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Google sent out a call for entries called Project 10100, asking people to submit project ideas that they could invest in, in order to help a large number of people.
The following is one of the project proposals that I submitted.
Your idea's name:
Global Cultural Archive Foundation
Please select a category that best describes your idea.
- Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
- Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
- Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
- Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
- Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
- Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
- Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
- Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.
What one sentence best describes your idea?
Creation of a virtual library with an avatar representation of each culture and language in the world, mapping the entire course of human history.
Describe your idea in more depth.
In the novel _Beyond This Horizon_ by Robert Heinlein, due to their world's utopian economy, long-term projects with no (expected) possible economic return are favored above all else. The Global Culture Persona Foundation is a similar project, in that it must span multiple generations in order to ever be realized.
The goal of this foundation would be to create, manage, and maintain a virtual Rosetta stone -- a living, evolving content repository of global history and culture. It would become the representation of our global cultural heritage.
Initially, by using virtual personas (for example, using AIML and the technology created by the alicebot.org foundation) this Foundation would build multi-lingual, multi-cultural personalities that would be scripted to be experts in their time, culture, and history. They would be able to "converse" about historical facts, as well as analyze events as seen through the viewpoint of people of their time.
Unlike the Cyc Knowledge Base, AIML bots are able to be maintained and developed and evolved, but personalities can be scripted without having to take care of every distinct possibility. For example, an Egyptian priest persona would be able to talk about religious ceremonies, practices, and beliefs...and would be able to respond to simple cultural questions...but would not have to know that a bird can fly , or because a bear is a mammal, it doesn't lay eggs. In other words, this system of personas would not be expected to reason -- they would just be scripted to parrot back pre-determined answers. However, as these scripts are tested, the answers will be trained and re-trained to evolve the personality until eventually, they will seem nearly human.
What problem or issue does your idea address?
History erodes. Culture fades. Archeologists are constantly struggling to rebuild, recreate, and reimagine past history, because historical and cultural records are so susceptible to entropy.
The mandate that this Foundation would live under would be to create a system and a knowledge base that would survive throughout time. Future scholars would be able to ask questions from a different cultural perspective and be able to truly understand their cultural heritage.
If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?
Knowledge and understanding is the greatest gift we can bequeath to future generations. However, the benefits to this would be almost instantaneous, as different groups working with creating these personas would be interacting, training, and analyzing information -- and each year as new scholars join the Foundation, they will continue to explore and discover new insights based on the work of their past contributors.
What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground
Initially, a Foundation would be created with a charter to collect and maintain a cultural archive. The first main project of the Foundation would be setting up an AIML development environment, where groups of contributors can develop personalities (or work with existing personalities) based on different times, places, and cultures. They would then dive as deeply as possible to catalog as much of that cultural and historical segment as possible. Different teams of scholars from different universities would be organized to compete and make their persona as deep and rich a personality as possible. Every year, different teams would come in to continue to evolve their personas, while scholars all over the world would be able to test and work with any of the personas while pursuing their personal cultural and historical lines of study.
Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?
Success would be measured by the initial launch, the number of teams who sign on to build and maintain these personalities, and by how people use and interact with them. Eventually, the Foundation should evolve to pursue other knowledge-base archival projects (such as solid-state devices to store data, images, and video, or methods that could be used to off-load this knowledge to satellites in space).
1 Comments
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Rawan Alsaffar
Hi,
I'm an 18 year old architecture student and I just want to say that this project and your website is completely inspired and fantastic!! if what your proposing could actually happen we will be able to even analyze our selves and maybe see potential historical patterns in the future. A massive project but great insight :D.
I may not be able to Hire you but good luck to you and your vision. |
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