I believe the term artificial intelligence has actually been used to describe machine intelligence, and in this case the intelligence doesn't reside in machines; the machines are a mediator for people’s actions.
Current tools are really tools for communication, not for thinking.
—Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold, credited with inventing the phrase “virtual community,” is an adjunct faculty member of the Transformative Leadership Studies program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, and a critic, writer, teacher, and expert on the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media and virtual communities.
He served as editor of The Whole Earth Review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and as the first executive editor of HotWired. Subsequently he founded the website Electric Minds and started a consultancy for virtual community building.
He is the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Basic Books, 2002), The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, 1993), and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (MIT Press, 2012).
Adolfo Plasencia:
Howard, thanks for accepting this conversation with me, here in Barcelona.
Howard Rheingold:
It’s a pleasure.
A.P.:
Why don’t we start with the concept of your most famous books?—a concept that has generated much comment owing to the numerous possible interpretations of the title, Smart Mobs, particularly in this age of social media and the almost universal use of cell phones, which are now, with their ubiquitous connection to the Internet, called “smart phones.” The smart phone issue appears to be an application directly related to your book.
How would you most directly define “smart mobs”?
Do you believe that distributed intelligence, in the form of, for example, being contacted by cell phone, generates an emerging collective intelligence?
H.R.:
I'll give you a definition of smart mobs. Smart mobs are groups of people who emerge as such, when technology allows them to collaborate and organize their activities in a collective way, through an interaction that we could call something like “intelligent.”
A smart mob is not necessarily a wise mob. In English, I think that “smart mobs” has a somewhat different connotation from that given by the Spanish translation of “mobs,” in the sense that “mobs” also has a bit of a sinister connotation. It has numerous meanings, one of them being “collective intelligence.” Another is that a group is capable of organizing its activities in ways in which it would be unable to organize itself without mobile and Internet technologies. And there is also a kind of description (concept) (so they say) that adding computers to things turns them into smart things or homes into smart homes.
People aren’t smarter because their use of a cell phone somehow makes them better or more intelligent but because this technological device and the technologies linked to it give people the chance to engage in a world, in a setting, different from which until now had only been possible to access through Internet, using computers connected to a socket on the wall.
So there are different connotations, which obviously don’t fully describe the phenomenon. I explain this quite widely in my book. I speak about the use of mobile communications, I speak about the emergence of collective intelligences, and I also think there is a difference between people who use technologies to coordinate their activities and people who, in addition, understand how they work. And this is the reason why I wrote the book: because there is a phenomenon that is emerging and people who participate in it don’t necessarily understand it or understand all aspects of it.
We’re in the early stages of the emergence of a new medium that combines the personal computer with the Internet and the cell phone (telephone + Internet + wireless + ubiquitous chips and a ubiquitous connection. too).
A.P.:
Let’s talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and machines.
Do you think that AI now exists in digital machines?
Is it going to be possible to use genuinely intelligent machines soon?
H.R.:
I believe the term artificial intelligence has actually been used to describe machine intelligence, and in this case the intelligence doesn’t reside in machines; the machines are a mediator for people’s actions. What simply happens is that technologies such as the Internet or cell phones allow people to carry out collective actions, even in the virtual world or the physical world, which we wouldn’t be able to do collectively without the technologies.
A.P.:
Let’s talk now about processes, the ones you have written about in your books, both in the pioneering The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993) and in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002), as well as in the most recent Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (2012).
Do you think these processes in relation to smart mobs are in some way related to Hayek’s concepts of spontaneous evolution, or biological theories on self-organization and morphogenesis, which is what Alan Turing talks about in his latest works? Because some scientists insinuate that in a large enough mass with special biological activity, there might be a spontaneous generation of intelligence, precisely as a result of surpassing a certain threshold or quantity of critical mass of the activity.
In summary, what do you think about the idea of a new intelligence arising as a result of an accumulation of many individual interacting intelligences? Hayek and Turing have spoken about these types of processes applied to intelligence.
H.R.:
I'm not too sure that this is related to the ideas revolving around the intelligence of machines. Current tools are really tools for communication, not for thinking. I insist: they are not a tool for thinking. Actually, I think it doesn’t matter whether a computer has the capacity to emulate AI or not. The important thing is that it allows people to act collectively, and I suppose that wanting to call it an emerging phenomenon is a philosophical question, in the same way that we call the sum and accumulation of many people’s actions civilization.
