Do not exaggerate the importance of machines

There is a trend, which began several centuries ago since the First Industrial Revolution and it is still a fashion until today. We often tend to exaggerate the importance of machines, and think of this exaggeration to be scientific prediction, though history has repeatedly disapproved the imaginations.

Kevin Kelly, one of my most respected living thinkers, has a recent post titled Two Strands of Connectionism. In the post, Kevin claimed the co-existence of human connections and machine connections on the Web. Kevin thus suggested the future Web to be a balanced network in the middle of the two strands of connectionism. Nevertheless the vision is illuminating, Kevin exaggerated the importance of machines and, inevitably, overlooked the true value of human mind.

Kevin is right on observing the two strands of connectionism. What I do not agree to Kevin is, however, to equalize the importance of the two strands. The danger of this equalization is that it easily misleads people to believe that the Web intelligence is a fair mixture between the collective human intelligence and the collective machine intelligence. In fact, there is only human intelligence on the Web. The so-called machine intelligence is nothing but a steady, lack of self-creative, and embodied portion of the human intelligence. Any exaggeration of the machine intelligence would only lead us to some unrealizable plots that waste our resources and time.

We should be clear that the strand of machine connection is a way of distributing the strand of human connection instead of being another independent set of connections. By this vision, we may grasp the true spirit of World Wide Web evolution, which is essentially an evolutionary reorganization of human intelligence in contrast to constructing certain independent machine intelligence that is beyond humans. The greatness of the Semantic Web is not about building up machine intelligence. By contrast, it is to be able to connect various pieces of human intelligence in the mind of different individual human beings that we can never realize in any other environment except of the Semantic Web. Whether or not understand this distinction could be fundamental and crucial to the success of any Semantic Web business institute.

The Age of Google (4): the future

(The previous installment: Web 2.0)

It is hard to imagine how a barely 10-year-old company has been the logo of our age for several years already. But Google has done it. Google has so far satisfactorily solved two major demands of our age---information overload (through Google search) and generic globalization (through being the leader of Web 2.0).

However, does it mean that Google has become invincible? Sramana Mitra has cautiously denied this supposition, and I agree to her. Google is at its peak. The age of Google is passing.

Negative side of Google

Nothing in this world is perfect; so is Google. Inevitably, here are three major negative impacts Google has brought to this age.

1) loss of think

Is Google changing how our brains physically work? Garett Rogers, however, is not the only one who questions it. Nicholas Carr, a well-known thinker and writer on cutting edge technologies, also asked the same question at The Atlantic. The title of his article is: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Google's corporation mission statement)

Ironically, this divine mission statement of Google is where the problem seats. If we go over the history of mankind, only one another human behavior is comparable to Google's mission, i.e., the behavior of producing fake gods.

Google dreams that one day the interface of google.com might not just be the magic door Ali Baba approached and search queries through the interface would be more than "open sesame." By contrast, the interface would be the Gate towards the God while search queries be individual pleas to the God. When this divine mission would be fulfilled, Google must have had been indistinct to God.

Instructed (implicitly or explicitly) by this philosophy, Google behaves itself like any of the other man-made gods. These man-made gods anesthetize human mind by telling them thoroughly trusting what these gods say. Hence extraordinary, individual thinking becomes discouraged while blind following is encouraged. This is what Nick told that Google is making us stupid since we are losing the intention to think actively because of Google, as many previous man-made gods have done (and are still doing) to us.

2) neglect of individuals

Google's objective Web search policy has overlooked the value of individuals. In general, Google encourages collectivism overtaking individualism.

In the prefect world Google rules, individuals have the right of free speech but their voices may hardly be heard unless the voices have enough large of volume (i.e., enough number of votes on the Web). In general, the Long Tail effect is only applicable to the unpopular topics. To the major popular issues, low voices would simply be neglected as if they are the truly negligible long tails discarding the real quality of content the low voices may have.

The world Google rules is where rich people get richer. Although this philosophy is a common fact in the real world, there is lack of mechanism of balance in the world Google rules to control the spread of the unevenness. In the real world, we have government using its compelling power to make balance between rich and poor. But there is no such a government-like force on the Web Google rules. As the result, the unevenness of Web resource deployment could only be more and more severe. If the age of Google last longer, the Web will be full of all kinds of monopolies while single regular individuals may totally lose (in contrast to gain) their voices.

3) discouragement of creativity

In the world Google advocates, true value is more about popularity than intrinsic personality. That is, it matters less on how valuable the content is. The one that really counts heavily is how much popular a content is linked. Though it is true that many times we may trust public votes from people, which is the secret about the wisdom of crowd, truly novel creation rarely gets popular at the beginning.

In long term, the philosophy represented by the PageRank algorithm is a discouraging factor to human creativity. Many times, we humans indeed intentionally look for unpopular answers to expand our mind. Such a human behavior protects and leverages human creativity. However, Google generally discourages this performance.

