It was interesting to read Jaron Lanier, in the New York Times, referring to Clay Shirky talking about twitter as a kind of global mind...

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

That reminds me of my somewhat provocative talk at the Twitter Developers Nest last year: You are a Neuron, which was a thought experiment and chat about our individual messaging of short messaging on twitter adding up to the beginnings of a global mind of sorts.

I'm thinking I need to go deeper with that talk, specifically to tease out some of the interesting aspects of how we learn to work together in a connected social system to do things like share and filter links for each other.   At an individual level, sharing a few links with followers seems simple enough, but can we express that as some kind of intelligent filtering function.

But enough of that.  Jaron Larnier's article is well worth a read; as a part of the ongoing discussion about what is Artificial Intelligence. And especially to red about the unsettling thought (or rumour) that Google is scanning all those books not just for human search, but to feed to a big artificial intelligence...