2008 Apr 25 - Fri
Latent Brain Power
In an article or two ago, I made a brief mention of
MapServer in relation to
throwing together a mixture of data types regarding Bermudian Visual Features.
I was thinking a little later on that this exercise becomes one of building a
spatial/temporal complex of meanings. I then got to thinking about this visually. What if
one could take a slider or a bounding box and zoom in on a part of the island, and then zoom
around in time space. It would be interesting to see what the hot spots were, and what they
were about. It would become what could be described as a space/time based Wikipedia for
Bermuda, or any location for that matter. Information is one thing, but navigating it and
relating it is another matter entirely.
Something like this would only be possible through the
Collective Intelligence of users.
The article mentions that many many people have contributed many many hours to making
wikipedia the huge compendieum that it is.
But the article goes on to say that there are still many many people out there who have
more time on their hands than they know what to do with. Lots of people have hobbies, do
public service, take care of families, etc. But how many more vegetate on the
couch in front of the 'one eyed monster' known as the TV?
This reminds me of the fact that there must be millions of computers out there sitting
idle, wasting energy, waiting for something to do. Instead of illigimately using these free
cycles to spew forth harmful spam, what if we could harness them into catalogueing, or
storage, or analysis, or ...
Seagate just sold its billionth hard drive. If we take a billion drives times a billion
bytes each (probably a woefully inadequate estimate), that is a lot of data, and probably
underutilized at that.
It is also said that we, as humans, utilize less than ten percent of our brain capacity.
And if less than ten percent of the population is mentally active (doing something other
than passively watching preprogrammed images pass through their retinas into the blackhole
of vicarious experience), that represents lots of wasted capability for enhancing humanity.
Robert Heinlein, in one of his science fiction stories, suggested that if we took the top
one percent of mankind and moved them off world to start new digs, what remained would be
unable to take care of themselves in any organized fashion. Not that we are very good at it
as it is.
Anyway, on a positive note, the article seems to think that things might be improving by
saying:
Just as people "woke up" during the Industrial Revolution, society is now beginning to
emerge from its sitcom-induced stupor to see its cognitive surplus as an asset rather than a
crisis. As a result, people are turning to Web 2.0 technologies as an outlet for that
brain-power surplus.
With appropriately designed interaction tools, we have a
reasonable hope for carving out enough of ... the collective goodwill of the citizens to
create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing five years ago. This isn't the sort of
thing that society grows out of. It is something that society grows into."
I'm liking what I am hearing.
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