Network of Networks,
We are sleepwalking into a pivotal phase of history, and it's high time everyone awoke. We stand at the threshold of an 'age of intelligence'. How significant is this shift? It rivals, perhaps even surpasses, the scale of the industrial, and agricultural revolutions.
This means we will enter a period marked by high velocity and volatility. The decisions we make now, in these initial stages, will have far-reaching consequences that are magnified by the chaotic nature of our world. The nonlinear feedback loops will turn small initial changes into significant downstream impacts.
Facing this challenge can seem daunting. AI often appears incomprehensible, mastered only by a few maths geniuses who operate massive computational systems. Yet, this perceived disempowerment is an illusion. A critical shift in focus can dispel this illusion: AI feeds on your data.
Taking control of how you prepare your data gives you agency. The key to preparing your data for AI is enhancing its compressibility. This involves focusing on the relationships between data items, not just the items themselves, because better connectivity equals better compressibility.
You can add meaningful connections to your data in two main ways:
🔵 Connect your data items to shared abstract concepts.
🔵 Link data items to each other in interesting ways.
Crafting these connections through conceptual ontologies and forging interesting links is a profoundly human process; that is a source of power. AI needs your data connected, and how you choose to connect your data will profoundly influence the nature of AI.
Even the decision to start connecting your data is significant. Compacted, consolidated data forms a distinct cluster, setting it apart from the generic data being absorbed into large-scale foundational models. Achieving a high level of data compression allows your organization to maintain its unique identity and thrive in the AI era.
This is important! For a future where a diverse ecosystem of intelligent companies can cooperate and compete in a nested 'Network of Networks,' we need as many companies as possible to connect and compact their data. The challenge might seem daunting and we will need more tools to help us, but here are a couple of practical tips to get you started:
🔵 Start Small: play with linking a few existing datasets to widely used industry standards or public ontologies like schema.org.
🔵 Think Big: use URLs to identify things, turning the siloed database records into globally unique URLs that can be linked in distributed graphs.
AI does not need to happen to you; organizations can shape AI by shaping their data. It is a choice, we can allow all data to be absorbed into huge 'data gravity wells' or we can create a network of networks, each of us connecting and consolidating our data. Things are happening fast, and the time to act is now, so don’t just collect your data, connect it!
