Scott Rafer on Collaborative Intelligence

Scott made a comment earlier about Artificial Intelligence, stating basically that the optimistic Singularitarians are mixing up simple (‘Weak’) AI versus (seemingly) complex (‘Strong’) AI, and the potential of Strong AI in software actually happening to propel them to their Rapture of Singularity.*

Scott linked to some thinking he has (see quote below) that I agree will be where we truly get Strong AI like activity – from the Web itself.

Scott mentions aggregation of ‘online gestures’ and ‘collaborative intelligence’. Others have also called it the ‘lazy Web’ – asking a question to a community of real people (not some search robot) that then returns the relevant answer.

Current aggregation of online gestures seems to be still more explicit, requiring a explicit connection to those gestures or some sort of explicit reading of the outcome, say joining the right community or following it via RSS.

I think what Scott is getting at is how to easily link that collective intelligence in a much simpler way, in a way that it happens without any explicit work having to be done, and, of course, he, too, sees mobile tools in the equation.

Yes, I think part of the next wave of the Internet (not to hype, but I feel it’s already started, the current wave already being quotidian) will have this collective intelligence more integrated into our lifestyle than it is today.

Link: Scott Rafer at WINKsite � Blog Archive � My Entire AC2005 Presentation in 7 Words.

I’m committed to working with two startups right now, and there’s a tagging-related company that I might start. All three are working to sum up online gestures in new ways to serve us all better. For Wireless Ink, it’s the gestures of mobile web users. Dave and I think that we can make the mobile web transparent to broadband Internet users in ways it never has been and needs to be. At Delight, it’s the gestures of women, assembled in savvier ways than I’ve seen elsewhere. The Collaborative Intelligence of mobile web users and women will teach us all a lot.

*Scott sorry for being so slow to respond. I wanted to think a bit more about what you said.