Only Robot Can Free Information
Past
Human + Human
In nineteenth-century London, after people read newspaper providing by telegraph and newsboys, they gossiped about the murder occurring a few blocks away. The private detective, Sherlock Holmes, started reasoning out who the killer was with his fully functional brain.
He gathered information, such as relationships, from newspaper and his poor client, but the big picture of the incident cannot be concluded by these few clues. However, the only way to prove the deduction is taking the initiative.
The street children he hired to collect and trace the sign became his own medium. They had been trained for telling valuable information apart from a large number of sources; therefore, Holmes obtained the truth thanks to his powerful and intelligent agents.
“It is the unofficial force — the Baker Street irregulars.” — Sherlock Holmes
Holmes extended himself into everywhere in the city so that he could actively extract information with only a few shillings to reward his street children.
So, what would happen if he can access modern technology (e.g. smartphone)? Would he turn irregulars into web crawlers or AI robots to collect those information he needs?
Future
Human + Machine
In Christopher Nolan’s movie: Interstellar, we can extend our imagination about what a robot can do for the human and help them to finish their important mission.
Especially TARS played an important role in the movie as an information collector and medium from spaceship to blackhole. He helped human figure out all the information they need in the “Box”, then translate those Morse Code into important information to the human in order to survive. This movie inspired me thinking of few questions:
What if there is a robot can collect all the information we need for us like TARS without any barrier, and it can learn how we digest the information? Can one absorb all the information faster and more accurate, or it can even find a new way of digesting for me?
Furthermore, what would happen if people can follow my robot (part of my brain) on a social network? Anyone who has a smartphone or computer can follow this robot or even clone it to your account deconstruct it then train it.
Now
Why machine? Why now?
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
(From Aaron Swartz, archive.org)
It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of time. We are so lucky to born in this amazing era, having a pocket supercomputer, pad, laptop… there are so many tools that we can use it to access almost unlimited information and knowledge on the internet.
Yes, almost.
Because information has a price, not only academic papers, scientific research but also MEDIA. And it has been gapping whole society, including finance, education…..for a long long time. We want to break this, we believe free information can erase those barriers.
The world needs free information now, and we deeply believe robot is the only way to make it happen. The knowledge should be available for every person regardless of their income, social status, background and etc.
The machine is the only answer to free information, the machine can fight inequality in information access across the world. The social machine can bring the human to the whole new level of the information age, the social machine can share one’s brain.
We are building the machine.
We are building the social machine.
