A Distributed Infrastructure for Collective Intelligence

Tim Berners-Lee
Decentralized Information Group
CSAIL

Collective intelligence

Combine human and increasingly machine intelligences in a space of shared knowledge

Think of distributed mechanical turk?

for when two half-formed solutions to a problem are in two people's, or machine's, brains

How

1. Undifferentiated distributed socially aware storage
2. Apps separated from storage
3. Apps constructible by anyone

1. Undifferentiated distributed socially aware storage

• Semantic web
• Well-defined semantics compared to natural language
• But Bottom-up decentralized generation of ontologies
• Scale-free optimal ontology community size distribution
• Space for sharing data between apps
• Many ontologies per app, many apps per ontology
• Loose

Socially aware storage

• (Two models, Read-Write and Write-once)
• We have experience with read-write
• Interested in write-once, immutable storage
• Storage space respects ownership, access control, appropriate use

2. Apps separated from storage

• An app is a machine type (cell type) in and interacting mesh of same and diff apps
• Apps share data and interact through the graph
• Example: doodle - Why is this a web site? - Should be able to be an app - Should be able to share with calendar
• Example: suveymonkey - Issue: data silo - Can't interact with other apps
• Compare mechanical turk - MT has a single central site - MT does not have the substructure of data storage with shared meaning

3 Apps constructible by anyone

...who can use a spreadsheet

• Spreadsheet losing so much semantics every day
• Capture semantics
• Create your own doodle - Refine one you use - Connect it to others
• Machines generate apps as intermediate states in solving problems

Building on

• existing work in CSAIL on undifferentiated socially aware memory
• existing work in user-generated form-based apps
• existing reasoning, storage and user interface experience

Why

• Viral growth of new applications
• Selection, and improvement process ⇒ evolution
• Harness machine and human intelligence
• Humans puzzle fodder, and humans as specialized experts
• Machines as puzzle fodder, machines as specialized experts in task or domain

Tackle major challenges and make humanity more effective