Author: Zann Gill
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If Microbes begat Mind – films
This film was taken of Zann Gill giving an early talk on the origin of life at NASA Ames in 2008. Part 1. Part 2. xxx Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
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Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, later Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a distinguished professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. His advance over Aristotle’s static Scala Natura, or Great Chain of Being, was to introduce the dynamic concept that life’s behavior propels the ongoing evolution of species in a theory he…
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Artificial Life as a Petri Dish
Artificial life simulations reinforce hypotheses that possibly a species’ total skill set necessary for optimum survival may first be assembled through symbiosis, and only later encapsulated as heritable traits in single individuals. If new species can be created through genetic integration of traits first sampled in a symbiotic relationship, the Baldwin Effect would overcome the…
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Cities as Organisms
Barcelona is seen from the air in the daylight (above). Barcelona had an innovative vision for digitizing their city. Urban leaders gathered data on what caused people to leave the city and why jobs were lost. Cleanliness, safety, reliable transportation and urban services emerged as issues that mattered in citizens’ experiences of their city. People…
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Volvox – early collaborative intelligence
Volvox is a genus of freshwater green algae often found in ponds, ditches, or shallow puddles — one of the earliest communities manifesting collaborative intelligence. Volvox played a unique role as a precursor of multicellularity, illustrating how collaboration came very early in evolution. Volvox diverged from unicellular ancestors about 200 million years ago. Antonie Philips…
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Rainforests: Collaborative Intelligence Ecosystems
The rainforest manifests “collaborative intelligence” in a co-dependent ecosystem. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 70 percent of the anti-cancer plants identified to date are rain forest plants. A new drug under development by a private pharmaceutical company, possibly for treating HIV, is Calanolide A, which is derived from a tree discovered on Borneo,…
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Next Generation Social Networks
Making sense of today’s deluge of Big Data is a great IT challenge, requiring Design Synthesis. Zann Gill predicts that crowdsourcing platforms will evolve into next generation social networks to support the emerging field of collaborative intelligence. Her talk at Draper University describes this thought leadership space and its emerging potential for a range of…
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SuperLux: Smart Light Art, Design & Architecture for Cities
In recent years, new lighting technologies have been used to illuminate cities and towns in creative, energy-efficient ways. “Smart Light” is now a widely used term for the new technologies and ecological ideas that are transforming nighttime atmospheres and spectacular Smart Light festivals are awing audiences around the world. Featuring more than 120 public artworks,…
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Gaming the Future
Buckminster Fuller, Irving Janis, and others, provide inspiration for a new approach to the development of learning media. Fuller emphasized that synergy is whole system behavior that cannot be predicted from the behavior of its parts. Synergetics is the dynamics through which synergies are produced. Buckminster Fuller conceived the idea of “design science” (1951), “World…
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