The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary

information and communications technology Information and communications technology (ICT) is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications ( telephone lines and wireless signals) and computer ...

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

that interconnects all

humans Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more

information Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random ...

, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a

brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a ve ...

for the planet

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...

Basic ideas

Proponents of the global brain hypothesis claim that the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system that functions as part of the collective

nervous system In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes ...

of the planet. The intelligence of this network is collective or

distributed Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations *Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...

: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. Therefore, no one can command or control it. Rather, it self-organizes or emerges from the dynamic networks of

interactions Interaction is action that occurs between two or more objects, with broad use in philosophy and the sciences. It may refer to: Science * Interaction hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition * Interaction (statistics) * Interactions o ...

between its components. This is a property typical of

complex adaptive systems A complex adaptive system is a system that is '' complex'' in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. It is '' adaptive'' in that the indiv ...

. The

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

in particular resembles the organization of a brain with its web pages (playing a role similar to neurons) connected by

hyperlinks In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wi ...

(playing a role similar to synapses), together forming an associative network along which information propagates. This analogy becomes stronger with the rise of

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

, such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

, where links between personal pages represent relationships in a

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

along which information propagates from person to person. Such propagation is similar to the spreading activation that neural networks in the brain use to process information in a parallel, distributed manner.

History

Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by

Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesla ( ; ,"Tesla"
''

Peter Russell in his book ''The Global Brain''. How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by

Gottfried Mayer-Kress Gottfried is a masculine German given name. It is derived from the Old High German name , recorded since the 7th century. The name is composed of the elements (conflated from the etyma for 'God' and 'good', and possibly further conflated with ) a ...

in 1995, while the first

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by

Francis Heylighen Francis Paul Heylighen (born 27 September 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (the Dutch-speaking Fr ...

and Johan Bollen in 1996. Reviewing the strands of intellectual history that contributed to the global brain hypothesis,

distinguishes four perspectives: ''“organicism”'', ''“encyclopedism”'', ''“emergentism”'' and ''“evolutionary cybernetics”''. He asserts that these developed in relative independence but now are converging in his own scientific re-formulation.

Organicism

In the 19th century, the sociologist

Herbert Spencer Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. Spencer originated the expression " survival of the fi ...

saw society as a

social organism Social organism is a sociological concept, or model, wherein a society or social structure is regarded as a "living organism". The various entities comprising a society, such as law, family, crime, etc., are examined as they interact with other e ...

and reflected about its need for a nervous system. Entomologist William Wheeler developed the concept of the ant colony as a spatially extended organism, and in the 1930s he coined the term

superorganism A superorganism or supraorganism is a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont. Concept The term superorganism is used m ...

to describe such an entity. This concept was later adopted by thinkers such as Gregory Stock in his book Metaman and Joel de Rosnay to describe planetary society as a superorganism. The mental aspects of such an organic system at the planetary level were perhaps first broadly elaborated by palaeontologist and Jesuit priest

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( (); 1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and phil ...

. In 1945, he described a coming “planetisation” of humanity, which he saw as the next phase of accelerating human “socialisation”. Teilhard described both socialization and planetization as irreversible, irresistible processes of ''macrobiological development'' culminating in the emergence of a noosphere, or global mind (see Emergentism below). The more recent

living systems theory Living systems are open self-organizing life forms that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter. In the last few decades, some scientists have proposed that a general living sys ...

describes both organisms and social systems in terms of the "critical subsystems" ("organs") they need to contain in order to survive, such as an internal transport system, a resource reserve, and a decision-making system. This theory has inspired several thinkers, including Peter Russell and Francis Heylighen to define the global brain as the network of information processing subsystems for the planetary social system.

Encyclopedism

In the perspective of encyclopedism, the emphasis is on developing a universal knowledge network. The first systematic attempt to create such an integrated system of the world's knowledge was the 18th century ''

Encyclopédie ''Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers'' (English: ''Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts''), better known as ''Encyclopédie'', was a general encyclopedia publis ...

'' of

Denis Diderot Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the '' Encyclopédie'' along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a promi ...

and

Jean le Rond d'Alembert Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (; ; 16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the '' Encyclopéd ...

. However, by the end of the 19th century, the amount of knowledge had become too large to be published in a single synthetic volume. To tackle this problem,

Paul Otlet Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; ; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of infor ...

founded the science of documentation, now called

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of informatio ...

. In the 1930s he envisaged a

-like system of associations between documents and telecommunication links that would make all the world's knowledge available immediately to anybody.

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

World Brain ''World Brain'' is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938.Wells, H.G. (1938). ''World Brain''. Lond ...

, as it would function as a continuously updated memory for the planet, although the image of humanity acting informally as a more organic global brain is a recurring motif in other of his works. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the

, too, was inspired by the free-associative possibilities of the brain for his invention. The brain can link different kinds of information without any apparent link otherwise; Berners-Lee thought that computers could become much more powerful if they could imitate this functioning, i.e. make links between any arbitrary piece of information. The most powerful implementation of encyclopedism to date is

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

, which integrates the associative powers of the world-wide-web with the collective intelligence of its millions of contributors, approaching the ideal of a global memory. The Semantic web, also first proposed by Berners-Lee, is a system of protocols to make the pieces of knowledge and their links readable by machines, so that they could be used to make automatic inferences, thus providing this brain-like network with some capacity for autonomous "thinking" or reflection.

Emergentism

This approach focuses on the emergent aspects of the evolution and development of complexity, including the spiritual, psychological, and moral-ethical aspects of the global brain, and is at present the most speculative approach. The global brain is here seen as a natural and emergent process of planetary evolutionary development. Here again

attempted a synthesis of science, social values, and religion in his

The Phenomenon of Man ''The Phenomenon of Man'' (french: link=no, Le phénomène humain) is an essay by the French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads t ...

