مغز جهانی به عنوان یک مدل جامعه اطلاعات آینده: مقدمه ای بر موضوع خاص  The Global Brain as a model of the future information society: An introduction to the special issue

1. Introduction Since it came to the fore in the late 1980s, information and communication technology (ICT) has drastically changed the organization and functioning of society, bringing us into a new regime that has been called the information society. The Internet in particular has taken over ever more social, economic and technological functions from other systems of communication and collaboration, and this at an absolutely staggering speed. At the same time, it has been opening up a seemingly infinite variety of new forms of interaction. It is being used for applications as diverse as ordering groceries, organizing political protests, financing new ventures, sharing commodities, discussing global problems, keeping in touch with friends, monitoring factories remotely, guiding traffic, publishing documents, keeping stock in warehouses, distributing calculations across thousands of independent computers, “crowdsourcing” tasks to anonymous workers, and remotely following courses. This explosion in the number of actual and potential developments of the Internet is overwhelming (Heylighen, 2016a). The resulting confusion makes it very difficult to discern stable trends—except for a general growth in Internet use. Forecasting how these myriad competing advances will shape the future information society seems especially daunting. Still, there exists a paradigm that promises to bring some order to this tangle of volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) developments: theGlobal Brain (Bernstein et al., 2012; Goertzel, 2002; Heylighen, 2011; Mayer-Kress and Barczys, 1995; Russell, 1995)]. The Global Brain can be defined as the self-organizing, adaptive network formed by all people on this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into a cohesive system. The idea is that global interactions have made the people on this planet interdependent to such a degree that together they form a single superorganism (Heylighen, 2007; Stock, 1993), i.e. an organism (global society) whose components are organisms themselves (individual people). As the Internet becomes faster, smarter, and more encompassing, it increasingly interconnects people and computers into a single information-processing network, which plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism (Heylighen, 2011, Heylighen, 2002). The function of a nervous system is to coordinate the different activities taking place inside this organism, thus increasing their efficiency and coherence, while minimizing any friction or conflict. It moreover provides a repository of knowledge, which functions like a world memory (Wells, 1937) or global expert system (Skulimowski, 2013) that would be able to answer any questions. The knowledge function is supported by the emerging Semantic Web, a suite of protocols for representing knowledge in a machine-understandable way (Berners-Lee and Fischetti, 1999; Heylighen, 2016c). The communication with the superorganism’s physical body is supported by the Internet of Things, another emerging technology for the integration of physical objects into the ICT network (Atzori et al., 2010; Rifkin, 2014).