Business - Written Sunday, November 2, 2008 by Jeff DeChambeau - 4 Comments

Could Mass Collaboration Generate Life?

Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream is one of my favorite blogs. Earlier this week, Mr. Kelly wrote a post titled Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, in which he seriously entertains the idea that the Internet (working as a distributed brain) with cloud-based software (roughly analogous to the mind) could develop into a self-aware, semi-autonomous superorganism.

Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,”  — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual. Continue…