From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Sep 15 2003 - 08:04:36 MDT
reason@exratio.com writes:
> It has to be said, watching the evolution of these things is fascinating.
> It's the scrabbling lizards on a glass wall stage; lots of momentum and
> action, but not much purchase yet in the climb to something truly new. I'm
> fairly sure there's something very cool, transforming and radically new
> hiding somewhere in this whole six degrees and networking service thing, but
> it remains to be seen what that actually might be.
One of the issues is that many would consider it impolite to be included
in someone else's network w/o their permission or knowledge. There are
some ways around that.
I see aggregators as a social singularity precursor. Especially when
most folks have wearables with always-on internet connections. I see
such a human-centered singularity as possibly quite more desirable than
a technological singularity obtained thru nanotech and/or friendly AI.
In any case it might better prepare us for such advances.
Part of it boils down to, what do I want, and what do I have to trade.
Remember that comedy plot, used more than once in M*A*S*H, where the
folks need some part, and the only place to get it is thru someone who
won't trade it except for what he wants. During course of the show they
produced a Rube Goldberg-esque multipart trade. With aggreators, it
seems possible that such could be accomplished almost automatically, and
on a world-wide scale.
Another possible application would be stranger identification. In any
community crowd, you won't know everybody, but chances are that someone
in the crowd will know someone that you don't. Those unknown by anyone
in the crowd could be quickly identified by aggregating the crowd's
collective identifications. This doesn't mean they would be a criminal,
but in certain high-risk areas they might be stopped and checked for
bombs or something.
-Mike
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