, which argues that the ''

telos Telos (; ) is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of a work of human art. Intentional actualization of potential or inherent purpose,"Telos.''Philosophy Terms'' Retrieved 3 May 2020. ...

'' (drive, purpose) of universal evolutionary process is the development of greater levels of both complexity and consciousness. Teilhard proposed that if life persists then planetization, as a biological process producing a global brain, would necessarily also produce a global mind, a new level of planetary consciousness and a technologically supported network of thoughts which he called the '' noosphere''. Teilhard's proposed technological layer for the noosphere can be interpreted as an early anticipation of the Internet and the Web.

Evolutionary cybernetics

Systems theorists and cyberneticists commonly describe the emergence of a higher order system in evolutionary development as a “

metasystem transition A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control. A metasystem is formed by the integration of a number of initially independent components, such as molecules (as theorized for instance by ...

” (a concept introduced by

Valentin Turchin Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 14 February 1931 in Podolsk – 7 April 2010 in Oakland, New Jersey) was a Soviet and American physicist, cybernetician, and computer scientist. He d ...

) or a “major evolutionary transition”. Such a metasystem consists of a group of subsystems that work together in a coordinated, goal-directed manner. It is as such much more powerful and intelligent than its constituent systems.

has argued that the global brain is an emerging metasystem with respect to the level of individual human intelligence, and investigated the specific evolutionary mechanisms that promote this transition. In this scenario, the Internet fulfils the role of the network of “nerves” that interconnect the subsystems and thus coordinates their activity. The cybernetic approach makes it possible to develop mathematical models and simulations of the processes of

self-organization Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when suff ...

through which such coordination and collective intelligence emerges.

Recent developments

In 1994 Kevin Kelly, in his popular book '' Out of Control'', posited the emergence of a " hive mind" from a discussion of cybernetics and evolutionary biology. In 1996,

and

Ben Goertzel Ben Goertzel is a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society, and chair of Humanity+. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general inte ...

founded the Global Brain group, a discussion forum grouping most of the researchers that had been working on the subject of the global brain to further investigate this phenomenon. The group organized the first international conference on the topic in 2001 at the

Vrije Universiteit Brussel The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) () is a Dutch and English-speaking research university located in Brussels, Belgium.The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is one of the five universities officially recognised by the Flemish government. listof all ...

. After a period of relative neglect, the Global Brain idea has recently seen a resurgence in interest, in part due to talks given on the topic by

Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, C ...

, the Internet forecaster who popularized the term

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

, and

Yuri Milner Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (russian: Юрий Борисович (Бенционович) Мильнер; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He is a cofounder and former c ...

, the social media investor. In January 2012, the Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded at the

to develop a mathematical theory of the “brainlike” propagation of information across the Internet. In the same year, Thomas W. Malone and collaborators from the

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, headed by Professor Thomas W. Malone, that focuses on the study of collective intelligence. The Center for Collective Intelligence b ...

have started to explore how the global brain could be “programmed” to work more effectively, using mechanisms of collective intelligence. The complexity scientist

Dirk Helbing Dirk Helbing (born January 19, 1965) is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. Biography Dirk Helbing studied phy ...

and his NervousNet group have recently started developing a "Planetary Nervous System", which includes a "Global Participatory Platform", as part of the large-scale FuturICT project, thus preparing some of the groundwork for a Global Brain. In July 2017,

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...

founded the company

Neuralink Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Founded by Elon Musk and a founding team of seven other scientists and engineers, the company's headquarters is in the Pioneer Bu ...

, which aims to create a brain-computer interface (BCI) with significantly greater information bandwidth than traditional human interface devices. Musk predicts that artificial intelligence systems will rapidly outpace human abilities in most domains and views them as an existential threat. He believes an advanced BCI would enable human cognition to remain relevant for longer. The firm raised $27m from 12 Investors in 2017.

Criticisms

A common criticism of the idea that humanity would become directed by a global brain is that this would reduce individual diversity and freedom, and lead to mass surveillance. This criticism is inspired by

totalitarian Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...

forms of government, as exemplified by George Orwell's character of " Big Brother". It is also inspired by the analogy between collective intelligence or swarm intelligence and insect societies, such as beehives and ant colonies, in which individuals are essentially interchangeable. In a more extreme view, the global brain has been compared with the

Borg The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the ''Star Trek'' fictional universe. The Borg are cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge ...

, a race of collectively thinking cyborgs conceived by the '' Star Trek'' science fiction franchise. Global brain theorists reply that the emergence of distributed intelligence would lead to the exact opposite of this vision. The reason is that effective collective intelligence requires

diversity Diversity, diversify, or diverse may refer to: Business *Diversity (business), the inclusion of people of different identities (ethnicity, gender, age) in the workforce *Diversity marketing, marketing communication targeting diverse customers * ...

of opinion,

decentralization Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

and individual independence, as demonstrated by

James Surowiecki James Michael Surowiecki ( ; born April 30, 1967) is an American journalist. He was a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page". Background Surowiecki was born in Meri ...

in his book ''

The Wisdom of Crowds ''The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'', published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, ...

''. Moreover, a more distributed form of decision-making would decrease the power of governments, corporations or political leaders, thus increasing democratic participation and reducing the dangers of totalitarian control.

References

External links

on the Principia Cybernetica Web
The Global Brain Institute
at the

{{DEFAULTSORT:Global Brain Cybernetics Global civilization Hypothetical technology Holism Superorganisms Systems theory Theories of history World