The Collaborations

I can imagine a point in time, in the not-to-distant future when instead of talking about Corporations people will talk about "Collaborations". Networks of like minded people that get together via collaboration software, and with the help of expert systems, and perhaps a neural prosthesis or two to solve problems or to create works of art or build software or anything else of mutual interest. I suspect that Collaborations will attain greater-than-human intelligence much earlier than AIs will, and I suspect if the Singularity is a real possibility that Collaborations will play an important role in its coming.

What does everyone think?. Will "The Collaborations" give rise to the Singularity?

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Comment by Adam James Davis on October 24, 2009 at 4:14am: I'd say such collaborations would come naturally with the arrival of a technologically-aided post-Darwinian order where competition and selection takes a back seat, and such traits as empathy are brought to the fore and enhanced. Furthermore, I'd also like to step up and contribute to said Wiki :)

Comment by Cortexelus on October 21, 2009 at 10:25am: Collaborations! I like it.

I love the internet. We take part in building the infrastructure, the art, for the love of it. It's like we're colonial explorers on an unexplored world, chopping the wood and building homes of language.. out of necessity.

The transhumanism thing is a Collaboration. Metacollaboration, actually. Since we're collaborating on how we'd build the Collaborations.

You know what blows my mind? http://www.reddit.com/r/TMBR
Someone posits an argument, and within hours is flooded with a whole perspectrum of comments elaborating and reacting to that argument, which can be further elaborated and so on. Language Collaboration. The group intelligence in that subreddit is astounding. Language has never before been given a chance to evolve and branch out so quickly and densely and significantly. I imagine the Singularity being a movement in this direction.

Imagine, a Collaboration of thousands of philosophers, their minds hooked together, reacting to each others' ideas a thousand times a minute. Imagine, all the AIs around the world, each with their own unique wiring and perspective, all responding to each other's ideas. What would come out of that... after 10 seconds? An hour? (lol for some reason I imagine it looking like 4chan)

Collapsing into the black hole of imagination. Collaboration of imagination. Group lucid dreams. Group virtual hallucinations.

Group dreaming. Now that's something. Once we are able to extract the imagination in real time... once brain scans can read the mind's eye and the mind's ear... the walls come down. Hook one person's visual imagination up to another's visual display, and vice versa. A criss-cross feedback loop dream. Now hook a thousand people up. A thousand creative, imaginative people.

Imagine, augs walking about the land with black contact lenses, projecting their imagination into the world and everyone else's world around them. Imagine collaborative virtual reality, evolving on the spot in reaction to everyone's mind. Building landscapes, soundscapes, tactilscapes, themoscapes. Sensationscapes. Linguiscapes. Philososcapes. Perceptionscapes. Vibroscapes. Scapescapes. Metascapes. Cycloscapes. Paradoxscapes. Fractalscapes. Impossiblescapes.

The immense beauty of even attempting to imagining it.
o_o

Comment by Wayne Eddy on October 15, 2009 at 9:34pm: It was my pleasure to do a few edits to the wiki. I know how hard it is to get people to contribute, and how nice it is to get some unexpected help. I will try and add a bit more when I get a chance.

Comment by Peer Infinity on October 15, 2009 at 6:28pm: Well, if your definition of "Collaborations" is broad enough to include any group of people working together for a common purpose, then of course collaborations will give rise to the Singularity, and the only question is how much they are augmented by collaboration software, expert systems, and neural prostheses, etc.

As we all know, there are plenty of examples of collaborations around already, like wikipedia, and open-source software projects.

And of course, wikipedia has an article on Collaborative software

I was hoping for the transhumanist wiki to be something like a collaboration for transhumanists, but noone other than me seemed interested in actually editing the wiki. Maybe Google Wave will work even better than the wiki software. Thanks again for your edits to the wiki, by the way.