In the world of Internet technology, big changes are taking place – many of them right under our noses. Everyday devices all around us, from phones to wristwatches to clothing and even jewelry are weaving their way into the Internet, becoming givers and receivers of data that can change our lives profoundly.
This Internet of Things is growing at many times the rate of the business technology universe. The latter is the emerging repository for artificial intelligence – the ability of machines to learn and modify their behavior, so that their support of human activities is more efficient and accurate and predictive – which likewise has the ability to change the way we all live, in deep and meaningful ways.
The problem that I and others in my line of work face is a big one: how to get AI out of the clouds it’s living in today, and down into the Internet of Things, where life is really happening?
The answer is something called distributed intelligence: the placement of machine learning down into the IoT by embedding powerful computing resources there where the action is, rather than in the corporate server room. With distributed intelligence, the devices we hold and wear and consult and live within can all begin learning from us, and the environment, and each other in real time – and offer real time responses back to us, without chasing off into the clouds.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because the concept of distributed intelligence can be truly helpful in taking our next steps toward more fully understanding ourselves, and one another.
That said, I should disclose that I hate the your-brain-is-like-a-computer analogy: it is deeply misleading, and distracts from the essential truth of computing technology, that the human brain does poorly what computers do very well, and that we are a long, long way from fully understanding how to making computers that can do the things at which our brains excel.
Still, the concept of distributed intelligence not only does reflect important truths about how human brains work – it also throws some serious hints our way about how human brains evolved, and even how they can be improved.
Human beings, it turns out, possess distributed intelligence. What mind and consciousness each of us possesses individually is not only utterly dependent upon the intelligence of others all around us – and, for that matter, countless people who lived before we did – but we could never achieve the same mind and consciousness without it.
The arguments supporting this claim could fill books (and actually do already), but we can establish the claim around a single feature of mind: language.
Language is the basis of most of our existence as intelligent, conscious creatures. We use it to communicate with one another; to create and explicate and apply and pass on knowledge; to organize our internal models of the world, as well as the models we share with others; to interpret the thoughts and wisdom of those who came before; and to understand our own thoughts and memories. Without language, communication and knowledge and our own perceptions of ourselves and other people could not exist; our command of the world as apex predators would never have been achieved; and technology would never have emerged into the universe.
Here’s the thing: language is the quintessential exemplar of distributed intelligence; it is, in fact, its primary moving part.
Without language, human minds can capture only a fraction of the knowledge available from others of our kind; without language, our knowledge of ourselves and others is not nearly as deep; and our ability to build on the past, as well as to enter into deep cooperation with others in the present, is virtually non-existent.
We know this for many reasons, but one of the most poignant is that there have walked among us human beings who never acquired language, and whose lives we have been able to observe closely. Language shapes the human brain, as experienced by a child learning from family and friends to speak at a very early age, and the shape of such a brain is required for all the knowledge and consciousness we experience by default. Without it, our relationships are shallower; our potential, sharply truncated; our self-awareness, less rich and nuanced.
Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron, is one of several examples. Found in the woods at around age 12 outside a French village two centuries ago, he had lived on his own in the wild and never learned to speak. And despite his health and anatomical uniformity, was unable to learn.
He was able to form limited bonds with others – the teacher who studied him, a woman who looked after him – but kept trying to run away, to flee civilization and return to the woods. He died young.
Victor lacked what Douglas Hofstadter calls strange loops – the bits and pieces of others, their thoughts and emotions and the substance of experiences shared with them – that we incorporate into our own thoughts, the consciousness that forms in human beings due to the community we experience from birth to death. Put another way, Victor’s brain – and thus his mind and consciousness – lacked the ingredients that we take for granted, those ideas and concepts and facts and truths that build a rich world within us.
Language throws open those doors of shared experience, acting as a supercharger that causes our minds and awareness and consciousness to be amplified many times over. There are other contributing factors – our genetic diversity, the dangers of the world that cause us to innovate, and an environment in perpetual change – and they have all combined to make us something far greater, in sum, than we could ever hope to be alone.
We are taught by our culture, which is tilted precariously toward a false notion of individuality that has no real basis in reality, that we are autonomous creatures – that we can be self-sufficient, relying on no one else, solitary successes whose reason for being is to be better than those around us. That’s not even close to true; we are, each of us, far stronger and smarter and more capable because we are part of a greater whole than we could possibly be on our own.
The human story is about to improve in giant leaps, because of the new tools we are now creating. We are about to begin healing from the crippling missteps of the past 10,000 years. Part of that story involves one of those tools – distributed intelligence. But it is just a reflection of a tool we’ve possessed far longer, one that given us deep gifts, a generator of miracles now embedded in our DNA: distributed human intelligence, our legacy, our substance, our future.
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