Howard Bloom, Visiting Scholar, New York University, via videotape

I have been chosen to talk to you because I am allegedly—don't believe this; don't take it too seriously—I am allegedly a knowledge maker. I create things like The Lucifer Principle, which was my first book, and Global Brain, which was my second book. Whether those are contributions to the knowledge of humanity is not for me to say. It is certainly my intent to make them so.

I wish I could be there in the room with you right now because you are my partners. You are more than my partners. I am a parasite. I am a carnivore. I am a person who goes around pouncing on the knowledge gathered by other people and lacing it together in entirely new ways. You are the people who put together my pasture, my grazing grounds, and the prey I feed on. When I pounce on that prey, hopefully I give it back to you in entirely new ways. Hopefully I give it back to you in ways that elevate what you do.

I need your help badly, because my books are extremely research intensive. My life is extremely research intensive, and I rely on you in ways that go beyond anything that you can possibly imagine.

My first book, The Lucifer Principle is 334 pages of text with 112 pages of footnotes. Everything that I do involves tying thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of threads together.

Where do I get those threads? Those are threads of information; threads of knowledge. Those are historical stories. Those are bits of astrophysics. Those are visions of quarks getting together in threesomes at the very first instance of the Big Bang. Those are visions of quarks precipitating from absolute nothingness. There are visions of those quarks having social interchanges. Those are visions of quarks obeying rules about who to get together with and who not to get together with. Those are visions of quarks obeying elemental "thou shalts" and they have "thou shalt nots."

I am one who has to take the information that comes from people like Alan Guth and a wide variety of physicists whose notions normally are not very easy to comprehend, and I have to turn those into pictures in my head, and then I have to take those pictures and get them vividly across—often in words that rhyme, because rhyming words drive a message home. I have to get those pictures across to you and to other people and show you how we as collections of quarks, 14 billion years after the Big Bang, are the Big Bang's children.

I need your help badly, because my books are extremely research intensive

That is a big job. It means knowing everything from physics and cosmology—that is, how galaxies evolve, how planets evolve, how huge stars turn into a new form of metabolism and start chewing up their atoms and then, when they die, take those atoms and reprocess them in new forms as if they too were information processors and as if they too were creators. A dying star will take the remains of chomped helium atoms and put them together to form a carbon atom...and I have to show you how.

I have to show how this relates to Chinese history, how this relates to the history of Islam, how it relates to the evolution of social instincts among crustaceans and among lizards 220 million years ago. I have to show how the evidence indicates that these social instincts may even have evolved a solid 550,000 years ago. I have to take information from paleontologists who have been working on the discovery of new sets of bones in China that indicate that a bird, Confuciusornis, was alive about 220 million years ago and that this bird gathered in flocks. I have to go digging to find that even though these researchers are not concerned with the social behavior of these animals—they do not bother to note formally the fact that these birds had gathered in flocks—I have to go digging through the evidence to see what they have ignored in their own work. They found the evidence of social evolution 220 million years ago, and it is up to me to show you how this relates to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

It is up to me to show you how this relates to Osama Bin Laden and his attacks on America, how it relates to the emotions of Osama Bin Laden, why it is that Osama wants to attack us, and how the flocking of Confuciusornis pertains to the belief system of Osama Bin Laden.

I have to pull all these threads together to show you what is likely to happen 10 years from now when China, Islam, and the United States are engaged in the kind of three-way competition that George Orwell predicted in 1984. Then I have to be able to go back, if I want to, and show you what life was like for George Orwell, how he came up with his visions of new information, how he went off to the Spanish Civil War and there discovered that he was not fighting for the kind of idealistic cause that he thought he was, but was being used as a pawn by various Russian Marxist elements. Those Russian Marxist elements were vicious and brutal and in their own way were as bad as the fascism that Orwell was fighting.

