Earlier this month, Computerworld reported that 175,000 Parisian high school students will be given free USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software. The school board’s reasons are familiar: closing the Digital Divide, less expensive than MSFT, and legal to copy.

This will be good news to my friend Dave Lane, one of the more evangelical of the open-source supporters. I think, in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone as passionate about what they believe in as he is. And, while I can’t say I get as… exuberant as he does, he has certainly made an impression on me. His arguments about quality and fairness and economics make sense. And yet we can all feel the seemingly overwhelming tide of all things Microsoft pulling us out into the current.

Branton Kenton-Dau, the founder of VortexDNA, is fond of saying that we create our own reality. I’m not sure where he got the concept, but I’ve heard it repeated many times—in books, in seminars, in movies. Don Miguel Ruiz, in ‘The Four Agreements’, refers to the reality that we create for ourselves as a dream.

Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events and holidays.

Tying this to the previous post… yes, we create our own reality. We also create an infinesimal part of all reality, and even though our part is such a microfraction of the whole, the whole couldn’t exist without us.

The dream of the planet (the developed part, not the majority that cares more for clean water than for open-source code), can be felt through the tide of Microsoft. Why is it so difficult to get people to change to open source? Dave must hear this over and over again: “I have to use Microsoft because everyone else is and I have to be compatible with them.” Reasonable excuse? Absolutely. Possible to act differently from of the planet? Definitely. Dave’s hope, I think, and that of others like him, is that so many people become willing to choose a different dream that it becomes the new dream of the planet.

In a post titled, “Google to Rule the Earth”, Duncan Riley writes:

In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

And Duncan’s readers went ballistic.

The whole concept of AI apparently taps into some of our deepest sci-fi-George-Orwell-T2 fears. Surely ‘AI’ means ’self-aware’, and obviously the first thing any ’self-aware’ being would do is ‘blow up the earth’.

Seems to me there’s a massive breakdown in logic somewhere along that train of thought.

Hats off, though, to ‘xoc’, who wrote this insightful comment:

Personally, I can’t see how millions of humans connected via the internet could be anything other than a form of AI - a kind of meta-intelligence. We can never know another’s consciousness, but in our arrogance, we assume we are the highest and only form of intelligence around. We can only guess at intelligence by behaviour. We don’t speak the language of this meta-intelligence, so communication will have to be more basic. Try and turn off the internet, and you’ll find it will fight for life as hard as any human. The only way you could possibly achieve it would be to do all the planning in secret and entirely off-line. If the ‘net got wind of it, it would put a stop to it in no time. Surely fighting for survival is a basic test for sentience.

Thank you, thank you! That’s what I spoke about in my last post—the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts power of millions of small contributions.

There are infinite forms of intelligence out there, and the likelihood of the movie scenario is so highly improbable as to be practically impossible. Let’s look at a few:

• A large company (such as… oh yeah! Google!) has its own intelligence, which is distinct from the intelligence of the individuals who work there.
• The planet has its own intelligence, which is what runs our weather patterns and makes the grass grow.
• Animals other than humans have their own intelligence. Beavers and bees and ants far outrival us in architectural skills.

Artificial intelligence is merely the ability to make a decision when there is more than one alternative and no fixed means of choosing. So sleep easy, my friends. Arnold isn’t back yet.

In the intro to the spectacular primer “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson congratulates you, the reader, for being here.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you… It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Interestingly, he goes on to point out that none of the individual atoms care a jot about you; in fact, they haven’t the slightest idea that you’re even there. And that’s one of the ironies that lie in the power of numbers: the sheer volume of efforts enabling the achievement of monumental tasks mean that the impact of the individual can’t be felt. If you want to tap into that power, you have to be willing to become practically powerless.

I didn’t vote in the 2000 election. I was out of town and I figured it was just too complicated for me, and, anyway, one vote doesn’t make a difference, right? You all know the results, and one of the most hotly contested counties in Florida was the one I lived in at the time, where I would have been registered to vote, where my voice could have been one of only 500-odd needed to swing the balance of history in a dramatically different direction.

It’s a an obvious and cliched theme that appears over and over, in crowd-surfing and non-violent protests, in Bill Bryson’s biology and the emergence of YouTube:

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Even events which appear to be one-man shows — a gymnast pulling off a particularly daring feat at the Olympics — become more special when you’re part of a big honking group of people going “ooh, aah,” rather than just you by yourself. Part of this is because we recognize the increased pressure from the audience, but another part of this is that it’s just more fun to share the appreciation.

The direction of the Web, and the reason that it continues to get better, is towards ever-greater participation in a giant community. Web 3.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is us, and, just like Bryson’s atoms, the vast majority of us only know our own meager existence. We don’t recognize that the avatar we put up on MySpace is a part of developing the next generation of the Web — but it is, as much as an atom in your eye is a part of helping you to see.

Developers, take heed: Web 3.0 will be owned by apps that recognize that a billion small contributions are more powerful than a single behemoth. The meek are indeed inheriting the Earth, bit by incremental byte.

A particularly hot question, these days…

Stephen Baker came up with three criteria:

1) Easier and cheaper

2) Always on

3) More controllable

Check out the comments following his post, though, if you want to see a sea of differing opinions as to what Web 3.0 actually means.

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that prefers categorizations I can get my head around. Things like, “Web 1.0 was read-only, Web 2.0 is read-write, and Web 3.0 will be read-write-execute.” But, from what I’m reading, Web 3.0 is actually going more in the direction of “intelligence” — apps that can interpret plain English and human context.

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web (another term for 3.0?) through W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.

Do you doubt it? I don’t. I don’t think there are any limits to human ingenuity, only to the magnitude of the leaps between flashes of insight. Even though the idea of artificial intelligence has been around for a zillion years, we’re close enough now that it’s actually a feasible fantasy. And, if it’s not, we can fake it.

The key lies in integrated communities. Think about all the great Web developments in the past few years: Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace… they have only become what they are through community. That’s why Time named ‘You’ the Person of the Year for 2006. I think they were a bit slow to catch on: well before 2006, Google became the behemoth that it is thanks to the power of squillions of individual searches and links. Maybe Time could create a Noun of the Year: Leverage.

Greetings, world. And salutations. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Kaila, here to instigate and invigorate an interchange of ideas. We’ll primarily focus on Web 3.0, but who knows where our conversation may lead? Into the great depths of our humanity, I hope, and to a place where we’ll begin to question what we really care about. Welcome to the next generation.