Where is this all going?

So I can see you out there wondering, "where is this guy going with all this?"

My intent was not to educate, but to stimulate, thought. Make people interested in this space ponder the possibilities, reflect on the impact, of automating and scaling intelligence.

Brainstorming has a tendency to dump impromptu thoughts out there, with later iterations iteratively sorting through the incremental results and picking the most interesting and relevant bits from the pile, refining them to a more coherent picture. So in the spirit of evolutionary development of the world, and agile progression of methods, tools & technology, this series too evolves as we go along.


I've always been an integrator, not an inventor. I let brighter minds discover the ground-breaking stuff, and once it's ready for prime time, I will aspire to make it work together. It takes all kinds, the precisely focused genius to come up with new things, and then those with a more generic perspective, putting the pieces together for broader solutions. I see myself as the latter.

We are at a great juncture in the Business Intelligence / Web Analytics space. It appears that we are at the juncture where Analytics & "Intelligence" (at whichever questionable maturity level) starts becoming part of the fabric of the Web, soft of as layed out in the described evolution of the upcoming Web 3.0/4.0 of "Semantic Web" and "Metaverse" fame.


In the telecom industry of the late '90s, they called it "convergence". Back then it referred to (voice) telephone calls, video conferencing, text messages and other data traffic using the same network. An old hat by now, but someone had to come up with the vision.

It seems to become obvious now that we have a new convergence going on between...

• Cloud computing (technology advances, cost efficiencies)
• Artificial Intelligence (autonomous software agent-driven systems)
• Social networking (crowd-sourcing of quality control & investigative journalism)

Now, if you consider the 

1. Computing Cloud to be the infrastructure (just what it's intended to be),
2. the Artificial Intelligence parts the thoughts (processes, algorithms), and 
3. the Social networking the sensory input from the real world (the people, human intelligence, component), 

you have the classic Hardware->Software->Data pattern traditionally applied to computers, while at the same time the model of the human brain is mimicked here: 

• Nerve cells (infrastructure), 
• Thoughts (A.I.)
• Sensory Input (human-driven social networks)

Considering that what makes the human brain stand out is called "intelligence", then it's not far fetched to recognize this new global / social / media / software / service / network driven phenomenon as some sort of a macro-intelligence, just like the term "macro-economics" has become established for global trade & finance.

The pieces are coming together slowly but surely...