And Orwell dared to reveal what he'd discovered, he dared to go against the social trends of his day. He dared to be politically incorrect, and he came to the conclusions about the way things would eventually be that we read in books like Animal Farm and 1984. I have to do for you what George Orwell did for me. I have to bring George Orwell vividly to your eyes and then to put George Orwell in the context of socializing quarks 14 billion years ago. This takes enormous, enormous amounts of research.

I Am the Cyberclient You Will Soon Have

I have a very strange position, and this is why I am so utterly dependent on you. In a strange way I am your client 20 years from now. I am the cyberclient that you soon will have. I have been a cyberhuman for 14 years now. Once upon a time I walked upon the sidewalks. Once upon a time I loved looking at the façades of buildings. Once upon a time I would get calls at four in the afternoon saying, "We need you out here in LA by 11 o'clock tonight. Only you can convince Michael Jackson not to cancel his tour."

The tale of how I got into the strange position of a scientist being the only one in the world to convince Michael Jackson not to cancel his tour is a story for another day. The fact is that before I became ill, I could simply grab the knapsack that I kept behind my desk with a laptop computer in it, an extra shirt, and my toiletries. I could tell my staff to make reservations on the plane. I could hop into a car, be out at the airport within an hour and a half, fighting against traffic all the way, and, yes, I could be in LA that night at 11 o'clock and I could convince Michael Jackson not to cancel his tour.

Those were days when I could travel anywhere, when I could walk in Hanover, Germany, the city that gave us democracy, the city that gave us Prince Albert, a remarkable city. Walking around that city, after four days, the sense of history becomes so intense it's horrible. You walk past churches that were built in the wake of Martin Luther's reformation and see the darkness and the oppression that Martin Luther's point of view on life passed on to humans through the very architecture of the place; and then you see the joy that Germany had in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm, in the wealth of the architecture—in the old days I could see all of these things. I could go out and travel to them.

This bedroom is the center of an information-processing nest

I cannot travel any more. Fourteen years ago I was hit with an illness with a trivializing name. It is called chronic fatigue syndrome. It has nothing to do with being tired. It has everything to do with being disabled. For five years I could not speak. I, who live on words and who have always lived on the books that you have made available to me, I could not speak. Very often I was so weak that I could not tap a computer keyboard either. During those years I put together books anyway. During those years I continued to make knowledge, and I continued to be able to make knowledge because of you.

I am stuck in a bed. What you see around me is my daily environment. The house in which I live, the apartment in which I rest, this bedroom in which I do everything including talking to you.

This bedroom is the center of an information-processing nest. Next to me on my left are two computers operated through one keyboard and one monitor. There are roughly three other computers in the house and five VCRs. Those bring me all kinds of programming every day.

On my hip I have a Sony Walkman. This Walkman is filled not with music but with books. There is a woman who has a synergistic set of disabilities to mine. She is three and a half feet tall and, because of her dwarfism, she can no longer walk. What she can do is speak, and I send her the books and the journal articles that I have picked out and she reads them on tape for me.

Because I am allegedly a knowledge generator, still in this bed, whenever I am not actually spending a little social time—very little unfortunately—with my wife and kid, I am busy sewing together the threads of knowledge. I put together two international scientific groups, for example, and I have to tend to those every night.

All the knowledge that I get in one way or another comes either from you or, I am hoping, will eventually come from you.

What Do I Need From You?

I have enormous needs. This is incredibly arrogant, but I am trying to operate as a kind of central processing unit in the human web. I hope that there are tons of other central processing units, and thank goodness there are. Those other central processing units do what I do. They take in vast amounts of information. They twirl and whirl them together and weave them together in entirely new ways. They put together ways of seeing things that utterly floor us.

I go looking for those books. I go looking for those articles. When I say I go looking, I mean not that I go out on the streets, into the bookstores, not that I travel to Hanover and LA as I used to do, but that I go out online. I go out through my computer screen. I go out through the means at my disposal—my Walkman and my boombox, which is filled with journal articles on cassette tape. I try to find the threads of knowledge that will feed my omnivorous curiosity and allow me to use that curiosity and to use the tools of language that I have been developing for the last 40 years to make things clear to people in ways that they've never, never been clear to you before.

