Category: Collective Intelligence

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David Isenberg: IARPA Trys to Predict Future

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence
David Isenberg
David Isenberg

How to Get Better At Predicting the Future

Could human and machine forecasters work together to increase the intelligence agencies' foresight?

By Alexis C. Madrigal

Atlantic, 11 December 2012

We would like to know what the future is going to be like, so we can prepare for it. I'm not talking about building a time machine to secure the winning Powerball number ahead of time, but rather creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen. Supposedly, this is what pundits and analysts do. They're supposed to be good at commenting on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone by 2014 or whether North Korea will fire missiles during the year or whether Barack Obama will win reelection.

A body of research, however, conducted and synthesized by the University of Pennsylvania's Philip Tetlock finds that people, not just pundits but definitely pundits, are not very good at predicting future events. The book he wrote on the topic, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, is a touchstone for all the work that people like Nate Silver and Princeton's Sam Wang did tracking the last election.

But aside from the electorate, who else might benefit from enhanced foresight? Perhaps the people tasked with gathering information about threats in the world.

You probably have never heard of IARPA, but it's the wild R&D wing of our nation's intelligence services. Much like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which looks into the future of warfare for the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity looks at the future of analyzing information, spying, surveillance, and the like for the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

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Berto Jongman: Anonymous to Leak “Unprecedented Amounts of Data” — Project Mayhem

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, Officers Call, YouTube
Berto Jongman

Anonymous to Leak “Unprecedented Amounts of Data” Starting with December 10 – Video

Starting with December 10 and until December 21, Anonymous hacktivists plan on leaking “an unprecedented amount” of corporate, financial, military and state data as part of the campaign called Project Mayhem 2012.

According to the hackers, the information has been secretly gathered by whistleblowers, vigilantes and conscientious citizens.

“The global economic system will start the final financial meltdown,” the hackers stated. “People all over the world, out of fear to go bankrupt, will try to withdraw their savings from their bank accounts. This will trigger an even larger meltdown wave.”

They added, “Imagine the corrupted start to fear us. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny, but when the government fears the people, there is liberty. People shouldn't fear of their government. Governments should fear their people.”

See other Anonymous YouTubes.

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Berto Jongman: Recommended on Networked Future

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Berto Jongman

Networking for Progress

Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age (Riverhead, 2012)

Amazon Page

In Future Perfect, bestselling author Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You)declares himself a member of the new revolutionary party, the peer progressives. For the most part, it’s a quiet movement, steady, not inherently violent. The recent uprisings in Bahrain, Egypt, the Occupy Wall Street protests, and other well-covered clashes between Net-enabled citizens and truncheon-wielding cops do not embody this phenomenon, but are instead merely a symptom. Make no mistake, however: A revolution is afoot.

Peer progressivism is the social change that occurs outside of rigid government structures but in a way that isn’t guided by capitalistic self-interest, at least not exclusively. It’s spontaneous networks of free and equal agents, democratically intertwined. For instance, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter is nominally owned by a for-profit company but is powered by millions of selfless users seeking only to reward worthy creative projects. Wikipedia is peer progressive, as are employee-owned businesses.

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Yoda: Addictive Macro-Learning – The Future

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Liberation Technology
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Totally Addictive Education: The Future of Learning

Steven Kotler

Forbes, 8/27/2012

EXTRACT:

Today’s educational system is all about standardization. We treat every kid the same. But not every kid learns the same. Some need the microscopic first, others the macroscopic. Some people are tangential learners, some prefer their facts in a linear fashion. Some are quick, others slow. Thankfully, this is changing.

. . . . . . .

Microscopic learning doesn’t really harness this system. It builds the patterns up slowly, one block at a time, but rarely does it require the kind of intuitive BIG PATTERN RECOGNITION that macroscopic learning demands. By keeping things microscopic, we’re keeping things boring. Sure, kids learn this way, but not all kids and, anyway, it’s not much fun.

Read full article (two screens).

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Mini-Me: REPLAY Future of the USA in 3 Parts

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Policies, Threats
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

The future of the USA – 2012-2016: An insolvent and ungovernable United States (first part)

Thus, according to LEAP/E2020, the 2012 election year, which opens against the backdrop of economic and social depression, complete paralysis of the federal system (3), strong rejection of the traditional two-party system and a growing questioning of the relevance of the Constitution, inaugurates a crucial period in the history of the United States. Over the next four years, the country will be subjected to political, economic, financial and social upheaval such as it has not known since the end of the Civil War which, by an accident of history, started exactly 150 years ago in 1861. During this period, the US will be simultaneously insolvent and ungovernable, turning that which was the “flagship” of the world in recent decades into a “drunken boat”.

To make the complexity of the current process understandable, our team has chosen to organize its anticipations around three key areas:

1. US institutional deadlock and the break-up of the traditional two-party system
2. The unstoppable spiral of recession/depression/inflation
3. The breakdown of the US socio-political fabric

Read rest of analysis.

Below the line: the other two parts of the series.

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Michael Bauwens: P2P Foundation Open Ontology

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Michel Bauwens

Open Ontology, by Paola Di Maio

While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to understand what makes up an ontology, different authors have different views. Mike Uschold et al. say that an ontology may take a variety of forms, but it will necessarily include a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning, such as definitions and an indication of how concepts are interrelated, which collectively impose a structure on the domain and constrain the possible interpretations of terms. Particularly in Web based environments, an ontology delimits the boundary of the system's knowledge and functional domain, and serves as conceptual and semantic reference for software development. In practical terms, entities and attributes, classes, objects and properties, as well as data models, data schemas, metadata and vocabularies and their extensions, when ‘normalized' all contain information that models a view of the world, for the purpose of a given system, and constitute the representation of such domain, in short, an ontology.

The expression ‘open ontology' is not new, and it is used generically to reference ontologies which are in the public domain, and sometimes to ontologies that have been developed using collaborative processes.

In our work, we have come across the need to define and qualify, at least to some extent the degree of ontology ‘openness':

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