Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2160718.2160731
Viewpoint
Programming
the Global Brain
NeW WAyS of combining networked humans and computers—whether they are called collective intel- ligence, social computing,
or various other terms—are already
extremely important and likely to
become truly transformative in domains from education and industry
to government and the arts. These
systems are now routinely able to
solve problems that would have been
unthinkably difficult only a few short
years ago, combining the communication and number-crunching capabilities of computer systems with
the creativity and high-level cognitive
capabilities of people. And all this is
supercharged by the emergent gen-erativity and robust evaluation that
can come from the many eyes of large
crowds of people. As the scale, scope,
and connectivity of these human-computer networks increase, we believe it will become increasingly useful
to view all the people and computers
on our planet as constituting a kind of
“global brain.”
illUStration by John herSey
We still only poorly understand,
however, how to “program” this global
brain. We have some stunning success
stories (such as Wikipedia, Google),
but most applications still fail, or require a long series of trial-and-error refinements, for reasons we only poorly
understand. Because people are involved, programming the global brain
is deeply different from programming
traditional computers. In this View-
point, we will consider this challenge,
exploring the nature of these differences as well as issuing a call to arms
describing open research challenges
that need to be met in order to more
fully exploit the enormous potential of
the global brain.
What makes the Global
Brain Different?
There are already literally hundreds
of compelling examples of the global
brain at work, collectively representing
the contributions of many millions of
people and computers.
3, 10 These range
