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4-D Idea Markets: The Next Processing Revolution

Thesis: As virtual worlds proliferate and evolve, 4-D Idea Markets will emerge as powerful new social structures because of the ginormous value that can be saved and generated by coordinating human processing activity (a.k.a. brains & thought) according to a timeline.

What is an Idea Market? Idea markets have been around for some time now.  Technically, the very first idea market was launched whenever organisms first developed the ability to act on stored behavior scripts and competed for life (probably anaerobic bacteria, unless behavioral scripts can be stored at some other physical level).  But nowadays the common definition of an Idea Market is far more human-centric, and goes something like this: a system in which many humans individually ascribe value to certain ideas in order to better estimate the value of those ideas, generally for some socio-economic purpose.  

Examples of Idea Markets: Voting is one of the oldest and simplest forms of an Idea Market, a process that allows a large group of people to collectively make a binary decision.  Ben Franklin was known to brainstorm with a council of advisors, called a Hunta (sp.?), and attributed much creativity to this process.  The government, especially the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies, has been known to rely on internal Idea Markets to help identify terrorist targets, identify other threats, and to compute what to do with resources.  The Stock Market is an Idea Market that allows human to very accuratley estimate the value of corporations.  The Wikipedia, a highly accurate encyclopedia compiled by the poeple of the world, is an open access Idea Market.  The Hollywood Stock Exchange lets hundreds of thousands of users buy and sell "movie stocks" to have fun, then uses their predictions to compute highly accurate box office predictions.  The Google search engine is in part a highly complex behavior and Idea Market that allows people to find the information that others have searched for.  * For more information, a great Harvard business School article by Ajit Kambil and about the demonstrated power of Idea Markets, with some good examples of internal corporate idea markets, can be found at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3808&t=innovation.
 
So, what's a 4-D Idea Market?  A 4-D idea market is any idea market in which the data being scored/valued is plotted on a timeline.  In other words, it is an idea market with a formal timeline component that allows extrapolation into the future (prediction) or the past (revision).  The Hollywood Stock Exchange is an example of a Predictive Idea Market, but it can only forecast near-term events.  Stock market Puts and Calls allow people to place bets on the future performance of a given stock.  Even a family discussing budgeting over a given period of time can be considered a 4-D idea market because they compare individual extrapolations to arrive at a consensus best guess on the best course of behavior.  So long as it involves brains and predictive activity, it's probably a 4-D Idea Market.

The Impact of VW's on 4-D Idea Markets: Since biology started churning out 4-D Idea Markets, they’ve been limited by the laws of physics and the types of physical structures that make up our environment.  However, the system we live in constantly reorganizes itself via autocatalytic evolution and development and spits out new structures (organisms, technology or combinations thereof) that allow for increased speed of communication of ideas/information.  (This happens at various systems levels and contributes to John Smart's computational MEST compression.)  In human history, the primary drivers/substrates of/for increased communication are Interactive Communication Technologies (ICTs).  ICT's have included gesturing, words/memes, language, the volume amplification cone, drawing, writing, books/moveable type, the telegraph, the telephone, movies, broadcast TV, the internet, and dynamic websites.  Presently, we are witnessing the birth of the latest ICT: Virtual Worlds.  

Typically, Virtual Worlds are massive virtual environments that look just like video games, but that allow users far more control over the enviornment and with the ability to communicate.  Some popular virtual worlds include Second Life (the break-out leader right now), Multiverse (created by the founders of Netscape, up and coming fast), and The Sims 2 (still more a game, but getting really close).  Fundamentally, virtual worlds allow for a market of creation, behavior and communication to develop in a 3-D interactive setting.  Already, the efficiency benefits of virtual worlds are becoming very evident as humans all over the globe are pumping a great deal of capital into them, while also using them as a platform to earn up to $150,000 per year. 

An interesting recent development is that Virtual worlds are being used as 3-D wikis, a type of collaborative software, and it's become obvious that Google Earth has the potential to become the biggest 3-D wiki of them all.  A good friend and former Hollywood roommate, Jerry Paffendorf, discusses the benefits of a merger between wikipedia and Google Earth and advances the concept of the 3-D wiki in this blog post.  (Paffendorf also helps run Democracy Island, an innovative educational venture launched in Second Life that is begining to explore the potential of 3-D wikis.)    

Being that Virtual Worlds are now exploding onto the worldwide scene (Second Life growth forecast, book by Castronova on business and VWs), I think it's high-time to start thinking about the dynamic 4-D Idea Markets that can be created inside Virtual Worlds because 1) dropping computing costs, and 2) increasing wi-fi connectivity are about to allow for some robust and crazy sh*t.  

