Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. ~Statistician I.J. Good, 1965

All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth.~AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2001

TECH IS A HAIR BREADTH AWAY FROM SELF-AWARENESS: Technology is within a hair’s breadth of becoming self-aware. The social networks and properties may be seen as a mass effort by humanity to train our tech to first mimic and then evolve our actions. The intimacy of human-tech relationship has become a red-hot love affair.

I can forget my wallet at home but woe is me if my cell phone remains on the bedside table! With mobile now fully poised to take over as THE access point to all my information and action, that iPhone or Android becomes THE lover in my pocket, my EVERYTHING. I can dock my phone and access all of my content with a wireless keyboard and mouse and my 55″ 3D 1080p screen. And I can store 60 GB of my information in the cloud for $10 per month, giving me the power to link in to my info from anywhere at anytime.

And ALL of this information is scanned and makes up the ever-expanding global mind, which systems like the Chinese-made Tianhe-1A can perfect at rate of 2,507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second). Soon all of this computing tech will occupy a transhuman body, like the hospice cyborgs in Asia.

I do agree that we may be closer than one realizes to the Singularity and that AI has advanced to truly FANTASTIC heights. One need only begin at the Singularity Summit, Singularity University and Humanity+ web pages to get thrown in the deep end of this information AND to realize that humans in the know are keeping long hours preparing for this imminent reality!

WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN IN THE NEAR-FUTURE? So what happens when many more human duties are done by robots? What happens when the Transhumanists reign supreme? How does one look upon this: as an average consumer, as a corporate leader, as a major VC, as a nation-state concerned about security, as a parent raising children, as the leader of a global religion? For some, there is no action to be taken and submission is the only option due to NO TIME. For others, like the leaders mentioned, the conversation becomes philosophical and nostalgic: the good ol’ days of being human are now over.

Now we also, as leaders, have to understand what it really means to be led by our technology. It presents us with possibilities and solutions we may never have considered: Like finding the cure to cancer OR receiving a fully charted investment strategy yielding 125% growth per annum for 7 generations on your desktop OR just plain old peace of mind. We truly have more possibilities before us as humans now than ever YET at the same time we are in an economic crisis. Or are we?

Hear the following quote from the philosopher Aleister Crowley:

“We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present.”

TECH LEADERS GUIDE GOVERNMENTS AND SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE: Just a few weeks ago, Michael Dell said, “Our report contains straightforward, proven ways to pare back $1 trillion from the deficit while increasing productivity and enabling sustainable competitiveness. We’re serious about helping to provide solutions for the mounting debt crisis, and we’re optimistic that changes today will help lay the foundation for future job growth and innovation for our country.” And the TCC report, entitled One Trillion Reasons, stated: “A $500bn savings opportunity exists by consolidating the government’s myriad supply chains. This would also render the government’s procurement process far more transparent, helping to strengthen public trust.”

With tech leaders applying the power of computing to human inefficiency, we know who the REAL kings of this planet are and will increasingly be. It’s no wonder that men like Michael Bloomberg and Silvio Berlusconi are corporate leaders, political leaders and multi-billionaires. They are the model of the world-king, the Zeus archetype. And men like these have the power and resources to orient tech around cleaning up 20th century messes. Those who have erected Kingdoms of Opacity around the these cesspools are doomed, as we already have seen, while those who embrace Transparency as a route TO greater discovery and engagement with mystery and innovation will rule. The simple mathematical and scientific rule concerning this is Pareto’s Law or Occam’s Razor and Leonardo da Vinci has captured this when he says, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

HUMAN INTERACTION NO LONGER SLOWS DOWN TECH ADAVANCEMENT: Our technology’s solutions are so beautiful now and are being packaged to accentuate this elegance. Solutions on the social intelligence front are just one example of this. With Flowtown, I can upload all of my email addresses and see exactly which social properties these entities currently occupy. With another tool just about to launch I can upload my email addresses and know the exact time of day a Facebook ad campaign should run to reach the maximum online users. With another tool also on the verge of launching, I can determine which tweets and FB statuses have the highest chances of being re-tweeted and passed along AND which ad copy will achieve the highest percentage of click-through rate.

Again, with well-priced and effective solutions, we hurdle opaque entities that shroud previously complex processes in secrecy AND end up with BETTER solutions at BETTER pricing. This principle is horizontally applicable across industries AND is the metaphorical basis for human-tech relationship to leap-frog into a new paradigm of leadership, democracy and independence.

