David Chacko’s newest mystery novel, The God App, is a story about a detective tracking down the killer of the professor who invented a computer program that anticipates major moves in the financial markets. Whoever holds The God App is far above the law as the people who rule the world come calling for their guaranteed returns. It would seem that the only problem with The God App is for those who don’t have one…sound familiar?
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If everyone had The God App then no one would have a God App. Today we are at a point where the only way to beat the disease is to lose the patient. As long we are competing with each other, we’ll never figure out how to predict the future, let alone fix it.
First, we seriously need to reorganize ourselves:
Instead of ranking, rating, and organizing each other as winners and losers of things, we need to organize ourselves as students and teachers of things. This would allow us to exchange value with each other in a pre-dollar proto-economy without necessarily competing with each other. Teachers would represent supply and students represent demand in a collaboration market. Here is what the teacher/student scale may look like:
Second, we need to create an inventory
In order to build anything useful or meaningful, we need to have an large inventory of parts that can be easily combined, assembled, exchanged, and inter related.
Today, Wikipedia has grown to become the most comprehensive collection of definitive information about the world around us. Everyone should rewrite their résumé as a set of Wikipedia URLs that most closely represent their talents, interests, experiences, skills, and abilities. People will locate their selves on a knowledge graph.
A Wikipedia Cluster Ball –courtesy of Chris Harrison (click to enlarge)
The dimensional résumé:
When we combine Wikipedia Tag with the teacher/student scale, it forms a 2-dimensional array. This new form of résumé/CV allows communities to store and exchange value among each other. The CV array may look something like this (etc):
The Personal API
In this 2-dimensional form, everyone would own and control a string of code that represents their willingness and ability to build and collaborate economically in their community.
[tag1](-3), [tag2](+2), [tag3](1), [tag4](-2), [tag5](3),….,etc.
This string can be processed computationally more like an API than a résumé. Most importantly, anonymity can be preserved until the point when a transaction will actually take place.
Additionally, people can represent themselves by partial strings to create separate personas. Individual APIs can be combined among many people, and their personas, to create productive teams, communities, and corporations.
Adding dimensions to your API: Attributes such as location, schedule, context, and equipment can be attached in real time or travel dynamically wherever the persona is traveling.
The API Economy
With anonymous source data; everyone can conduct surveys of communities that would likely resemble the proverbial “Bell Curve” or, a normal distribution. This is important because it would allow everyone the same ability to predict the likelihood that a collection of knowledge assets can execute a particular business plan. People could see exactly what they need to do next in order to achieve a reliable probability of success in an economy.
Sounds Like Big Brother?
If this scares you, then consider this: The God App is already here. Everything you do is captured electronically in a very similar form in order to create a predictive profile of you; what you will buy, who you will associate with, who you will vote for, etc.
Political campaigns, advertising agencies, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, corporations, government, Wall Street, and even organized crime (not to be redundant) use big data to gerrymander their way into your productivity potential. The difference is that 99% are excluded from the predictive process, shackled behind the curtain, detached from their hopes, dreams, and intensions…mindlessly posting résumés, guessing, reacting, etc.
And the Good Lord said unto thee….
Hey dumb ass, wake up. You can cut them all off at the nub with a simple app that a bunch of hackers could probably code-up during detention hall. Get this sucker viral and build the better FB already. The only way THEY can cut you down would be to cut themselves down.
Now THAT’s a God App.
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(The implications of this app are vast – everything changes without changing anything. Follow-on articles will discuss these various nuances. Any builders out there?)
CoCreatr
Hmm, the student-teacher pull is reciprocal, not absolute. A beginner can learn from an intermediate, and an intermediate from an expert, often better than pairing a beginner with an expert. With an addition, like the knowledge differential, I think it can be built. Not yet at the stage how it can be built. For now I only know how it could not be built, e.g. endorsements ala Linkedin are not suitable to build trust because I do not know a thing abut who endorses what and how competent they are in this field.
ingenesist
Thanks for the comment. Indeed the separation between the two points carries a great deal of information – all of which is quite natural; parents mentor children, children of equal capacity play with each other collaboratively. Coworkers help each other, etc. In fact, this separation (variance) is where most of the predictive information is stored. People associate around this dynamic quite naturally already so that possibility is inherent in the construct. Likewise, most of my technology coaching comes from people 1/2 my age with whom I share my “trade secrets”. Funny how that term ‘trade secret’ takes on new meaning….thanks again, as always BN
Glistening Deepwater
Very interested to see where you take this, I am aware of the non-trivial nature of the proposal.
Dan Robles
Thanks Glistening!, The hardest part was reducing it to this state. Arguably, by entire blog – all 300K words – is about the implications of this. Just setting it free to see what happens. I hope it renews me.
CoCreatr
Here is another why it’s needed, useful, and how it could be done.
Via Amber Rae’s TEDx talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9aPkdfK63U