{"id":3726,"date":"2008-12-02T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2008-12-02T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3726"},"modified":"2009-07-12T09:44:38","modified_gmt":"2009-07-12T14:44:38","slug":"the-matrix-collective-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3726","title":{"rendered":"The Matrix: Collective Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

We text, email, phone and make purchases in an ever inter-connected world. As our point of accessing the internet has\u00a0shifted from stationary PC’s to smaller and more mobile devices, The Matrix is matching what we are looking for with where we are at the time and rending the data in\u00a0the new world of\u00a0Collective Intelligence,\u00a0the term now emerging to describe the data trail we all leave behind, knowingly, willingly, or not.<\/p>\n

Propelled by new technologies<\/a> and the Internet\u2019s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and the result? A plebe\u00a0in the White House, but I digress.<\/p>\n

Wireless and internet technologies afford consumers and businesses unprecedented freedom and productivity in the age of the Matrix.\u00a0What are the consequences? Is it a fair trade?<\/p>\n

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.<\/p>\n

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. \u201cThere are so many uses for this technology \u2014 from marketing to war fighting \u2014 that I can\u2019t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,\u201d says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alas, I know of few that would give up their Blackberry, the aforementioned President-Elect counted among them.<\/p>\n

In the balance, the benefits will hopefully outweigh the perils. Some will be more obvious than others.<\/p>\n

Assisting policymakers…<\/p>\n

a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Day traders…<\/p>\n

It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city\u2019s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.<\/p>\n

It also noticed that middle-income people \u2014 as determined by ZIP code data \u2014 tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and bar hoppers.<\/p>\n

The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moving forward into the past?<\/p>\n

\u201cFor most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,\u201d Dr. Malone said. \u201cIn some sense we\u2019re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like it or not, with the advent of an ever-growing array of sensory technologies, it will become difficult if not impossible to\u00a0avoid the grasp\u00a0of The Matrix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We text, email, phone and make purchases in an ever inter-connected world. As our point of accessing the internet has\u00a0shifted from stationary PC’s to smaller and more mobile devices, The Matrix is matching what we are looking for with where we are at the time and rending the data in\u00a0the new world of\u00a0Collective Intelligence,\u00a0the term […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,30,49,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-universe-and-everything","category-liberty","category-science","category-the-matrix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}