I have on the one hand the benefit of what you have done. Yesterday you heard from someone who has helped create the World Wide Web and the Internet. Frankly, without him I would be dead. You heard from someone at Argonne Labs who has new ideas about how to network. He is talking about intranetworking, networking within small organizations. Frankly, what I need is the material of the World Wide Web—and what do I need from you?

I am already getting enough information to put more bibliography and annotation in my work than most people are capable of believing, and it is not enough. It is not enough. I am still frustrated. I am still hungry for knowledge. What do I need from you? I need the next generation of knowledge technology. I may need the generation of knowledge technology beyond that.

Let me tell you what works for me and what doesn't. In 1988 when I first was trapped here, e-mail existed. E-mail was extremely helpful to me. E-mail allowed me to speak with other scientists in Australia, in Israel, and in London, and to speak with them every single night. That was extremely helpful. I can't exactly thank the members of RLG for that, but I certainly can thank Bob Aiken, who yesterday was talking to you about helping put together the Internet and eventually the World Wide Web.

At that point I was reliant on books—the books that I could purchase, the books that I could send my assistant up to the library to get for me, the books that I could give to my three-and-a-half-foot-tall reader to record for me. This is a problem. Where should I ideally have been getting this information? Not from books. I should have been getting it online. If I had been, I would have been able to knit together 15 times as many facts.

All the knowledge that I get in one way or another comes from you or, I am hoping, will eventually come from you

I have a brief lifetime. So do we all. In that lifetime I have to put together tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of facts. The more facts I can get, the more I can process. The more I can process, the more I can send back to you in the hope that these things open up your eyes in some new way.

What couldn't I get back then? I could not get books I needed. What couldn't I get back then? I could not get journal articles I needed. Do you know something? To this very day I am having the same problem. The library up the street is the Ingersoll Library of the Brooklyn Public Library system, one of the five largest libraries in the country—that is all very nice, but I can't get to it. Until this year I could not get to it online, an incredibly frustrating phenomenon.

Now, new things have happened. The New York Public Library has been kind enough to give me a library card because I am disabled. I can go online and search the Web resources of the New York Public Library. I can do the same with the Brooklyn Public Library.

Now I use Google. Google is the most marvelous search engine in the world. Until it came along, search engines delivered mountains of frustration. They would deliver 10,000 hits and none of them were relevant to what you were looking for. Google for some reason is able to zero in on relevance. Relevance and access to knowledge are things that are incredibly important to me. These are things which I am hoping you will provide me with increasing amounts of in years to come.

I Need Intelligent Search Engines

This is what I need from you. I need intelligent search engines which deliver what I need. Recently I started using Google's photo search engine. It is frustrating beyond all belief. Here is Google, which put together one of the great masterworks of knowledge production, a search engine that really works, and they put together a picture engine that doesn't.

Several days ago one of the officials of RLG told me about the Cultural Materials database. I got very excited. Yesterday I went online and I saw the online demonstration of the database. Its search engine goes so far beyond Google's picture search engine that it is remarkable.

My wife has a project, a major one, that will be a lifetime achievement. It is a historical novel. She won't want me to give you the name of the person it is based on, but we looked him up in the RLG Cultural Materials database. We couldn't find him. This is a problem; we need to be able to find him from here. All of his papers are kept in a small library some place down in Florida. We need access to those papers, now.

When I go online and search on any given subject for journal articles, the results I get are in abstract form. The most marvelous journal database made available to people like me has been MEDLINE®. MEDLINE is a wonderful search tool. The only problem is that all it gives me are abstracts, and abstracts are written in such a bizarre way that they often fail to give the conclusion of the research.

