Kevin Kelly has a new post on the Two strands of connectionism. Essentially he writes about connections between people, the social networks we are all part of, enabled by machines, but primarily driven by people and the data we generate. The second is the connection between machines, what I would call ubiquitous computing. Machines and server farms, sensors and mobile devices, etc.
The main point of his post is that there is a gap between these human connections and the machine connections and that it will/should come together. I didn’t quite dig the rest of the post. It seemed to vanish into the kind of Utopian/futuristic vision that sometimes make me scratch my head. That said, the basic point is well taken, and makes a lot of sense. I have some ideas about what this will end up looking like, but to some extent the exact nature is immaterial. We have a the challenge, the goal, of taking these streams of machine information, and the collective intelligence arising from them, and combining those with human intelligence. One way to do so, is to convert these streams of machine-info into forms that allow humans to take better decisions, into forms they can meaningfully consume and return to the “machine”, forming a continuous feedback loop that, hopefully, allows us to solve meaningful problems.
One thing is for sure. Our current approaches to managing information will not work at all.
Man Machine
The main point of his post is that there is a gap between these human connections and the machine connections and that it will/should come together. I didn’t quite dig the rest of the post. It seemed to vanish into the kind of Utopian/futuristic vision that sometimes make me scratch my head. That said, the basic point is well taken, and makes a lot of sense. I have some ideas about what this will end up looking like, but to some extent the exact nature is immaterial. We have a the challenge, the goal, of taking these streams of machine information, and the collective intelligence arising from them, and combining those with human intelligence. One way to do so, is to convert these streams of machine-info into forms that allow humans to take better decisions, into forms they can meaningfully consume and return to the “machine”, forming a continuous feedback loop that, hopefully, allows us to solve meaningful problems.
One thing is for sure. Our current approaches to managing information will not work at all.
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