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The Creative Thinking Planet

By Peter Lloyd

What will Earth do when it realizes it’s a creative creature? Now that most of us are connected electronically, our brains have become part of a world brain. The Internet and social media tools like Twitter and Facebook now behave like dendrites that connect my thoughts to you and yours to me. We are like neurons in a vast, connected collection of a few billion other neurons. Not quite as well organized and synchronized as a human brain yet, but we’re getting there.

Our globally interconnected brains work as a whole the way Marvin Minsky’s model of the brain works in his book The Society of Mind. To Minsky, the human brain works like a society of mindless neurons. He calls them agents. The global brain evolving on the Earth right now is a society of mindful neuron-like agents called people.

Back to the original question, what will Earth do? Will it find a way to make all the connected people speak as one planet with one voice in the hope of conversing with other planets whose creative life forms have become globally interconnected? Will it speak English?

Will the Earth brain kill off human brains it doesn’t find useful the way our brains abandon neurons they don’t use?

Will it find a way to create art? Maybe start by sculpting and coloring cloud formations. Sort of like finger painting on a sky canvas. Will it make all of us sing “I’d like to buy myself a Coke” in perfect harmony?

What if it wants to name itself? I’ve given that some thought already in Earth Name.

In The First Church of Robotics, Jaron Lanier summarizes a gloomy evaluation of our Earth-brain-like processing from Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

…when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial—real thought and creativity—takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

Devaluation? According to Minsky, “Minds are what brains do.” Let’s see what Earth does with its brain, then judge whether the value goes up or down. We all have a voice, so there’s no justification for complaining or devaluing if you don’t participate.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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