I certainly can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get all of the subscriptions that I would need. Yes, I do spend hundreds of dollars that I can't afford to get subscriptions to Nature and Science, but I certainly cannot subscribe to all the hundreds of other journals that are producing articles that are relevant to my work.

Please, I need you. Give me those journal articles in full text, not in abstract form. Where you will find the money I don't know. Where you have found the money to give me everything that you have given me so far I really don't know either. But please, please, keep doing what you are doing. Keep coming up with that money and get those journal articles online.

In addition, I need books. I need entire books. I need them to be available with a Google-style search engine so that, when I search for a given topic like emotional contagion, I can find material on it in journal articles and in every book that is relevant, and I can go directly to the paragraph that is relevant because I am taken there—by who? By you. By the custodians of knowledge, by the people who made knowledge available to me.

How You Saved Me in the Past

I am going to take a little side trail here and tell you a story of how you saved me in the past. Then we will go more into how I need you to save me in the future.

When I was a child, I was one of those little kids that everybody loathes. I was fascinated by science. At the age of 10 I was into microbiology and cosmology, the story of the beginnings of the universe. Little kids at 10 are supposed to be able to throw a baseball. I could not throw a baseball. Little kids at 10 are supposed to be able to catch a baseball. You have seen those kids who, instead of catching a baseball, when a baseball comes their way, automatically go like this: "No, keep it away from me. It is going to splatter my nose all over my face." I was one of those. I could not catch a ball.

One of the great advantages of being driven out is that it gives you a different perspective on things

I could not in fact do any of the things that make you socially ept. Why? Because my head was totally buried in knowledge, or at least the forms of knowledge that a 10-year-old can take up. There wasn't a place for me in normal society. If kids had a club, they tried to keep me out of it. If I was the lead in a school play, they tried to keep me out of the cast party.

Where did I find a home? At the local library. In Buffalo, New York, there was a library half a mile from my home. I walked to the library. The librarians were extraordinarily kind to me. As a 10-year-old I was not supposed to get access to the adult books, and I was not interested in the children's books. I had grown away past the children's books. I had already read all 38 books in the Oz series. Those books saved my life for a summer between third and fourth grades. But now I was ready to move on into the world of science.

The librarians were not only good humans and gave me a feeling that I was welcome in their lair, but they also made all of the books available to me. When I wanted to read about how to make electrical coils from scratch, when I wanted a book of industrial formulae so that I could go home and make my own homemade cold cream, when I wanted all of Isaac Asimov's books, when I wanted all of Robert Heinlein's books, when I needed books on the theory of relativity, the librarians were kind and they had materials that I needed. They gave me a home.

I did not have good social instincts. That is one of the reasons I was driven out. One of the great advantages of being driven out is that it gives you a different perspective on things. But I needed desperately some form of social family, and where did I get it? I got it from people who were dead. I got it from the knowledge gatherers of previous ages. I got it from the people like you and me and what they have left behind. From Einstein. From Isaac Asimov, who was at that time still alive. From Galileo. I had a mind-tribe in my head, a group of humans who traveled with me everywhere, who set standards for me and who nourished me, and they included Einstein, Galileo, and George Gamow, who was one of the creators of the theory of the Big Bang.

Without the library as a kid, I don't know what I would have done. Without books as my refuge and without the authors of those books, dead or alive, as my emotional family I don't think I could have survived.

The Long History of Outsiders

Here is a strange thing about knowledge creation. Knowledge creators are very, very often the outcasts of society. Very, very often they are people like me. I imagine there are people in the room at this very moment who know exactly what I am talking about, because many of you have probably taken refuge in books and in information, too.

One of the figures in my book Global Brain is Pythagoras. Pythagoras was one of those kids who was regarded as an intellectual whiz when he was very young. When he was 10 years old, he had experiences very similar to mine. Adults would come in gatherings to his home to hear him lecture on the various abstruse, erudite, strange subjects of the day, and they would marvel at the quality of his brain. But you know that if adults are busy listening to the intellectual exercises of a child, that child is probably hated by every other child in town, and so it was with Pythagoras, who grew up in the small town of Samos—or not such a small town; it had imperial ambitions like many Greek cities did.

