During a dinner conversation earlier this week with
colleagues, I was reminded about the power of collective knowledge and
intelligence. It was an otherwise
unremarkable comment about one person’s recent discovery of a hot toddy that
sent me down the rabbit hole.
In the days following this dinner, I found myself thinking
about three distinct people, their views and what they have in common: (1) Russian
investor Yuri Milner and his quest to find life on other planets; (2) learning
guru John Seely Brown and his articulate thoughts on the beauty and value of
shared knowledge; and (3) computer programming icon Eric Raymond and his firm
belief in the “Bazaar approach” to programming and building better software.
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| Green Bank Telescope (Credit: Geremia at English Wikipedia) |
First, the hot toddy. Sumesh was here from India working in
Chicago. He had just discovered a delicious hot toddy at a nearby watering hole
and assumed it was a local drink. His colleague Rajeev, however, explained to
us both that the toddy actually has its roots in India where sap from palm
trees is fermented to make the drink. From there it made its way west.
This was news to both Sumesh and me, and it made me smile at how much smarter
we are as a collective than as mere individuals. If each of us at the dinner
table that night scribbled down all the information in each of our
heads, the resulting stacks of notebooks would be mind-boggling. We all know a
lot and often that knowledge sits quietly in our heads unspoken and unshared.
“Breakthrough Listen”
Enter into my head Yuri Milner. He’s the 53-year-old Russian
billionaire who just plopped down $100 million to answer what he believes is
the world’s largest unanswered question: is there life on other planets? Through
his “Breakthrough Listen” project, Milner’s money will buy a team of scientists,
rent expensive time at three massive high-tech telescopes (in West Virginia,
New South Wales, Australia and California) and scan 10 times more of the sky
than has been scanned before in hopes of picking up faint pings from other
planets that just might indicate life.
Will it work? Who knows? But the world’s top astronomers and
scientist, including legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, are behind him. And
this won’t be a closed door, scientist-only operation. In the spirit of
collective intelligence, we mere amateurs can help.
The Breakthrough team plans to employ the 9 million home computers
through the “SETI at Home” project. Started in 1999 at the University of
California at Berkley, SETI (standing for Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) has been analyzing radio signals in search of life on other
planets. Through its free downloadable screen saver, SETI taps into idle time
on people’s computers to analyze data.
Experts say that to date only thousands of the Milky Way’s
200 billion stars have been analyzed. Milner’s project plans to survey 1
million stars closest to earth and the center of the Milky Way and also listen
to 100 galaxies farther away.
The Power of Knowledge Sharing
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| John Seely Brown (Credit: "JSBJI4" by Joi Ito via Wikipedia) |
Milner’s approach builds on the work of the past and will
leverage the efforts of many. This is what led me to John Seely Brown and his
thoughts on how we build new knowledge. Brown, a former director of Xerox PARC
(Palo Alto Research Center) who earned a math and physics degree from Brown
University and a PHD in computer science from the University of Michigan,
points out that every document we produce is related to another that’s come
before. We see this in footnotes, annotations and text references to other
authors and previous works.
To Brown, learning is about discussion and dialogue within a
community of people.
Brown wrote, “…perhaps most important, shared documents
often provide the basis for disagreement within a community – thereby
representing not the ending, but the beginning of a process of negotiation,
learning and knowledge sharing.”
I would expect as the “Breakthrough Listen” team harvests
data from the telescopes, there will be plenty of debate, discussion and
knowledge sharing. And the fact that the data itself will be shared with
millions via SETI at Home, I think that somehow, at least in principle, Eric
Raymond would be pleased.
How Bazaar?
Raymond is a computer software developer and advocate of the
open source movement. The editor of “The New Hacker’s Dictionary,” Raymond has
been an outspoken advocate of one of the core beliefs that unite computer
hackers. They believe strongly in information sharing -- both as an ideal and as a practical
strategy.
“Hacker,” of course, has a negative connotation these days
as it’s associated with security breaches, break-ins and stolen personal and
financial data. But the hacker movement itself is not bad. Hacking is an
intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations
of programming systems to extend their capabilities.
Part of what perturbs hackers is closed systems, secrecy and
keeping knowledge and information confined to only a few people. In his book
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Raymond contrasts what he calls the Cathedral
approach to software development from the Bazaar approach. In the Cathedral
approach, access to source code is highly restricted to very few developers who
can view it, improve it and search for bugs that cause it to function poorly.
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| Hot Toddy (Credit: "Hot toddy" by Patrick Truby via Wikipedia) |
By contrast, the Bazaar approach is open and many have access.
By adopting a more shared, collective approach, the code for these systems
improves much more quickly and bugs are eliminated much faster. Raymond states,
“With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In this case, collective intelligence, effort and knowledge
sharing has a practical result.
We can all debate the pros and cons of whether certain computer systems
should be either open or closed to many viewers. However, clearly as a
collective, we’re smarter. Our knowledge expands exponentially when we’re open
to including more and more people. Look, for example, at current trends around
crowd-sourcing – the idea of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by
getting input or contributions from a large group of people – typically online.
Together we’re more intelligent. We’re better, hands-down. Now,
to Milner’s “Breakthrough Listen” project, time will tell whether that
collective intelligence will be confined to just the 7+ million minds here on
earth or opened up to the minds out there that we have yet to find.
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