanced, happy, intelligent and problem-free. It’s a blueprint of the world we need to create. The best thing you can do to help us get there is to share with your friends and get the conversation started with the questions this postcard has raised.