Because of the three major negative impacts Google brings, it is unlikely that Google may keep on its incomparable dominance over the Web for long time. Very critically, Google cannot solve these problems by itself because they are based on the fundamental structure of the company. Therefore, the age of Google will pass. It is inevitable.

The future

We must save the Web. By saving the virtual world, we save our real world and eventually ourselves. Google has made great contribution for the Web evolution. When time goes on, however, the negative effect of Google is gradually beating its positive impact. Now it is the time to seek for CHANGE.

Change should be done in varied ways. For example, we must encourage users to think more rather than to search more. Moreover, we need to foster individuals and empower some government-like force to stop the ever-increasing trend of monopolization of information distribution on the Web. At last, we look for the renaissance of delicate semantic analysis over content in contrast to the superficial analysis of link popularity, through which novel creation may become more accessible for people looking for innovations.

Subjective search (represented by such as Mahalo and Delver), Semantic-oriented services (represented by such as Hakia and Open Calais), and think-prompting services (represented by such as Imindi) will be the fresh forces in the next evolutionary trend. Look for better balance between subjectiveness and objectiveness (or between individualism and collectivism), better mixture of meaning accuracy and link popularity, and better blend about active thinking and passive searching will be the main melody of the future Web.

We should not regretted of the passing of the age of Google. Google will remain to be a great company as Microsoft is still. However, we need new forces to lead us to walk beyond Google could lead us. After the age of Google, we will only obtain a new age that is more brilliant.

Referenced resources:

• Imagining the Google Future (CNN Money)
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic)
  
• Is Google changing how our brains physically work? (ZDNet)
• Is Google invincible? (Alt Search Engines)
• Google is God (Buzz Machine)
• Web search is going to change (Alt Search Engines)
  
• Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? (TechCrunch)
• Alternative search engine and the "subjective web" (Alt Search Engines)
• Nick Carr reckons Google’s is not the model to emulate (Nodalities)
• Google vulnerable to alternative search engines? (Read/WriteWeb)
• Is Searching a Social or Solitary Activity? (Alt Search Engines)
• A Struggle Over Dominance and Definition (The New York Times)
• Web search, is Google the ultimate monster? (Thinking Space)
  

Collectivism on the Web

Collectivism emphasizes on human interdependence and the importance of collective. As probably the greatest collective project of mankind in history, World Wide Web engages enormous practices of collectivism. In this article, we take a brief look at several typical examples of these engagements.

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the most well-known engagement of collectivism on World Wide Web. In particular, Web 2.0 advocates have declared "harnessing collective intelligence" to be the touchstone of the Web 2.0 revolution. By definition, collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. If someone feels a little bit puzzled of this definition, here is an alternative explanation that is imprecise but much easier to be understood. Informally, collective intelligence on the Web is the collections of user generated "intelligence".

A keen reader may immediately find an interesting comparison: are there any differences between user generated "intelligence" and user generated "content" (or user generated "data")? On Web 2.0, we have almost mentioned users generation content (UGC) as many times as collective intelligence. In many people's mind, UGC almost equals to the collective intelligence. But the actual meanings between "intelligence" and "content" or "data" are very much different. The intent of "intelligence" is much richer than "content/data". Tim O'Reilly also had briefly mentioned this distinction in one of his earlier post about harnessing collective intelligence.

Content/data is a type of intelligence but at the low end. Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher and pioneer of the constructivist epistemology, had a compact description about intelligence: "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." Content/data provides shallow and unrefined information for people to use. Content/data is often too crude to be efficiently used. Keeping the user generation intelligence at the level of content/data is not enough. This is a problem.

I foresee that the degree of complexity (as well as the degree of efficient usage) of the collective intelligence on the Web is going to evolve with the Web. For example, by tagging content with formal labels that are defined by ontologies, the user generated content/data would evolve to be the user generated knowledge. This is exactly what the vision of Semantic Web wants to bring to us. Moreover, by augmenting formally labeled content with external logic routines, the user generated knowledge would evolve to be the user generated wisdom. By encoding the mechanism of proactiveness into machine computation, the user generated wisdom might evolve to be the user generated creativity. By engaging user generated content/data, knowledge, wisdom, creativity together, we might eventually get the user generated personality, through which the human evolution reaches a new stage of being artificially immortal. Is this path a long way? Yes, there is a long way to go. Is this path an impossible dream? No, it is not. The practice of collective intelligence is converting our society into a virtual world simultaneously from the level of individuals and the level of collective groups.

Collective Behavior

Collective intelligence is not the only practice of collectivism on the Web. Another key practice of collectivism on the Web is the implementation of collective behavior.

Collective behavior is very much difference from collective intelligence. All types of collective intelligences are static and thus they can be easily presented in an explicit way. In comparison, collective behaviors are dynamic and it is difficult to present them in an explicit way. As the result, collective behaviors are much harder to be used than collective intelligences on the Web though in fact at the same time the amount of collective behaviors is much greater than the amount of collective intelligences. The reason of this amount difference is indeed trivial. Every piece of collective intelligence on the Web must be related to at least one human behavior (i.e. the one action that post this piece of information online). The majority of the time, any piece of collective intelligence must be associated with many human behaviors such as reading and writing. With such a large pool of collective behaviors, it is surprising to see that so few actions have been made so far to manage and utilize this large pool.

