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

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?

Number of Pages in PDF File: 16

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

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

working papers series