The rising ingenuity gap and the role of virtual environment.

Human beings are not catching up with global challenges, whether in global warming, chronic poverty, pandemics potential and extreme consumerism. These are complex problems of extreme distributed nature; they require equally decentralized solutions that massively cascade throughout the entire environment.

These are all interconnected problems where key variables are interdependent. For example, extreme consumerism causing rapid global warming resulting in large scale drought leading to famine, poverty, epidemics, ad infinitum.

Interdependency among variables tends to make the problems increasingly complicated and growing at exponential rate due to non-linear dynamics inherited in such complex systems. With the increase in interdependency, chaos theory suggests that a steady change in seemingly stable environment could easily turning into chaotic turmoil where net results are unpredictable. Therefore, we?re facing increasingly volatile changes in the ecosystems. The rising degree of global challenges can be thought of as humanity?s demand for innovative solution or ingenuity to address those challenges and hopefully avoid the sudden extreme volatility resulting in potential collapse of human prosperity in a global level.

While the degree of global challenges seems to be exponentially on the rise, however, it is very doubtful that we have the same pattern on global problem solving i.e. the supply of human ingenuity. The solutions are not catching with problems on the global scale and we can call this situation as the ?ingenuity gap?. Although there is no lack of small-scale social innovations from green technologies to poverty-quenching water pump, yet the adoption of those technologies and required shift in social mindset are growing at a very slow pace compare to the growth rate of various problems. Unless we somehow exponentially increase the degree of ingenuity required to solve global challenges, the world seems to be locked in its path of doom.

It seems as if humanity as a specie totally lost its learning capacity to adapt with human-inflicted changes in the global environment and blindly head for the large-scale collapse. Our self-interest seems to prevent us from collective actions needed to avert global socio-environmental disaster. We are no longer intelligent adaptive system but rather seem like a growing parasite or cancer that marches towards its own demise once the host?s resources are all depleted.

Given past human track records in dealing with emerging hyper-complicated global challenges such as the second world war or the climate change seems to suggest that we will not learn our lesson until we collapse and learn from our mistake. Our only problem here is that there might not be a second chance for the coming environmental collapse as the situation will be irreversible and will trigger various other socio-economic problems from famine to resource-motivated conflicts especially among the poorer population of the planet.

Are there any emerging social innovations that are growing exponentially in scale which collectively have potential to match or even overcome the growth of global challenges?

There are such emerging examples and they all are largely driven by the rise of the Internet as the emerging virtual environment that connect passionate people together and mobilize their resources towards common causes in a massive scale in decentralized manner.

Wikipedia: It is the world biggest free encyclopedia in term of entries. There are over a million articles in English alone as well as over 20,000 articles in Thai language. Wikipedia allows people to openly share their factual knowledge online where they contribute entries. It allows hundreds of thousand of people to collaboratively edit any article on the wikipedia instantly where communities forming around various topics organize themselves to check for quality and accuracy of each article entry or edition. All articles on wikipedia are totally free for distribute (GNU free documentation license). It has become somewhat the planet?s brain repository. All of these without any monetary incentive to anyone.

Creative commons movement: Copyright is the world major driver of innovation, but over protect copyright will lead to innovation stagnation as people can?t leverage other people ideas, innovations and arts conveniently to innovate their owns. There is now a global movement called ?creative commons? or copyleft where the owner of various types of licenses whether writing, images, videos, etc. agree for other people to share, exchange and distribute their works for free under non-commercial use.

There are now hundreds of millions piece of creative works in every-kind available in creative-commons license that empower mash-up techno-innovation culture that is emerging currently.

Creative-common is widely known now in developed countries while developing countries such as Brazil are beginning to join the movement of over million people world-wide. With it, creative works are now slowly accessible and usable by all humanity. Open licenses similar to creative common are emerging in various areas of expertise such as open license for scientific discovery instead of narrow-minded patent.

WHO open collaboration on SARS: During the advent of SARS virus in Asia, the World Health Organization (WHO) organize an open collaboration platform for various laboratory and interest scientists to participate where they share key information in real-time as well as daily morning teleconference. All daily key findings and debates among various participants are post on WHO website for anyone to use for further investigation into the cause and the cure for the virus. This allows everyone to focus on their relative strength while reaping benefit from global information sharing; it was a kind of collaborative division of labor through virtual mean. Within months, the cause, prevention set and the cure are found. Launching a new chapter into open scientific co-discovery.

Reinventing intelligence gathering and crisis ordination: Gathering intelligence and crisis coordination are problematic. Event such as September 11 or Asian Tsunami illustrated how ill-prepared we are in dealing with large-scale crises. When traditional intelligence and crisis coordination systems failed because all the smaller parts within didn?t share enough information promptly. The typical responds from the government is to set out to create an even more specialized and centralized system in order to gain more control over the crisis situation. To date, those initiatives aiming at increase centralization of information are far from working and might even cause more problem as now there are more hierarchy in information processing that might cause slowdown in effective information processing and distribution due to overly complicated structure and its politics.

