به سوی یک شبکه هوشمند برای تطبیق پیشنهاد و تقاضا: از اقتصاد به اشتراک گذاری به مغز جهانی  Towards an intelligent network for matching offer and demand: From the sharing economy to the global brain

1. Introduction The relentless innovations accompanying the development of the Internet and related ICT may seem overwhelming. Hardly a week passes by without a revolutionary new technology, social network, or lucrative new business application being announced. Initially, in the 1990’s, the applications of the Internet were primarily focused on publishing and retrieving information. The first decade of the new millennium saw a proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 collaborative communities and social networks. The present decade seems most in thrall with the sharing economy and the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With this explosion in the number of new applications and trends, forecasting the long-term future of our information society appears like a daunting prospect. Yet, there is a paradigm that offers hope for a more integrated vision: the Global Brain (Goertzel, 2002; Heylighen, 2002, 2008; Last, 2014). The analogy underlying this perspective is that the Internet increasingly starts to play the role of a brain for the planet, i.e. a distributed, intelligent network that supports humanity in solving its problems and coordinating its actions. The initial inspiration for the Global Brain model of Internet development (Heylighen and Bollen, 1996; Mayer-Kress and Barczys, 1995) came from its role as a medium for information transmission, storage and processing. However, this perspective seems less applicable to its more recent social and economic functions, where the emphasis is on exchanging goods, services and experiences rather than mere information. The present paper wishes to propose a broader interpretation of the Global Brain (GB) metaphor – one that is directly applicable to the sharing economy and to the more distributed forms of social organization that accompany it. It will do so by synthesizing the notion of the GB as a distributed, intelligent network with Ben Goertzel’s newly proposed concept of an offer network, i.e. an architecture for a future economic system that is not centered on the accumulation of money, but on the direct matching of offers and demands (Goertzel, 2015).