Of course, in the context of all this left-brain, progress-oriented talk, there is the question as to whether cyborgs dream of electric sheep or can enjoy the most human of experiences.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Last night I sat with a client in LA discussing the growth of social networks, social monitoring/intelligence projects AND transparent social eco-systems. We agreed with one another that no matter how transparent the eco-system of social networks becomes, there really are countless skins of the onion left to peel off. And that applies from the individual to the corporate level.

Could it be that complaining about transparency in social networks IS REALLY FEAR OF IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION? I submit to participants within social networks that your very participation in the social fabric of the internet IS a transformative act.

“Social-networking sites, blogs, online discussion forums and online journals represent modern arenas for individuals to write themselves into being,” writes Theresa Sauter. “A lot of people see social networking as a new way for people to interact but I’m interested in examining it as a way to form an identity and understand ourselves,” she added.

The potential of an increasingly transparent eco-system in social networks is an OPENING OF THE HEART. This opening is a kind of humanizing of all that was once mechanical and commercial. And, as a result, phenomena like brands, corporations and products take on a living nature as brand ambassadors, community managers and Chief Customer Officers interact with customers in a dialogue format. Communication between the “storied heights” of corporations and the humans that buy from these corporations has NEVER had such an opportunity for intimacy.

How does this work? We now have numerous examples of major international brands who have realized the necessity of humanization. Pepsi’s Refresh Everything project, Nokia’s Shot By Fans project AND Zappos, Best Buy and Jet Blue Twitter-customer-service portals are ALL great examples of brands relating on a one-to-one basis with their customers in helpful and generous ways. DTC’s “Drop Everything For Love” campaign is one of my favorites, where people logged in with stories about how they had “dropped everything for love”. The best stories were awarded with the opportunity to do just that.

So here’s a direct challenge and invitation to the CEO’s, GM’s and MM’s of the world: Would you drop everything for love? Consider the benefit of falling in love with your customer and steering your brand(s) in a direction that ATTRACT and enroll him/her/them in the process of brand vitality through intuitively designed reward-driven campaigns. We must hunt for dollars as the leaders of corporations with a responsibility to our shareholders AND we must also create a brand culture that fosters generosity, reward and a community/environment of friendliness. In a world where “friending” and “following” have catapulted customer equity beyond brand equity AND elevated customer lifetime value over current sales, IT BECOMES THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS LEADERS TO CREATE HOSPITABLE BRANDS. The identity of corporate culture AND brand presence has never had a more favorable environment for transforming identity and re-making the world.

Virginia Satir, the fabulous author of The New Peoplemaking, writes, “I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them.” Brands that design/implement product, communication and sales strategy BASED upon listening to their customer WILL win. Listening IS the action that opens every petal of the human community and gives individuals and brands passage to the heart of vitality and re-productivity.

Popularity: 13% [?]

By Nathaniel Hansen, CEO, The Socializers

If more Marketing Managers at Fortune 500 companies/major media companies truly understood the potential of future media delivery channels like GoogleTV PAIRED WITH “content-informing-intelligence”, there would be a mass re-organization of dinosaur-age ad/marketing agencies whose teams have yet to even train in social monitoring/intelligence tools AND have none of the talent-identification capabilities that a CAA or William Morris has. Those same Marketing Managers would then turn to social business agencies for the following process:

(a) pre-product dev intelligence gathering/listening,
(b) demographic-savvy content/product design RELATED TO what is discovered/analyzed from conversations in the social fabric of the internet,
(c) Relationship Architecting with related Social Strategy to identify ideal Key Influencers (and their content), thus paving the way for seamless and swift introduction of said content into the fabric of communities hungry for it,
(d) on-going listening that creates a virtuous cycle of this process.

The future leaders of transmedia will use the process above as just one of their approaches in expanding possibility for those who interact with media, advertisers, media/content producers AND communications entities. Transmedia and the associated processes that will bring this fabulous new way of interactive relationship to programming IS the future of CONTENT IDENTIFICATION AND PRODUCTION.

Colin Donald of FUTURESCAPE.TV says it best in the following comment on an article entitled Struggling for control: The humble channel-zapper is evolving in ways that will shape television’s futurein a recent edition of The Economist magazine:

“Internet-connected TVs lead to massively increased choice and require next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry, a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major industry players.”

