Collective Intelligence: The Rise of the Machine

In today’s world, we have access to amazing amounts of information via search engines and data provisioning companies. In fact, you can pretty much find out anything you want to know — from what is the best restaurant in town to how to perform an appendectomy on a chimpanzee.

So what are we going to do with all of this information? I previously wrote about the idea of collective intelligence: collecting massive amounts of data and experiences, synthesising that data and making it available to all people, all through the power of the cloud. The possibilities of taking that data and using it to provide goods and services to people at the right time and right place are really mind-boggling.

At this point, we all know that computing power will expand exponentially and devices will get smaller, easier to use and cheaper to buy. The explosion of wearable devices in the last few years alone seems almost unstoppable. At my last count, there were over 250 different types of wearable devices, and these devices are showing up in every aspect of our lives including entertainment, sports and medical (Google is developing a contact lens that monitors insulin levels for Diabetics) arenas.

Advances in battery life and longer range communication are now enabling these devices to interact with one another virtually anywhere. For example, it’s now possible to send alerts that monitor medical conditions and any necessary interventions to your doctor or even summon an ambulance automatically if you become incapacitated.

So if we have the ability to monitor and diagnose complex medical conditions through wearable devices, what is the next “big thing?”

Cloud technologies and the ecosystems that have developed around them have attracted thousands of developers to create applications that extend those platforms to virtually endless capabilities. Just look at the Salesforce AppExchange.

This makes me wonder: could that same cloud technology soon bring collective intelligence to new wearable devices without manual intervention? Applications will be the key here. If developers flock to the world of wearable devices, we can expect huge investments to advance capabilities and functionality.

Studies surrounding Mind Machine Interfaces (MMIs) or Brain Computer Interfaces began in the 1970s at UCLA and have lately ramped up considerably. Is this the next big battleground? The ability to deliver information directly to your brain via an implanted device? Scientists have already created almost microscopic “implants” called “neural dust” which, acting together, can deliver signals mimicking sensory impulses to create memories or thoughts.

Imagine eliminating the need for manual intervention to gain access to data, rendering any input device obsolete. What if collective intelligence was delivered directly to your brain? What then defines the difference between the machine as a computer and the brain as a database?

What are the implications of having access to all information known to man by just “thinking” about it? Will there be any need for schools? Who owns all this information? How would we know what was real or not? Would there be any such thing as “intellectual property?” Who gets to make the rules? The rise of the machine could no doubt provide incredible access to information, perhaps making omnipotence almost ubiquitous.

What do you think will be the tipping point to this technical adoption, and is it a big leap from that fitness band on your wrist to some neural dust in your head?

Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2014 will, no doubt, highlight some amazing technologies and opportunities for applying what this future might hold. Some of the brightest minds in the world will be on tap to shine a light on the art of the possible, and many of us from Asia Pacific will be there to participate and soak it in. In particular, Cloud Sherpas and “APAC on Tour” will be making a huge splash at Dreamforce this year and we are all very excited to see what the future holds.

I’m really going to miss the day when I don’t have to fly 15 hours to get to San Francisco. Instead, I’ll be able to just tap my temple and zoom into that collective…

Collective Intelligence: We Are the Cloud

Pulling information and recognising the importance of it has been critical for strategists for thousands of years. Over 2,500 years ago, Chinese military general Sun Tzu nailed it on the head when he proclaimed: “Know your enemy and know yourself, and in 100 battles you will never be in peril.”

Fast forward to today, and we see people making huge businesses out of collecting and collating all kinds of information. For example, Facebook has a market cap of $175 billion against a current revenue of less than $9 billion, while Google has a market cap of $400 billion against a revenue of around $38 billion. Those numbers would place the two combined companies close to the top 20 largest countries in the world based on estimated GDP.

The reason that companies like Facebook and Google that have such vast amounts of information in the cloud are so valuable is because they are using demographic and behavioural data to help other businesses find, target and acquire customers. This data is becoming increasingly important to businesses of all kinds, and these companies seem to have all the answers.

To better understand the importance of this data, let’s look at a real-life example: the direction I travel to work is important to road planners right now. But what I’m doing in my car on the way to work — listening to the radio or my own music, listening to text to voice emails, holding teleconferences, talking to friends or family about this weekend — really isn’t important to anyone. But will it be at some point? Will the people designing cars, roads and transport in general want to know these things? What about retailers? How can businesses use this information to determine the best way to hit me with relevant ads?

This is where the whole big data thing comes into play. Because, in order to collect, store, make sense of and run predictive analysis around all those bits of information, you need to collect a lot of data. The amount needs to be so high to account for a margin of error: if someone has only done something once and next time they do it differently, it really means very little in predicting their future behaviour.

By using what is now seemingly meaningless data, we can begin to predict behaviour to certain stimuli. When we collect everything that someone does and add dimensional variables such as time, location and even weather and traffic conditions (you can see where this could get to), we can then start to “direct” behaviour. It’s all about the aggregation of data: data you have internally, data you can capture from new sources and making sense of all of that. That’s what salesforce.com was doing when it was talking about the Internet of Customers at Dreamforce.

Directing behaviours can be done on an individual, corporate or even political level if enough information is available. So then the question has to be asked: “Is all the information that’s collected about us being used in our interest, or is our interest being directed by the aggregation of this data and played back to us?”

You might remember that scene from the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” in which everything was tracked and stored. The billboards then talk to him directly as he’s walking down the street. In the future, as people become more willing to share behavioural information about themselves, we might see something similar to what happened in the movie. And these individually targeted offers can add value to both the business making the offer and the customer receiving it.

Today, we source and extract information from the cloud and then run external analytics to aid in decision making processes. Ultimately, all of this information amounts to a “collective intelligence” coming from events created by people.

There will come a time when everything we do, think and say will all be collected, manipulated and fed back without intervention. External variables will create potential scenarios for us based not only on our individual experiences, but also on the collective experiences. People, themselves, will become “the cloud.” This is the real future of cloud computing.