User:Clementvidal/Global brain

Global brain refers to a concept relating to shared human knowledge; the sum total of all thoughts, creations, and inventions of the human mind. According to this abstract concept, the accomplishments and thoughts of humanity can be considered as a single mind, culture transmitting thoughts from individual to individual as the brain passes these signals from neuron to neuron. Such an abstract concept has now found application in other domains including innovation management.

History of the idea
According to the Global Brain FAQ the idea dates back at least to the Ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages. The analogy was also used in a mythological context to describe the Hindu caste system. The current use of the term began with the publication of Peter Russell's book The Global Brain in 1983. Also see related writings by Sri Aurobindo.

History of the global brain
According to Howard Bloom's Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century, the global brain began shortly after life first evolved on this planet roughly 3.85 billion years ago. By 3.5 billion years ago, there were at least eleven species of bacteria living in colonies of trillions. Bloom cites the pioneering work of physicist and microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob, who showed in his 1998 paper Bacterial wisdom, Gödel's theorem and creative genomic webs that bacterial colonies function as collective intelligences. In the early seas of earth, Bloom demonstrates, those collective intelligences swapped information in the form of genetic scraps. Bacterial colonies cooperated, competed, and made war using weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons. Battle, Bloom says, is one of the most intense forms of information exchange. Even among microorganisms, to win it's often necessary to know and ape your enemy's ways. So even conflict contributed to the web of primitive intellect. Meanwhile wind and waves carried gene fragments coding for new strategic techniques and upgrades around the globe, synapsing the creatures of earth's early seas into the first global brain.

The global brain as a higher level of evolution
The emergence of such a higher order system may be called a "metasystem transition" (a concept introduced by Valentin Turchin) or a "major evolutionary transition" (see Szathmary and John Maynard Smith, Nature, 16 March 1995).

The global brain as the context for 'global network-centric innovation'
With more and more companies 'looking outside' for innovative ideas and technologies and the Internet and other communication technologies lowering the barriers to global collaboration, the context for product, service, and technological innovation has become 'open', 'democratic', 'networked', 'collaborative', and 'global'. The concept of 'global brain' thus relates to the vast creative potential that lies outside company boundaries -- a rich and diverse global innovation network comprising of customers, suppliers, amateur and independent inventors, scientists, academic researchers, experts, innovation brokers, etc. A new book The Global Brain by Satish Nambisan and Mohanbir Sawhney to be published by Wharton School Publishing in Nov 2007 talks about how companies can partner with the 'global brain' to enhance their growth and performance.

Wikipedia

 * Companies that use a global brain would already have access to the knowledge held by the rest of the world, so they would no longer need non-fiction publications, consultants or specially educated employees (recall how calculators and spell-checkers have already obsolesced tiny pieces of these industries).


 * Today, we have only pieces of prototypes: information aggregating markets, collaborative filtering systems, social networking systems, (etc.), so the market is best characterized as "early stage".


 * Wikipedia is the dominant online volunteer community collaborating on a shared knowledge base.

Reference: factbites.com

Other names for this concept
Different people have proposed many different names for this concept of a cognitive system at the planetary level:
 * global mind
 * Hyper-Enlightenment by Open Media Center's David Myers
 * noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin)
 * planetary brain (Joël de Rosnay)
 * social brain
 * super-brain (Francis Heylighen)
 * World Brain (H. G. Wells)