The teams working on Oprah’s new cable channel and on eBook sales strategy at Bertelsmann’s Random House are contending with issues related to the new possibilities in transmedia and how to make content delivery platforms lucrative for their shareholders WHILE giving users the most flexibility in interacting with their portfolios of content. Those media publishers who acknowledge the value in being customer-centric vs. product-centric in their offering AND develop platforms that allow maximum interactivity WILL win!

To quote Ali Valdez, a senior Microsoft sales leader, “Their customers will be their marketers. Their customers’ social network friends will be their new customers. Full transparency, good and bad, will drive innovation and competitive pricing. The consumer will win. Those brands that enable consumer victory will share in the bounty.”

TO SUM UP: Combining research from tools like Recorded Future, the world’s first temporal analytics engine (a video intro to Recorded Future here), and Radian6, a leading social media/network monitoring solution, media companies now have the opportunity to LISTEN to audiences that have OPTED OUT of traditional marketing channels and are OPTING INTO new, socially chosen/recommended channels. They then are able to match valuable information from conversations within the social fabric of the internet WITH market trends and probable future events to create product/service/content offerings with previously un-paralleled precision. Existing portfolios of content may be re-purposed into countless monetizable and USER-GENERATED interactive communities.

Understanding the future requires observation and listening and it is a Chief Customer Officer who will teach this to marketing staff, brand managers and community managers.

Popularity: 55% [?]

Can transparency be shaped? If the concept “transparency” were a medium, what qualities would we give it in its current state globally? Meet a Transparency Expert, http://bit.ly/transparency_expert, who has written books on fascinating subjects like Doublespeak (http://bit.ly/doublespeak_article) and THE SEC Plain Language Handbook: (http://bit.ly/plain_language_handbook).
~ Nathaniel Hansen

Popularity: unranked [?]

The transition from a paradigm of opacity/power to transparency/ethics IS the bridge humanity now crosses. It is a passage best led by individuals and groups with evenly-balanced masculine/feminine polarity, pluralists and those who oriented more around Eros than Phobos. ~ Nathaniel Hansen, Athens, Greece.

RELATED RESOURCES:

Eros by Neumann (the best writer on the story of Psyche and Eros. He is a depth psychologist).

Popularity: 13% [?]

Has transparency through social networking brought humanity closer to the “truth” or into a more subtle layer, similar to fiction or poetry? The new literary form entitled “status update” lends itself (like fiction) more to psychological narrative, imitating the play of the wandering or dreaming mind…not a bad thing for a humanity in healing from the industrial revolution.
~ Nathaniel Hansen

Popularity: unranked [?]

March 21, 2010

After the Social Media Business Summit in London, I’ve been pondering the meaning of transparency and what this paradigm means to business and the social realm.

I’m convinced that humanity is entering a fantastic age, where undiscovered aspects of ourselves and the world appear the moment we imagine. And I firmly believe that our social networks offer us the means for this evolution to take place.

We have entered an age where fantastic job titles are possible, careers for Social Relationship Architects, Social Strategists, and Social Physicists, among others. These careers are for people who have training in existing disciplines AND who are able to think metaphorically, drawing lines across right and left hemispheres of thought, weaving new worlds of relationship.

We live in a time when our networks contain people who are super-relevant and specific to our dreams, aspirations and challenges. Goethe’s quote could not be more true at this time: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” It takes a boldness composed of genius, power and magic to enter one’s social networks and begin creating and synthesizing relationships. It takes a willingness to ask questions, be awe-inspired and open to what your particular network has for you, for where you are right now. No other person has the same network that you have. No other person sees the world like you do. And no other person has the opportunities to contribute to this customized network than you…you are, after all, the one who built it and owns it.

Transparency is not something to be feared. It is the greatest opportunity to be exactly who you are meant to be, no shame, no fear, only a wild animal out in the open, a tendril springing across the earth for all to see as you bloom and root into the soil of your community and offer your fruit.

My observation is that an alignment is taking place globally that is akin to a holographic puzzle. Before, with Google, we looked and found. Now, with social networks like Facebook, we see in multi-colored, multi-dimensional space, what the community surrounding a keyword looks like…we see the faces, read the updates, hear the music and taste the journey that this key-phrase is taking. The paradigm of transparency is revealing the living nature of our languages and images.

Nathaniel Hansen
CEO
The Socializers
http://www.thesocializers.com

Popularity: 7% [?]