The Interbio at 20
05.24.2006 by Brian Mulconrey

Monday, December 22, 2036 � The 1999 film The Matrix painted a dark future where "advances" in AI (artificial intelligence) resulted in an army of robots deciding that the best use for human beings was to generate energy from their immobilized bodies. While the term artificial intelligence fell out of popular use in the early 2020's with the dawn of AtomGate technology, the actual evolution of interbiological intelligence would have struck 1999 movie audiences as almost as strange as The Matrix Scenario.

Today we hardly notice as we slip in and out of the Interbio to channel our collective imaginations and intelligence to invent new products and services, manage business/government enterprises, and generally entertain ourselves in ways that an individual human intellect could never have imagined. This week we'll celebrate the 20th anniversary of release 1.0 of the Interbio with a look back at how this ambitious open source project channeled advances in computing technology into the world's first interbiological operating system.

Of course the most important force that drove the evolution of the Interbio was the rise of biological computing in the early 20's and the relentless progression of Moore's Law through the end of that decade. At the turn of the 21st century AI researchers were obsessed with replicating "human" intelligence. But the maturing Millennial Generation had a better idea. Why not take multi-player games and networked communities to the next logical step? Instead of replicating the human intellect, the Interbio "aggregates" and "augments" the intellects of any group of employees, representatives/citizens, or players. In the process, it rendered our traditional notions of management and "individual human" representative government obsolete.

By the tenth anniversary of the Interbio in 2026 it was clear that the management of enterprises of all shapes and sizes would never be the same. The executive aristocracies that had grown up at the top of business and government organizations by the end of the 20th century were unraveling rapidly by the mid 2020s. Since "collective" intelligence augmented by the Interbio was so much more powerful than even the smartest individuals, it was no longer possible for individual employees to extract wages equal to tens or even hundreds of times the compensation of the average knowledge worker.

When the Interbio was born in 2016 - a quarter century after the launch of the World Wide Web - it was heralded as the world's first interbiological operating system. But the real power of early Interbio interfaces was the extent to which enterprise employees were able to "become" the mind of an enterprise. Large enterprises were always thought to be metaphorically alive. With the Interbio, this became more than a metaphor. A new "enterprise intelligence" had been born and with it the solutions to new categories of intractable problems were suddenly within reach. The Interbio sidestepped the goal of replicating human intelligence in a machine and focused instead on augmenting enterprise intelligence using computer technology to aggregate and amplify individual human intellects.

Over 30 years ago, futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil wrote a visionary book titled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. In it he captured many of the forces that drove the growth of the Interbio. While Kurzweil focused heavily on the milestone of replicating human intelligence, he also seized on the radical implications suggested by the continuation of Moore's Law for another three decades. With the Interbio, we harnessed and augmented collective human intelligence to the point where it quickly transcended the intelligence of even the smartest individual humans. Kurzweil clearly grasped the possibility - perhaps the inevitability - of the Interbio.

But...it took more than technology to propel the Interbio to its central role in government and business management. The political and business leadership scandals and miscalculations in the early 21st century contributed to a growing weariness on the part of citizens and employees around the world with abuses of executive power. We the people of the planet earth were ready by 2016 to declare our interdependence in a manner that would have made Thomas Jefferson proud.

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