When Pythagoras hit the age of 18, Samos decided that it wanted to up its status in the world. The way to do that in those days was to get a nice fleet together, get all the jocks in town together, put them in the boats, have them row out in these galleys and conquer and raze to the ground as many other Greek cities as you could possibly humiliate. As a consequence the normal kids in Samos all went off to volunteer for this incredible naval expedition that was going to bring Samos the kind of fame that Athens had.

Pythagoras didn't see any place for himself in this. He didn't belong with the jocks. He didn't feel that his life should be spent rowing an oar and then trying to kill somebody in another city, so he dropped out. Pythagoras dropped out of normal society. Believe me, he did it because he had been kept out of normal society previously.

What did he do? First he went to visit Thales, who was another knowledge gatherer. Thales was the founder of a new way of thinking called philosophy. He spent time with Thales, who seemed to love him.

I am trying to do what Pythagoras was trying to do

Pythagoras continued his travels. He met with the priests of Egypt, he met with the priests of Persia, and according to some accounts, he ventured all the way into India at a time when a young man named Gautama was only 20 years old. Gautama was soaking up the Zeitgeist of his day. India was generating the Zeitgeist that would produce Buddhism at almost any minute. Allegedly, Pythagoras went in and stewed in that heavy spiritual and intellectual brew.

Pythagoras was on the road. Pythagoras was traveling and gathering knowledge from a variety of societies because he was an outcast and he would do this for years. Finally, he came home again at the age of 52.

Pythagoras came home and put together all the knowledge he had gotten from the Egyptians, from Thales, from the Persians, and from the Indians. He had learned something in Egypt and Persia that was not available in Greece yet. It was a new form of mathematics: geometry. Pythagoras actually brought back to Greece what we would later know as Euclidian geometry. He came up with a mathematical system to describe how the universe worked, how the planets worked, how the cosmos worked. He had an entirely new philosophy of how the universe worked and of humans' place within it.

When Pythagoras came back to Samos, people were anxious to see him. They wondered what this wunderkind had come up with in all his years of traveling. When he told them that the entire universe was based on geometry, they thought it was the most uninteresting thing they had ever heard in their lives, and they all walked away. Pythagoras realized that he needed to get his knowledge out in a more appealing way.

He took off and spent three years in a cave near Samos. In those three years he apparently repackaged his database. He repackaged the batch of knowledge and the condensations of that knowledge, his concepts, in ways that would be more user friendly.

Then he went off to a place that had more friendly users. He went off to Italy, where they didn't know him as the obnoxious little kid who had always known too much, and in Italy he gained a following.

Here is how we deliver knowledge. Pythagoras rented an auditorium. Yes, they did exist in those days, in 600 BC. He lectured to the people of Italy. He developed a little "in group" of passionate followers, a commune, and a large group who didn't come to live with him, but those who nonetheless followed his philosophies.

Eventually he took over entire cities in Italy, and eventually his concepts spread. His concepts, from the Pythagorean theorem to his notion that there is an underlying mathematic and geometric structure to the universe, linger with us to this day. In fact, the physicists in Einstein's day were still looking for the underlying geometry of the universe. Physicists today are still aware of the fact that there is some sort of geometry that they are trying to find, that there are mathematical patterns implicit in this universe.

What have I been talking about? I have been talking about a multigenerational enterprise, one that has been going on since Pythagoras's day and before. If we take it only back to Pythagoras, we have 2,600 years in which people who are outsiders have taken advantage of their outside perspective and have gone out to gather knowledge from as many sources as possible and then woven those bits of knowledge together, condensing them and using new concepts. Concepts allow us to grab whole batches of knowledge with just a few words. Clichés help us do the same thing.

There was once a playwright, William Shakespeare, who wrote so many good lines that 212 of those lines have become clichés in the English language. Those clichés are our culture, the things that allow us to think today.

