From hardware-based sensors of the physical to software-based sensors of the social
Quotes in this blogpost are
from “Ecological
Computing,”
by John Seely Brown and Feng Zhao.
Looking back at the first
decades of the third millennium, humans will see them as the era of the Great
Transition, an unexpected result brought to us by a confluence of many confluences.
Writing about an
omni-present, planet-scale sensor network that will dwarf the Internet by many
orders of magnitude, and its implications for biological and computing
ecologies, John Seely Brown mentioned:
“The transformational
force underlying this change is the confluence of recent rapid technological
advances such as micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and actuators,
wireless and mobile networking, and low-power embedded microprocessors… When
the sensor grid becomes ubiquitous it becomes like an enormous digital retina
stretched over the surface of the planet.”
The idea of a planet-scale
sensor network evokes an orbital view of not only the confluence of
technological developments that make it possible but also, the other confluences
that such network contributes to and mingles with. For example, the confluence
of shifts from authority to authenticity as driver of social organization, from
scarcity to wide availability of knowledge, and from groupware to massively
distributed social media that link up mega-millions of minds.
“Let's add intelligent
browsers to this vast sensing system that lets scientists, government
regulators, or environmental advocates use the internet to ask questions never
before imaginable.”
When we’ll use such browsers
for navigating on the ocean of data obtained from networked indicators of
social well-being, collective moods, diseases in the global social body, and
challenges to collective intelligence and wisdom, then we’ll have made a
decisive step towards the bulk of humankind joining in a self-aware meta-being.
