FORA.tv - Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

Interesting talk - O'Reilly believes that the evolution of technology has disrupted our social structures - resulting in the birth of the "global mind." A few years back, Howard Bloom wrote a book on this idea (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century), from a deep evolutionary perspective.  A compare and contrast would be interesting.

    Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

Tim O'Reilly discusses how evolving technology has disrupted society, and has given birth to the global mind. "The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex 'multicellular minds,'" says Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Maker Faires, Make magazine.)

Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time.

But that's not all. In one breakthrough computer application after another, we see a new kind of man-machine symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by human Google Streetview drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors. In the same way, crowd-sourced data from sensor-enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare, and new economies.

The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but to collective intelligence.

~ Tim O’Reilly is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly also hosts conferences, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata Online Conference, and Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. O’Reilly’s MAKE magazine and Maker Faire have been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. O’Reilly is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online. He watches the alpha geeks to determine emerging technology trends and uses his platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community.

Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation

Mark Pagel stopped by the RSA to talk about the ways in which the human brain is wired for creating community and culture through cooperation.

This talk is part of his promotional tour for his new book, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. At the bottom, I have included his 2011 TED Talk on how language - as a social technology - shaped human evolution.

Wired for Culture: The natural history of human cooperation

1st Mar 2012

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RSA Thursday

Head of the University of Reading’s Evolution Laboratory and one of the world’s leading experts on human development - Mark Pagel - uses evolutionary biology, anthropology, natural history, philosophy and years of observing human behaviour around the globe to shed light on our species’ capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Since humans left Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago there has been a staggering explosion of cultures. What caused this blooming of diversity? Why are there so many mutually incomprehensible languages, even within small territories? Why do we rejoice in rituals, wrap ourselves in flags, or define ourselves in opposition to others?

Humans are usually seen as differing from other animals because of our inherent traits of consciousness, language and intelligence. But have we had it the wrong way round? Many of these things would not exist without our propensity for culture - our ability to co-operate in small tribal societies, enabling us to pass on knowledge, beliefs and practices so that we prospered while others declined.

Join Mark Pagel at the RSA when he will demonstrate how the role of culture in natural selection shows how humans developed a mind that is hardwired for culture - so that it has outstripped our genes in determining who we are, how we think and speak, who we love and kill - and how it equips us for the challenges of life in the modern world.

See what people said on Twitter: #RSAPagel

Here is the TED Talk:

Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

Using biological evolution as a template, Mark Pagel wonders how languages evolve.

Full bio »