With the rise of the Internet and the Open Source movement in the late 1900s, the basic building blocks of software—operating systems and libraries that applications build upon—started becoming a collaborative effort. At first, few people believed that great software could result. Few believed that a rag-tag collection of individuals and companies, working in parallel, could produce a great platform to build upon. But they did it.
Then, at the turn of the millennium, markets sprung up to collaboratively fund these same projects. Drivers, scripts and middleware to connect Open Source with every kind of software and hardware device were developed. Many small but frustrating problems were fixed. Open Source was now the most interoperable software platform available, and it was getting all the polish and customization needed to appeal to the full spectrum of end users.
Open Source did not win out completely. Rather, the result was intense competition between closed- and open-source platforms that drove accelerating innovation for all.
In recent years, the open model has gone on to tackle problems beyond the platform: highly parallel problems that require a huge collaborative effort; projects that require complete openness and collaboration; efforts that are beyond the resources of a single corporation; modern pyramids of software.
In 2004, the first of these successes—the Interling project—was completed. It is, of course, the software we use to translate hundreds of written and spoken languages to and from the common Interling language. Dozens of programmers were required for each dialect to produce the complex grammar-processing codes. The project was possible only through the participation of thousands of programmers worldwide, with work on each language funded by motivated individuals, corporations and governments.
In 2006, we completed the initial work of the Historica Humanica project. Every piece of writing, every painted canvas and every available oral history was scanned and entered into our huge searchable database. While not every individual has or will publish a full autobiography, many have willed that their invaluable memoirs be made available at their death. What can we learn from history? We've found we can learn much, especially at the personal level. The human psyche has not changed dramatically over the ages. We are now able to search our records for others who have felt the same pain or dealt with the same concern. In these writings, we have found perspective and understanding to guide our path forward in everyday life.
Now, in these last few years, we've begun to tackle the most daunting effort yet—the Neuroscape project to approximate and emulate the human brain. We learned early in our AI work that no one simple algorithm can replicate the wonder of the human brain. Rather, the brain is made up of millions of flexible, evolving rules and guidelines the equivalent of billions of lines of software code.
It is a project we can hope to achieve only through the most massive parallel effort ever undertaken by humankind...
