Knowledge and experience collaging

The original vision for creating artificial intelligence was to recreate human intelligence in a broad sense. The Turing test was a result of this thinking: as a test of machine intelligence, ask a question to a real person and a machine and see if you can tell the difference. While some computers have been declared winners of the Turing test, these computers clearly fall far short of actual human intelligence. We at Holon Labs, believe that computers can be so much more.

We believe that true artificial intelligence should also have a greater moral and ecological foundation than the Turing test demands. Computing today comes at a tremendous cost to our well-being, our social fabric, and our environment, and the projected environmental costs for more advanced forms of computing, such as quantum computing, are expected to be orders of magnitude higher. (1)

What follows is our take on why computers should be designed to do more. However, the language used to describe our intention and our interests at Holon Labs is constrained because the language of our technological era has infiltrated almost every aspect of life and dominates how we talk and think about technology. Here’s our thinking in language we find compatible with our perspective. Please engage by letting us know what you think in the comments.

What seems to separate existing forms of artificial intelligence from human intelligence are the fully embodied and cognitive experiences of living, intuition, awareness, perception, enlightenment and insight. It could be argued that some aspects of cognition, such as perception and insight, can be simulated by technology. Intuition, awareness and enlightenment are at a farther remove, especially if we constrain awareness to self-awareness and enlightenment to spiritual life. While AI can respond to data with any action it is programmed to be capable of, it cannot experience, imagine, feel and judge, much less deal with changing situations or shift from short-term to long-term concerns. AI can produce the appearance of perception, insight, and emotion - perhaps with some verisimilitude - but it cannot experience them, and it cannot care about the consequences of the answers it gives. A true intelligence possesses all of these depths.

Our interest at Holon is in a completely different form of artificial intelligence. Our aim is not to create machines that simulate human intelligence. Our focus is on collective knowledge and experience, preserving meaning and facilitating connection to each other and the planet. We’re not seeking machines that think or create for us. Instead, we seek to create collective computers that enable and facilitate our ability to interact, to connect with one another, to create and to discover new things together - and to do so while preserving all the context, nuance, insight, and meaning of each person’s experience The ability to do this in a technology-assisted exchange was never designed into today’s computers. Nor were they designed to convey or facilitate nuance or insight. 

What existing computers were programmed to do was to solve problems. But the paradigm of problem-solving skews everything into a potential solution for a problem, even if a problem doesn’t exist. The creative act is, for instance, not a problem to be solved. Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas that may be employed to solve problems or to create something totally new. Framing things as a problem creates the paradigm of human life as a series of problems to be solved. But we are so much more. We dream, we eat, sleep, pray, love and make things. 

One of the most striking elements of modern business is the need to collaborate across many divides – geographic, topical, cultural, political, and more. The opportunities for misunderstanding meaning, intent and context are many. In our efforts to collaborate, we are often wholly dependent on technology to manage layers of meaning which would be present if we were speaking face to face. In-person collaboration is enriched by nonverbal cues that subtly convey intent or meaning. Instead, we are forced to employ suites of meeting and facilitation technology, such as chat apps, virtual whiteboards, emojis, and so forth, which try to provide similar cues online but are clumsy at best and can be the cause of misunderstanding and conflict. Often each type of affordance or capability is covered by a single technology such as chat or a whiteboard, which do not truly integrate. Herein lies the challenge. Our presuppositions and current technologies get in the way - they constrain collaboration and connection and thereby build in underperformance. By trying to simplify the interface for humans, our technology strips us of nonverbal cues and obscures our interactions and intentions, fostering distrust and confusion.

With our proposed collective computer, we imagine new socio-technology affordances that facilitate the transferring, changing, deliberating upon and combining experiences between us to create something new through collective computing. This has been referred to as "knowledge collaging," though we would extend it to "experience collaging." We aim to preserve and manage the variances that typically interfere in collaboration, rather than try to eliminate them, and to create knowledge and experience collages that are composed of the full intelligence complements of the individuals involved. We can then rely on existing technologies to map the forms and progress of these collages.(2) 

We are working to truly understand how to foster environments that support the development of technologies that provide the affordance landscape that scaffolds semantics, culture, perspective, expectation, intention and meaning into material knowledge and experience collages that possess inherent wisdom - not mere intelligence.

Our ambition at Holon is to support the full potential of people and business through new regenerative socio-technologies that support life. Get in touch if you’re interested in exploring these ideas with us.

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(1) Monserrate, Steven Gonzalez. 2022. “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage.” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, no. Winter 2022 (January). https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553.

(2) Malhotra, Arvind, et al. “Socio-Technical Affordances for Large Scale Collaboration.” Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, vol. 32, no. 5, Oct. 2021, pp. 1371–90, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1457.