17th
December Is A Time For Predictions
Looks like more predictions of the future are being thrown about. A mid-year list was started by Kevin Kelly (and Brian Eno, actually in the Summer of 1993) on “unthinkable futures” that aimed to show how unpredictable the future was. This game of trying to guess the most outrageous outcomes seems to be catching on in different ways, with Clay Shirky asking about surprising predictions that, of course, are not-so-surprising to the predictor.
Clay Shirky reminds me that I’ve been thinking about the concept of a “work mob” recently — where work that is traditionally accomplished by formal companies will soon be done on a whim by a loosely-organized group of individuals who connect through various online or mobile tools. For example, I envision more journalism will be accomplished by random people updating twitter feeds — such as what witnesses to the Mumbai terrorist attacks did. But as twitter-like tools become more sophisticated, the quality of ad-hoc journalism will undoubtedly get better and better. I see this happening for more and more fields of study. Soon, social experiments and polls will be conducted and analyzed in near real time by mobs of people who are passionately curious about the outcome. This is already happening with clunky online forums, and the tools to help make instant analyses are on the way.
I hope to be a part of bringing this vision to fruition, but even if I’m not, I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. I assume the “Semantic Web” efforts will help form a collective “hive mind” from the inputs of both humans and people processing information. I can’t claim to have come up with this idea since it’s a re-occuring theme in Ghost in the Shell stories, but I think the future of collective and distributed information processing will be amazing in a few decades… even if we don’t have “true” artificial intelligence by then.
