tag archive: artificial intelligence

Kevin Kelly: Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism

Haven’t read the whole article yet, but good stuff so far:

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?

So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with …

Celebrating Software Freedom Day: Check out some newly emancipated AI Java example code

An objection I’ve had to many programming books and web sites is that they don’t make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

A writer of instructional material may be doing so to earn some money, but I hope he or she is also motivated by the desire to help others. I think the best authors and teachers are motivated strongly by this desire. And if this is the case, I think it reasonably follows that the author of a programming work should want their students to be able to freely use their source code in the students’ own creations.

I was happy to exchange words recently with an author who was open and responsive to making his sample code available under a free license. With tomorrow being Software Freedom Day, it seemed like a good time …