Riding the Information Superhighway into the Intelligence Age

I remember sitting in my high school G/T class, which most of the time was little more that a free period, and being introduced to Megatrends, and the concept of the Information Age.  After all, it was 1993, and email and the Internet were terms just entering the public consciousness.  I had access to neither at the time, and really no idea that 5 years and a college degree later, I’d be building my first website, or that ten years later, I’d be completely dependent on them.

All this information, at our fingertips… I can’t even imagine how different life must be for children growing up with so much information at their disposal. No more arguing with friends over who sang The Warrior (it was Scandal w/Patti Smyth, NOT Pat Benatar), or racking our brains remembering what actor played Ming the Merciless in 1981’s cult classic Flash Gordon (Max Von Sydow, like we could forget), or digging through musty encyclopedias trying to find the chief exports of Madagascar (the world’s largest exporter of Vanilla).  Now we just Google it, and the answers are right there.

Sure, for simple questions, the Internet is a treasure trove of information, but for more complex problems, all that information gets buried in “los links!”

There is no Spoon

Having access to all this information is invaluable, but it’s true worth is determined by what one does with it. Data is nothing without a CPU, and information is nothing without a brain, or matrix to process them. While the days of Skynet are still far away, the rise of AI has found an unusual pair of partners… Apps and Games.

Apps have already begun compiling information, and allowing us to share massive amounts of data with our personal networks.  While Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and even RSS Readers are great aggregators of information, the intelligent aggregation of our data is in it’s nascence.  Twitter and Facebook have pursuing this end with their friend/follower suggestions, following Amazon’s lead with their product suggestions and recommendations. With the explosion of Facebook Connect, the data pool increases, and the suggestions will become smarter.  This combination of data streams can truly be seen in FourSquare, where users, locations, and networks all come together.  While it’s a great marketing tool for businesses, particularly restaurants, this ‘intelligent’ information isn’t very useful. It’s fun, to be sure, but critical issues won’t be solved by becoming Mayor of Nena’s Taco Truck, or the Pope of Chilitown.

So when the time for fun and games is over, it’s… well… just time for games.  The military has long been developing games to help train their soldiers for the intensity of combat (all those tax dollars spent, when they could have just bought a few copies of Call of Duty), but first person shooters were just the beginning. Just today i found an excellent article about how IBM has used the SIMs as a basis for CityOne, a game whose objective is helping urban planners and government agencies build the city of tomorrow.  Brilliant Idea, and one with far-ranging implications. Allowing urban planners to consolidate all of the data streams involved in running a modern city to help build extremely complex models and simulations will provide an incredible amount of extremely useful data.

Dawn of the Intelligence Age

As more data streams enter the matrix, the smarter it will become.  The days of personalized ads talking to us, as seen in Minority Report are coming, and sooner that we think. Personalized marketing is the new black, and something every marketing firm with eyes on the future is pursuing.  The potential for this data mining to provide better leads for companies will allow them to better target their customers, and better spend their marketing dollars.  It’s no longer about the vast amount of information bombarding us, but the filtering of that information based on personal predilections and habits.

Were I sitting in that high school G/T class today, we wouldn’t be discussing the Information Superhighway. We would be discussing the power of Personalized Intelligence.