A.P.:
The next question I have for you concerns what happened in the Madrid bombings—known as 11-M, for March 11—the series of terrorist attacks on four commuter trains in Madrid carried out by jihadist terrorists, as revealed by the police and judicial investigation.1 I recall that in the prologue of your book, Multitudes inteligentes (smart mobs), you talk about the smart mobs in Spain following the Madrid bombings; the social catharsis that affected many people, prompted by the impact of the events of March 11; and the twisted response given by the authorities about their origin.2 There are some who say that the popular response wasn’t self-organized, although we were all out there in the streets.
Do you believe it was a totally spontaneous phenomenon? That it modified itself on its own? Because in the text messages (SMS) it said: “The Government is lying. Pass it on.” In other words, there was information and there was an order. So did the mob carry out an order or was it something that was, by itself, self-regulated?
H.R.:
That doesn’t really matter.
A.P.:
I mention it because of the “pass it on” thing that people put at the end of their short texts so that the messages could be passed on from one person to another, to more and more people at full speed.
H.R.:
I'm not sure I understand it. It’s quite a common and colloquial sentence in any language for people organizing a political action. And I cannot claim to have any experience in Spanish politics, but what I do find quite logical is that people join in with a message of this kind.
A.P.:
Nicholas Negroponte explained wireless technology in its Wi-Fi mode in his article “Being Wireless” by using the metaphor of water lilies, the horizontal flowers floating on the surface of the water, and frogs, didn’t he?3 Information jumps from one side to another, from one water lily to another, in a horizontal system with no hierarchy.
Do smart mobs have no hierarchy?
H.R.:
The smart mobs phenomenon is even more horizontal, more lateral.
A.P.:
In other words, there isn’t any hierarchy?
H.R.:
They are lateral communications. Communication is passed on laterally from person to person. In that sense, yes, I suppose that Negroponte’s metaphor is a good one too.
A.P.:
Howard, you also said in the prologue to your book about the 11-M events that, in a certain way, television died with the text messages in Spain. I don’t know if you think that new things always kill off something that is old.
What could die, apart from television, if smart mobs become universal?
H.R.:
In fact I didn’t say that; perhaps it came up in the translation. However, it’s not a case of putting the blame on television. Instead, people who didn’t have access to television, to the radio, or to newspapers were able to use communication technologies for disseminating their message from person to person, and actually it has nothing to do with television, apart from the fact that it is an alternative, a means for spreading your message.
Of course, radio hasn’t killed off movies, movies haven’t killed off theater, television will not kill off movies, and the Internet will not kill off television. I think it was Marshal McLuhan who said that every time a new medium comes out, it simply alters other media, but this is not necessarily related to doing away with it or substituting for it. Many people simply used text messaging because in a delocalized environment they didn’t really have access to television. It isn’t that it killed off television. What was altered instead was the relation of these people with the television media because what they used on that occasion was a new medium.
A.P.:
You said in one of your essays some time ago that the Internet was born out of love and not through a lust for money. How can we combine a free and open space without controls and the economic business space in the mobile cyberspace?
H.R.:
I don’t see why there should be any reason for the two not to coexist. People use language for commercial ends and after that they use it for poetry, and they are not mutually exclusive.
A.P.:
In the third part of your most recent book, which is titled “Participation Power,” you speak about “participation skills.” As you usually do when speaking about this participation, you were referring to that carried out using a cell phone, a smart phone. Time has obviously proved you right.
Do you think this phenomenon of delocalized or mobile connection (of smart mobs) will continue to be decisive for humanity? Do you believe it’s going to be the next social revolution?
H.R.:
Well, yes, because there are more people who have cell phones than computers. In just the first quarter of the previous year, 267 million smart phones were sold. Telephones are giving us more and more access to Internet; people carry theirs around with them and it is a part of their lives. Personal computers and laptops haven’t been so readily available. So there are more and more people in more places who are able to do the same things they used to do with personal computers and the Internet. This is important: many, many more people in many more places.
A.P.:
Thanks very much, Howard, for your time and opinions and for this conversation.
H.R.:
You’re welcome.