Fortunately, Web researchers have started to pay their attention to the collective behaviors. The recent proposal of the implicit web is a typical example. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web. The majority of the implicitness on the Web actually belongs to the collective behaviors.

Collective Responsibility

The collective intelligence is a popular concept. The discussion of collective behavior is also not rare. But the rest of practices of collectivism on the Web I am going to discuss are indeed uncommonly. Many readers may not even hear of them before. But all these practices are unexceptionally important and valuable for the evolution of World Wide Web. The first one I introduce is the collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility is a concept, or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions. This concept is particularly important to the study of Internet security.

On the age of Web 2.0 and afterwards, security is no longer a solo issue with the deeper and wider implementation of collectivism. As a result, being innocent may no longer be simply taken as an individual issue. We must start to consider collective responsibility, i.e., some people may have to be punished not due to their own guilty but because they have not actively prohibited the guilty happened regularly in their participated societies. This issue is going to be very much debatable and exciting.

Collective Identity

A collective identity refers to individuals' sense of belonging to a group.

Identity is a tough issue on the Web. Normally, a web user may have varied identities on different sites. These varied identities, however, cause serious problems when people try to organize their information of interest across the boundaries of web sites. To address this problem, web researchers have issued the project OpenID that allows users to use a single ID over the entire Web.

But OpenID, even if it would be a standard over the Web, is not the end of the Web identity issue. Similar to that individual persons have their particular roles in real life, individual identities on the Web must gain their particular social roles in virtual life. The identification of these roles is particularly important when we would start to manipulate human generated information on the Web, i.e. collective intelligence, collective behaviors, etc. Only until humans or machines may identify the social roles of the information producers or owners, these humans or machines may be able to properly manipulate the information. The research of collective identity will focus on the identification of social roles of individual identities.

The collective identities are identities of identities. The study of this issue is another exciting and unexplored field that may cause much attention in the future.

Collective Consciousness

Collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In the other words, the collective consciousness is about machine morality because human consciousness on the Web is handled by machines. The machine morality is not a sci-fi term; this issue is indeed real. Machine morality is the reflection of human morality onto the virtual world.

The implementation of collective consciousness is very much related to all the previously mentioned collective factors. Human consciousnesses are materialized on the Web as static intelligence and dynamic behaviors. Moreover, the collective identities assign social roles for the materialized consciousnesses. The integrity of these materialized consciousnesses is closely related to the level of collective responsibility that is maintained at the meantime. The combination of all these issues compose the intent of the machine morality.

Collective Effervescence

Collective effervescence is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the emotion web site owners want to bring. Collective effervescence represents one word---hype! Collective effervescence is the ultimate goal of implementing collectivism on the Web. At the same time, how much an implementation of collectivism successfully brings collective effervescence into a web site is the fundamental standard that we can measure the quality of the implementations of collectivism. This concept encloses the entire set of collective factors and upgrades the evaluation of collectivism into the computational realm.

Summary

We have discussed several examples of how we may engage practices of collectivism onto the Web. Certainly there could be many other possible practices that are beyond this article. But one thing is certain. Collectivism is a crucial phenomenon on the evolving Web. The study of collectivism on the Web is going to be a critical issue of the Web Science.

YOU: Time Magazine's Person of the Year, and LONG TAIL

The increasing influence of Web 2.0 has permeated the spirit of Long Tail into every aspect of human life. Probably Web 2.0 itself is nothing but the demonstration of Long Tail: an aggregation of nobodies eventually becomes somebody. With this philosophy, the person of the Year 2006 (as elected by the Time Magazine) becomes reasonably understandable. Although YOU are (most likely) a nobody by yourself, YOU can be part of a somebody through the effect of Web 2.0. Therefore, every one of YOU is the person of 2006 because YOU are somebody!

Web 2.0 is changing the world. Long Tail demonstrates its power. In history we have never been so close to the real power of collectivism.

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said that the history was about "Great Man." But every "Great Man" came out of dozens or hundreds of "less greater man," who again came out of thousands or millions of nobodies who were long tails. We often overlook the impact of these long tails because the impact from every one of them is so tiny comparing to the power brought by a "great men."

Fortunately, the rise of Web 2.0 changes the history. The beautiful Web 2.0 allows everybody to have a chance being a "Great Man" through engaging the effect of Long Tail about many others. The great diversity of the Web brings the world tremendous opportunities. Through Long Tail, Web 2.0 constitutes a real fantasy that "I work for everybody; and everybody works for me." Or it may be restated in a more fashion style: I am in your long tail; and you are at my long tail.

So, the person of the year 2006 might better be YOU with a Long Tail!

Referenced resources:

• Long Tail