I should really be writting an essay for school about reality and virtual reality, but this was such a striking that I just had to write it down. It comes from a simple sentence in one of the articles leading up to my assignment, roughly translated from danish it said:
“Information has a form of control over the reciever. Of course you have your common sense to sort the good and the bad. However you do not have control over the information that is sent towards you.”
Then I began to think about the problem of common sense that I once looked at after watching this Google Tech Talk a few months back, and how the speaker in it argued about the fact how we waste the immense amount of information that gets poured into the virtual world, and how we could use human computing to build up a database of common sense. This database could than later be used to make our information better, hence, tell us the good from the bad better than we can!
I say better simply because we walk around in our isolated part of the world all day. Isolated by our identity(Prison Break, T-Bag, s4e12, near the end), by our work, community, government, shops, to hell with it, society. So although our brain has the ability to concieve so much more, we are bored with our isolated information, why do you think the world wide web is so popular?
Now, a bot that crawls the immensly wide web, could generate a just as wide common sense, or sense of good or bad, bias of it’s society, education and beliefs, simply because it has none. For the philosophers, this reminds of the state of the uknown, a part of the system for government of the unknown proposed by John Rawls.
The question simply lies in understanding the so wide web, that is written in such a wide natural language, by so widely intelligent human beings as ourselves. Basically, how do we get a machine to build up it’s own common sense? Or rather store it, building up can simply be done via human computing 🙂 The rest apperantly seems to follow with it?
Thinking.. 