Global Mind: Aurora Trinity Triples and building a Global Brain (Live within Reason Book 22)

Before the internet even existed I had a problem.
I worked in a profession where information and analysis were key. Trying to find that information, downloading it, getting it into some form that I could use to the present it to clients was a challenge.
I might use seven different systems, all with different formats, all requiring some manipulation of the core data, before I had a coherent picture.
There had to be a better way.
I looked at AI, Neural Nets, Blackboard Systems, Databases, Spreadsheets, and they all had something to contribute, but none was the answer.
Then came something called hypertext, from a project ‘Xanadu’. It provided a link to a document. I saw a world filled with millions of documents, any of which might be relevant, but it would create an explosion of information without providing an answer, without providing a coherent and appropriate set of information.
Then the Darpanet became the Internet, and a very smart man, Sir Tim Berners Lee, invented a hyperlink technology. It led to a world filled with millions of documents, any of which might be relevant, and search was born.
Perhaps a wise individual would have said ‘how can I take advantage of the problem?’ Some clearly did.
I had in mind something different: a system that collated information into an internally coherent picture, rather than millions of links to external documents.
The Internet grew.
I looked at the issue and realised that everything could be reduced to a very simple set of rules: something exists, a binary association is inadequate, and the minimal explicit association is a triple, a relation.
Based on that insight it would be possible to invent a technology that operated far more like a brain than a library, with internal linkage rather than external linkage.
That technology exists, it is Aurora Trinity, and it has one other feature that is critical to the brain: it absorbs information automatically. It learns, in the sense that new information is absorbed and associated without formal human input.
Some years later, I learned that a very smart man also believed in the power and relevance of Triples. He invented a technology and he called it the Semantic Web.
It was again Sir Tim Berners Lee.
By now though Internet is so pervasive, search is so dominant, that evolution to a global brain is confronted with the inertia of the success of the existing adequate solution.
It is the problem of the better mousetrap.
Yet information is trapped in millions upon millions of sources. There is no sense in which it makes a coherent picture.
It is trapped in millions upon millions of applications.
And so the dominant force in search, seeing a dilemma, launches an initiative to bring all of its search results to every single application.
It still isn’t a global brain, but it is nudging and lurching forward, or if not forward, then somewhere.

On the off chance that out there somewhere are some young, curious, impassioned individuals who might like to consider an alternative future, I’ve set down a little of the background and some of the key principles that lay behind our technology.
Science fiction takes the possible end result for granted.
Star Trek has a convenient ‘computer’. Whatever is needed is asked for and provided that it is something relevant to the computer’s store of knowledge, it gives an answer.
The Time Machine has a city library which operates somewhat akin to something between a brain and a search engine.
Neal Asher’s novels have AI’s with near omniscient quauntum based awareness.
All of those are reasonable and plausible, and the key elements are the founding principles which need to be understood and built in from the very beginning.
Is it a magic bullet?
Not exactly. Some of the problems that emerge are the same as for human brains: the complexity of the information and the myriad possible perspectives themselves add to the confusion.
Here we lay out in detail how far we got in proving a technology to