A radically different approach is emerging and proving to be much more effective, this new thinking focuses around swarm intelligence or totally decentralized information gathering and distribution with common protocol uniting diversity of systems. The idea is very similar to the Internet itself where different type of computing systems is connected and allows rapid communication through Internet Protocol (IP). Since the dawn of Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) in the United States, normal people get real-time crisis information on their personal computers in a very open manner. The open system maximizes decentralized groups of organizations and people to alert, receive warning and act spontaneously without central control. However, once up-to-second information is rapidly gather and distribute, the information system act as a virtual feedback mechanism or a open nervous system allowing people to coordinate their crisis responds globally. Theoretically, it allows agent to have access to global information while focusing on local responds base on their on the spot knowledge. To-date, millions of people are using CAP as their everyday social collaboration in dealing small-scale crises such as fire (911 is also on the system) all the way to terrorism. Thailand has similar emerging initiative called ?open care?.

Thaigoodview and Learners.in.th: Finding good quality learning material online in Thailand is always difficult, especially for students. Now, a small number of initiatives is changing all that. First case in point is thaigoodview website where thousands of students and teachers across the country are collaboratively create and share tens of thousands of their learning material in diverse digital format that can be use for school or self-study. Another case of totally open learning system is learners.in.th where university lecturers and students share their lessons online from lecturing slides to discussions. Learners with similar interests can collaborate across classes in different region of Thailand. For example, Internet PR class in Thammasat might be swapping class material with E-commerce class in Song-Kla university and get to know each other. To-date, thousands of members are creating and sharing over a million pages of knowledge content virtually.

From all the examples cited above, narrowly defined self-interest is in no way a key driving force of the creation of these massive scale social innovations. We are experiencing an emerging of new type of massively decentralized resource mobilization towards common goods driven by virtual environment.

The emergence of massively distributed collaborations illustrates a growing degree of collective intelligence where humanity as a whole acts as a complex adaptive system. From wikipedia to CAP, humanity acts almost as if it is a single multiple-cell organism although in reality no one is totally in control, no central command, no United Nations, no Governments. This pattern of behavior is similar to bee-hive, ant colony, rain forest or even Gaia. Somehow virtual environment such as Internet-enabled relationship and trust, online communities, collaborative filtering, are all connecting individuals and organizations with certain shared-interests to collaboratively peer-produce public goods.

In this new mode of production for humanity, smallest individuals can collectively lead to massive impact.

Virtual environment empowered normal people be able to truly think globally and act locally, it allow typical consumers of information to become co-producers due to the lower cost of information production and distribution through various user-friendly technologies from Blog to Video podcasting and any other websites that act as platform for people to collaborate in various ways. This generation of Pro-sumers (producer + consumer) enabled by virtual environment will shift power structure in media, politics and economics globally as now the information producing and distributing power are now democratized at the hands of average citizens.

If only one percent of the Internet population become powerful co-producers of information and knowledge in various areas important to collective decision making such as responds on climate change, poverty and so on. We must realize that current representative democracy system seems to fail to take on such complicated issues as few decision makers are those making all these key decisions and they are susceptible to lobbyists and their own self-interests. With robust virtual environment allows people to participate more prominently in these decision making processes as well as in global resource allocation bypassing politically-motivated intermediaries, we do have hope for the future.

The rise of robust virtual environment for massive social innovations could be one important key to bridge our ingenuity gap. When more and more people participate in these virtual movements, we might reach a tipping point where there are enough diversity and critical-mass to enable various grand scale social innovations to deal with global challenges.

As more people participate, and all these movement are interdependent, we are reaching similar conditions that cause the rapid exponential growth of the challenges themselves. Using the same self-reinforcing loops but on collective problem solving and solution co-creation, we might grows our collective intelligence (through our virtual synapses) so that we human begins to behave like intelligent adaptive system with sustainable co-existence with global ecosystems rather than our existing parasite status.

With robust virtual environment where the like-minded connected, the resources may flow in such a way that there is an increase in human adaptive learning capacity, perhaps like what many scientists called ?the global brain?, to survive our own narrowly defined self-interest. Of course, we don?t require the level of awakening in collective consciousness in order to mobilize massive resources to co-create social innovations. As long as virtual communities are rapidly growing and mobilize resources to solve their group-interest challenges, spontaneously, the multiple interdependency of self-organizing virtual communities will result in the emergence of global cooperation that allow humanity as a whole to incrementally adapt to environmental challenge without the need for each individual person to have supra global intelligence. Similarly to ant colonies and brain where each ant can be relatively dumb or neuron need not to be conscious, yet the emergence of the global level allow them to act with adaptive intelligence more than any member nor the sum of its parts.