The Social Mind

By Wayne Brown
The Social Mind
Self Portrait - DALL-E

Several years ago, I sat down and tried to list all the people who had influenced me somehow. When I gave up, there were 200 names on the list. After all, there are 1,000 books in my library, all with indexes listing influences on the author.

But that was "old tech."

In 1969, I imagined a computer system that would hold all the world's knowledge. It would have a natural language interface, and you could talk to it like a person. But it would be nothing like CHAT-GPT. Until recently, I have taken pride in my "visionary" imaginings of something vaguely like the World Wide Web. Really, my idea was a talking Wikipedia, not much more. But as time passed, we started to worry about "information overload."

Having all human knowledge at our fingertips was a mixed blessing ...

But that's now "old tech."

The picture above was created by DALL-E, the sister application of CHAT-GPT.  Both of these applications reference vast amounts of data, including the words, paintings and photographs of more than a billion human beings.

And you can ask it questions. They talk back.

So, who or what is answering? These days, the muddled answer is "an AI." But "AI" is just a computer application. It would seem that the best answer is "everyone" using the application. Before, we talked to thousands of people, but one at a time. With AI we talk to all of them, all at once. Yet the "answers" are specific, giving back more than we put in. A lot more.

It's a group mind. A social mind. Maybe.

That's today. What comes next?

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