AI pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, we will “multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.”
Recently there’s been a lot of excitement around companies attempting to build the brain-computer interface aspect of this prediction, like Elon Musk’s NeuroLink to Braintree cofounder Brian Johnson’s Kernel, but one Silicon Valley startup out of MIT thinks it can skip the cyborg implants and build a platform to enable shared intelligence now.
“Building a shared brain is fundamentally about information transfer,” says IdeaFlow CEO Jacob Cole. IdeaFlow hinges on the insight that all that is needed to enable true collaborative cognition is a way to enter the connections between ideas in a user’s brain into a shared space where they can overlap with others’ connections between ideas. This is enough to discover relationships between concepts no individual possibly had enough information to see alone. IdeaFlow’s promise is to build a “shared brain” for organizations; a system that unites personal information management, collaboration, internal search, and Web research.
Parnian Barekatain, a collective intelligence expert, previously built a company, called SolveCity, with the vision of creating the global brain. Before joining IdeaFlow, Barekatain developed two pending patents to connect related information for solving complex problems. Barekatain’s childhood dream was to cure cancer and create a unified theory of physics that accounts for gravity, until she realized that these are incredibly complex problems that no individual person is capable of solving.
“There are millions of scientists trying to cure the likes of AIDS and Alzheimer’s. Maybe the cure is currently separated in different people’s heads… How can we design the web so that these half-formed solutions can come together?” ~Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, 2011
Barekatain has a background in A.I. and sociology and saw the need to coordinate human activities to solve problems that are not addressable by individual people but rather require concerted action by all of society , that is necessary to solve complex problems. She also developed different protocols that enable segregated ideas and half formed solutions to unify in a central hub.
“Our goal is to accelerate research and innovation in the world, eliminate redundancy, and augment human intelligence. We want to help the knowledge worker access information a lot faster, without spending hours on end trying to find relevant resources or figuring out half formed solutions that may have already been discovered.” - Parnian Barekatain
Solvecity and IdeaFlow both started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley. It was not until the CEOs of the two companies coincidentally ended up living in the same group house in the Bay Area that they realized they shared the same vision. As a business, IdeaFlow’s first product is an enterprise tool that merges the knowledge networks of everyone on a team. This has caught the interest of organizations ranging from hackathons to public companies worth billions of dollars.
To accelerate the achievement of their shared goals, SolveCity joined IdeaFlow, where Barekatain became member of the founding team. They have, to date, raised over $1.8M in venture funding from top investors, including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, billionaire investor Jim Pallotta, and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.
At IdeaFlow, Barekatain’s main responsibility is to extend research in augmenting collective intelligence. She is helping facilitate relationships with key advisors, acquiring new customers and using her experience to identify and gather future capital.
Together, SolveCity and IdeaFlow are creating a human/machine collaboration scheme that will take on the world’s largest problems.