by Walter De Brouwer, Forbers 9 November 2014 linkhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2 ... the-world/[/link]
Not if I see you first.
[...] It was called Earthrise. It was 1968. It was magical. We—all of us—were in there, part of an organism, and we must have thought a thought that we had never thought before: let’s become whole. Barely ten months later—more precisely at 10:30 pm, 29 October 1969—the first message was sent over the ARPANET. The mission had started. Ever since then, a series of innovations and changes in culture have steadily advanced a global process of empowerment and connectivity. The new borderless digital network selected and favored anything that was “open.” [...] The more widely available the source code of any software is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered.
Two years later Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger introduced Wikipedia, based on these principles. A 2005 survey of Wikipedia published in Nature, which compared 42 science articles with Encyclopedia Brittannica, found that Wikipedia’s level of accuracy approached the encyclopedia, and both had similar low rates of “serious errors.” The people were winning. [...] Crowdsourcing became a massive educational movement that put more means of production in the hands of the people. At the same time, manufacturing skills of big corporations leaked to smaller startups and they taught entrepreneurial teams their esoteric manufacturing secrets, and in turn they learned to apply a software mindset to a hardware project. It was co-evolution. [...]
We are data. A new philosophy (dataism) is emerging that says people become the data they use and the companies that make filters also become part of one big, non-linear, complex adaptive dataset. One day it will be self-organizing thanks to new mathematical approaches we will pluck out of machine learning. The Internet, the crowd, crowdsourcing, makers, QS, big data—they are all pieces of a puzzle that is enabling our species to become more conscious. In the 21st century humanity will be going from read mode into write mode, and taking evolution in our own hands. We will learn to use the fundamental building blocks of reality: bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. We write with them rather than merely reading them. We seem to be ready to go to the next level of awareness. See you there.
Walter De Brouwer will speak on a panel about crowdsourcing and data at the Techonomy 2014 conference.
