The Emerging Global Brain

Abstract

Now it’s time to return to some of the more far-out ideas introduced in the Prologue, and pursue them a little more systematically. As you may recall, I proposed there that there are two Internet-related Metasystem Transitions in our future: first the transition to Internet Intelligence, and then the transition to the Global Brain. The first one will come soon: probably in the next decade or two, we will see a Metasystem transition involving the evolution of the Net into a full-fledged, largely autonomous, globally distributed intelligent system — a wild computing system. Phase Two Global Brain begins. And as this occurs, we will see this Internet AI network gradually wend itself further and further into human affairs, yielding, eventually, another Metasystem Transition, involving the emergence of a synergetic, symbiotic global intelligent system, incorporating machine and human intelligence into a single continuum of thought — a human-digital (and hopefully a human-digital-ecological) global brain. Phase Two Global Brain ends, Phase Three begins.