Welcome to the Age of Protocol vs Empire and the emergence of Global Intercognition Clans. Which side will you be on?
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Welcome to the Age of Protocol vs Empire…
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Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger
Olympic Gold Medalist in the Global Cognition Grid Cluefactor Competition, @DeWitt Clinton -- in unprecedented open collaboration with one of the most amazing global teams ever self-selected and assembled -- is "Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger."
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Google Eywa: What's Buzz Got To Do With It?
IMO, this buzz experiment is like a first, if awkward attempt, at enabling a fledgling global cognition grid to help us find our own true selves through all the amazing connections that we didn't even know we already had in place. There are always plenty of caveats to any upbeat Utopian perspective, of course; however, there are also plenty of problems with a perspective that insists that the current status quo is the best of all possible worlds.
If the panoptic Google Eywa stays entirely open to universal cross-checking and auditing by anyone, any time, there is an actual chance that we could engineer it so that it can't become evil and might even help us humans to become more authentically self-realized in the process.
I also propose that the GCG can and should become a Harry Potter-like Sorting Hat that filters us humans and configures us into research and project teams for maximum happiness and productivity in discovering and understanding the nature of our universe while enabling us to each explore and establish our most adaptive roles within it. Such ideas have been the subject of science fiction for decades; today, to borrow technoprogressive prose from the inimitable Dr. J, the tangible means for "a sexy, high-tech, radically democratic" participatory #futuretechture are clearly at hand. The GCG design-build decision is no longer a matter of whether we will be able to do so; but rather, whether or not We Will To Do So.
Back in the present tense, this means that we should be able to have a fairly high degree of confidence in the fact that if Google Eywa (well, an optimally configured Buzz recommendation engine, for now) lets someone through to participate in our thought-stream, it's probably a fairly benign, or even potentially really helpful entity. This is not yet the case and is a fundamentally crucial design criteria.
Parenthetical Inset: I'd love to read many more essays from many more perspectives on implications for such a scenario. Feel free to write them, or if already written, simply point to your work in the comments here. I know that's a practice frowned upon in today's concept of The Bogged Down Blog; however, this site is not about creating another pop culture blog comment repository; it's about learning how to figure out the UFIS concept.
Why does all this interest me? You'd have to scan this entire stream and web site for the full answer, but one simple reason is that I believe in the work over at SIAI and I am increasingly convinced that only the right Source Code Design and Audit Processes in the eventual AGI can save us from our individual and collective lesser, suboptimal ourselves.
Finally, it certainly seems that this post -- which I will continue to reflect as far and wide as possible, to eliminate FUD -- provides grounds for more than a little positive trans-cortical uplift. -
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Yahoo Buzz: Total BuzzKill
Wow, so apparently there is no way to get MY CONTENT out of Yahoo's Totally Self-Contained little beehive otherwise known as Yahoo Buzz. It's so pathetically lame, I'm not even going to link to it.
How many more non-starter closed cul-de-sacs do we have to endure before we reach the Point of Know Return of the fully transparent and portable open grid that we've all imagined and worked to build over the past half century?
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How to help readers click through to content
How to help readers click through to content is an ongoing challenge for communicators across all disciplines. Particularly with this P2 format of blogging, a new method of composition may evolve, as we finally have the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds: the immediacy of status updates and the deeper meaning of context. The decoupling of these has been a complaint from the very birth of Twitter and Facebook. In 2010, with the interdependent infrastructure of wordpress, rssCloud, wave federation protocol, status.net, and others, we may finally begin to see the emergence of open, integrated network fabric of free agents and collaborators. This is an absolute prerequisite for achieving the next steps in improving the global cognition grid. While there is no single solution or plan for the grid, it does continue to evolve organically, as a result of this exciting era in the evolution of human communication.
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With All These Accelerating Advances, Can You Still Write Science Fiction Set In The Future? (rev 0.1)
The eponymous io9 poses the question.
I propose, in short, no.
Perhaps our new job is non-stop education, outreach, and distributed peer-to-peer augmented psychotherapies to help other humans adjust and adapt to The Hybrid Century, as well. If the recent townhall tantrum trend is any indication, it will take many generations to even begin to bring humanity up to speed on the obvious and dramatic differences in scale and function between gray goo and swarming microbots.
So wait, let me rephrase that, the answer isn't so much "no" as it is, "not in the sense you once thought." In other words, there's a diminishing return on racking our brains to INVENT communication satellites, Star Trek replicators, and matrixy singularities; especially if all existence as we know it is actually a simulation, right?
The fact of the matter is, none of us truly has a grip on where the hell all of these developments are leading, but we certainly can see that the ever exploding explosions of everyday advances are taking us to wherever the hell "there" is at an accelerating; not flat or decelerating rate. Argue about the shape of the curve, it doesn't matter. What matters is the trajectory and how we bring our allegedly enlightened Human Values to bear upon this journey set so plainly before us.
Bickering over whether or not specific scenario high resolution realization of occurs -- will "THE" singularity happen or not -- also simply does not matter. All such are, and always have been, highly evolved and Focused Instructional and Motivational Tools, boys and girls; so let us rather write science fiction scenarios within the seemingly known universe of unpredictable outcomes of seemingly all-known unknowns; let us rather help one another to get over ourselves, accept ourselves, find ourselves in the Shared Fate of each and every one another, regardless of whether or not Gort, Hal, Neo, or Colossus actually awaits us on the other side.
Isn't that more than Good Enough for a fictional future palette? What more do you want, oh forlorn and self-pitying writer-blocked human? Put your Once and Ever Might Imagination to work envisioning and describing futures wherein every human has More Than Enough, without suppression or oppression of any other. If that doesn't provide our allegedly superior SciFi minds an infinite palette of possibilities, then perhaps we have only our own stunted, un-augmented, un-transhuman imaginations to blame.
After all the dreaming, it's the DOING that matters. And perhaps in between dreaming, only DOING can open us all up to the next imaginable unimaginable final frontier.
"This is the real news of our century. It is highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever experienced or dreamt of. To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another so that everybody can enjoy the whole earth. And it can all be done by 1985." – R. Buckminster Fuller, The World Game, 1971 -
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The Rising Primary User Interface to the Global Cognition Grid Wars
The war is already on, it just isn't widely reported, yet. It is by now long known that folks like @scobleizer have taken a stand in the Friendfeed vs. Twitter as Primary User Interface to the Global Cognition Grid debate. Beginning today, with great gratitude to @yongfook for both the inspiration and the code, I take my stand here http://tr.im/lifestream Please let me remind that I do in fact love all of these new Extended, Augmented, Collective Cognition Tools; they are almost all great, a staggering number are indeed vital, and all are part of the evolution and emergence of this Hybrid Century, wherein we find ourselves, today. However, atomically, even as we become more Borg ... ish ... it is YOUR life and YOUR stream. From this, it's fairly straightforward to further deduce that I was therefore very happy to read @davewiner 's Not Earthshaking Announcement http://tr.im/notearthshaking -- which, if I intuit correctly, may operate something like an @feedly firehose, a Friendfeed-like stream of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" similar to what Feedly presents in magazine format? -- In any event, I surely look forward to the emergence of that project's new perspectives, practices, and capabilities. Onward!
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