The Rebel Faction

Intelligence Web

The intelligent Web can act as a kind of external brain, storing a huge amount of knowledge while being able to learn and to make smart inferences, thus allowing you to solve problems for which your own brain's knowledge is too limited. In order to use that cognitive power effectively, the distance or barrier between internal and external brain should be minimal.

Interaction between internal and external brain does not always need to go in the same direction. Just like the external brain can learn from your pattern of browsing, it could also learn from you by directly asking you questions. A smart web would continuously check the coherency and completeness of the knowledge it contains. If it finds contradictions or gaps it would try to situate the persons most likely to understand the issue (most likely the authors or active users of a document), and direct their attention to the problem. In many cases, an explicit formulation of the problem will be sufficient for an expert to be able to quickly fill in the gap, using implicit knowledge which was not as yet entered clearly into the Web. Many "knowledge acquisition" and "knowledge elicitation" techniques exist for stimulating experts to formulate their intuitive knowledge in such a way that it can be implemented on a computer. In that way, the Web would learn implicitly and explicitly from its users, while the users would learn from the Web. Similarly, the web would mediate between users exchanging information, answering each other's questions. In a way, the brains of the users themselves would become nodes in the Web: stores of knowledge directly linked to the rest of the Web which can be consulted by other users or by the web itself.

Though individual people might refuse answering requests received through the super-brain, no one would want to miss the opportunity to use the unlimited knowledge and intelligence of the super-brain for answering one's own questions. However, normally you cannot continuously receive a service without giving anything in return. People will stop answering your requests if you never answer theirs. Similarly, one could imagine that the intelligent Web would be based on the simple condition that you can use it only if you provide some knowledge in return.

In the end the different brains of users may become so strongly integrated with the Web that the Web would literally become a "brain of brains": a super-brain. Thoughts would run from one user via the Web to another user, from there back to the Web, and so on. Thus, billions of thoughts would run in parallel over the super-brain, creating ever more knowledge in the process.

The intelligence web communicates on a subspace level using the body as a latent transmitter for signal boost, while planetary scale transmissions are relatively simple operations, interplanetary web signals require the use of super nodes which are comprised of a highly powerful subspace reciever/broadcaster on par with that of a holonet transmitter, but on radicaly different wavelengths. While blockable with average communication inhibiting technologies, these transmissions are backed up by multiple transmitters on multiple frequancies.