Towards a Global Brain: techniques to support the emergence of collective intelligence on the Net

Towards a Global Brain: techniques to support the emergence of collective intelligence on the Net

Francis Heylighen Center Leo Apostel, Free University of Brussels
Principia Cybernetica


This presentation will review a number of concepts and methods that can help us to design a distributed information system with emerging intelligence, i.e. a system that can solve more problems than the sum of problems solved by its human and electronic subsystems. These conceptual tools include: associative networks, learning webs, spreading activation, semantic link typing, data mining, software agents, work flow and shared workspaces. The metaphor that helps us to integrate these disparate techniques is the "global brain": a view of web links and communication channels as neurons in the collective nervous system of humanity. Studying the evolution and self-organization of the human brain may then help us to understand, control and design the emergence of an intelligent net.