What's the benefit of 4-D vs. 3-D?  4-D idea markets help predict the future and revise the past.  They can be used to forecast events and clarify what already occured.  They already exist.  Hollywood Stock Exchange is a good example of a 4-D idea market.  But they are nowhere near their potential.  Just imagine the value that could be generated if hundreds of thousands, or millions of users decided to collaboratively predict something other than box office revenues.  For instance, what if the government, a corporation or non-profit foundation set up an online futures market for natural disasters, disease epidemics, innovations, or some other high-value human domain.  Wouldn't that information be very useful in building a better world?

Possible New 4-D Idea Market Structures: Over the next few years we can expect to witness the explosive development of 4-D Idea Markets because of the broad system efficiencies they represent (lower redundancy of thought processes / human computing, increased foresight, increased awareness of the nature of the system).  As we increase the communication quality of the web via increased processing, better software and more human participants, it is inevitable that these structures (just like families, bands, tribes, cities, corporations, armies, etc.) will emerge and play a significant role in human decision making at all levels. 

Some 4-D Idea Markets likely to pop-up in the near term Include:

Open-Source Tunnel of Time: Imagine a website similar to the Hollywood Stock Exchange where people go to cast predictions and see how accurate they are.   (A number of sites already attempt to do this, most notably The Long Bets Foundation, but none are anywhere close to establishing the value and consistent contribution/revision behavior of Wikipedia.)  What's different about this portal is that everyone must choose from a bank of predictions (like movie stocks on HSX, or stocks in the RL market) and then place them on a timeline.  This way, the values can be cross-referenced easily across the board.  This will allow for a variety of valuable data: individual prediction scores, individual prediction scores by domain, individual prediction scores by time-frame, individual prediction scores by domain and by time-frame, group prediction scores by category/time-frame/demographic, etc.  Best of all, both the individual and aggregate time lines can be plotted first in 3-D (the files can be placed in any desired array in a 3-D virtual setting, in a cluster) and then in the 4-D (the 3-D file clusters can then be arranged sequentially, so that one can view them in order by flying through or scrolling).  Basically this allows the creation of an ultimate reference tool, a literal tunnel of ideas fixed to a timeline.  One could literally walk forward or backward in time and view eith what occured or what most people think is going to occur, or what some specific people think is going to occur.  I believe that such public 4-D Idea Markets will represent the best structure for harness the largest number of brains the most efficiently.  (I believe that the Earth is already one of these markets, but that's going a bit too deep too early -- a discussion to be enjoyed in the future.)  This may seem vague, but just try to visualize the tunnel and I'm sure you'll see bazillions of uses for this new technology.

Production & Development Structures: It's not much of a stretch to venture that media outlets like MTV, G4 and Current.tv will look to efficiently harness the growing amount of content in the world as well as the growing amount of content sorters.  So what will their business structures look like?  They'll be 4-D Idea markets, me thinks.  Why? 1. Virtual worlds will soon allow all media (text, docs, images, audio, video, websites, flash, 3-D images, etc.) to be mixed together in new ways.  This will result in efficent new sorting and creating mechanisms.  2. A virtual structure will allow these companies to cast the broadest possible net.  3. By plotting anticipated developments on a timeline, these companies will have a more-accuarate-than-ever programming tool forecasting what content will be available and how popular it will be.  4. A virtual market will allow for better programs to rise to the top, enabling better moreinformed selection of what goes on air.  5. These markets will be able to compete with similar bottom-up structures better than the current business models employed by these companies.  6. Once st up, these structures will automatically generate users, content and content sorters.  This will represent a new commerce/info/content relationship.

Closed / Internal Forecasting Models: This is the same idea as the Tunnel of Time, just a smaller closed system.  corporations, families, sports teams, clubs, political parties, non-profits, any groups at all will be able to harness 4-D Idea markets, much as they utilize internal blogs and wikis nowadays, as they seek to better negotiate their environment.

Implications for Society: I believe that 4-D Idea Markets will allow for massive increases in group intelligence, forecasting.  They will help change the decision making process for businesses, governments, families, all groups.  4-D Idea Markets will help avert new disasters.   4-D Idea Markets will help fuel new crime.   4-D Idea Markets will helpt ot better quantify the current system.   4-D Idea Markets will help reduce the energy wasted on millions of people making the same predictions in the same domain areas and will allow the species to push our collective vision father into the future and past.   4-D Idea Markets will help us better understand human nature and psychology.   4-D Idea Markets will help us better identify human value/resources.  Essentially, I believe that  4-D Idea Markets are an amplification of existing computational processes and will prove very important to humanity as we approach a convergence in information/technology.

A Call for Dialogue: If 4-D Idea markets are interesting to you, then please drop me a line to either shoot the sh*t or just to let me know what you're up to.  I'd like to see things come into existence for the sake of humanity, and because the concept fascinates me.  I want to walk thorugh a tunnel of time (not just in my own brain) at some point in my life, and hopefully that will come sooner than later.  It's only a matter of time and MEST compression until these things pervade our system.  I hope that I am not wrong in believing that they will benefit the evolution and development of the system and our species.