Smart Business Networks (or, Let's Create 'Life' from Inert Information)

Smart Business Network Initiative (SBNi) Conference - Beijing, May 2008

16 Pages Posted: 5 Jun 2007 Last revised: 3 Mar 2015

See all articles by David A. Bray

David A. Bray

Institute for Defense Analyses; Harvard University; Emory University - Goizueta Business School; National Defense University; Forbes Ignite; University of Oxford

Abstract

The Internet that we access isn't self-organizing; instead, it's relatively limited in its intelligent abilities and exists as a wonderful example as to how the processes of creation can quickly become cluttered and entropic. Human beings create and remix information streams, adding to the web. The promise with Web 2.0 was that human beings would organize all the clutter of the web; that human beings would provide the missing intelligence of networks. Alas, human beings have limited cognitive capabilities and the ever-growing amounts of information on the web probably will exceed our abilities to organize it. I suggest, as demonstrated by the Internet, there are iterative causalities (i.e., links) to its data, information, and knowledge. This gives hope that one day the Internet, and other smart business networks, will become capable of self-organizing itself without human intervention. Would such smart business networks then not become alive?

Keywords: information systems, evolution, ecosystems, environments, adaptedness, survivability, intelligence

JEL Classification: D23, D70, D81, D83, O31

Suggested Citation

Bray, David A., Smart Business Networks (or, Let's Create 'Life' from Inert Information). Smart Business Network Initiative (SBNi) Conference - Beijing, May 2008, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=991163 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.991163

David A. Bray (Contact Author)

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