I Need Virtual Experience

I am trying to do what Pythagoras was trying to do. I may or may not succeed, but today I have to do what Pythagoras did in his 34 years of traveling, and I have to do it every every night, and I have to do it in 15 minutes or an hour. This means that I need your help. This means that, when I am researching a town like Çatal Hüyük, which was a city 8,000 years ago, in what we call the Neolithic era, and it was a sophisticated place—I want to be able to get the feel of that place. I want to know what it felt like to live in that place. I want to know what kind of bowls I would have been eating out of. I want to know where the food came from that I would have been eating. The facts are fantastic. The food came from miles and miles and miles around. The building materials and the home I would have been sitting in, and the decorative materials especially, came in many cases from as far away as Russia.

How do I get to know this stuff? How do I want to get to know? I actually got to know this stuff by sending an assistant to the library and very fortunately being able to get the one book on the excavations of Çatal Hüyük published in 1962 that had pictures and to get a version in English. (I have not been able to purchase a version in English; the one that I now have is in German, in the original.) I absorbed as much knowledge as I could about Çatal Hüyük for four months until I got a sense of what it was to live there.

I could do a so much better job of giving you glistening little gems of knowledge if I could have gotten a feeling for Çatal Hüyük in two hours and could then have moved on to Athens and Sparta, to China in 200 AD, to China when the books of Confucius were being burned, to China when Confucius's works were being resurrected again. If I could have made those travels within one night or within one or two days, it would have been a blessing to me, a tremendous blessing, and ultimately a blessing to you because I would have been able to hand you back more knowledge.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the fact that I need something that goes even beyond RLG's Cultural Materials database. I need something that gives me the virtual experience of walking into a room in Çatal Hüyük, of talking with its people. I need animation. I need something that goes beyond VRML. (Yes, there is VRML presentation of a temple in Çatal Hüyük. It is so primitive that it is utterly and completely useless.) I need what that VRML was meant to be. I need the feel of a room in 19th-century Victorian England. I need to know what it was like to hang out in a room in Brussels in 1860 when major world leaders were assembling just before the American Civil War. I need the feel of these rooms. I need to hear the conversation in these rooms. How am I going to get it? Ultimately I am going to get it through a combination of animation and holography, visualization in every conceivable form. We are talking about giving me access to visceral information, to a feel for things.

Make your information accessible

I spent my life, as you can pretty well tell, in science. When I was in eighth grade, one of the girls who hated me in my class, because they all did, walked up to me and said, "I told my mother last night that you understand the theory of relativity." Well, frankly, I didn't. I went to the library, and that is when I got Einstein's books out and that is when I not only got a sense of the feeling of relativity, overnight, because I had to show that I knew about relativity the next day, but I also got a very, very important passage from the introduction of one of Einstein's books. This was in the 1950s, in the days when Einstein was known for having a theory that only seven men could understand. Einstein said, "Genius is not a matter of having a theory that only seven humans can understand. Genius is a matter of having a theory that only seven humans can understand and being able to express it so clearly that any reasonable intelligent person with a high school education can understand it."

Einstein gave me a scientific imperative that applies not just to me but applies to you. It was: Make your information accessible. Make your information accessible no matter how abstruse, no matter how strange, no matter how many elements you draw into your conceptual scheme. You've got to take your conceptual scheme and make it come alive before other people's eyes in ways that they can see.

Now, I have never understood what sidereal time is. But a year ago I ran into something I didn't know I had on my computer. It was an animation in—and I hate to say this—Bill Gates's Encarta® Encyclopedia. Bill Gates's products, we all know, cause us to crash our computers every three to four hours. Despite that, this animation gave me a visceral sense of what sidereal time is that no books over the course of the last 50 years have been able to give me.

I need this from you. I need it about virtually every form of information.

I Need Visualization

When my friend Eshel Ben-Jacob, the head of the Physics Department at the University of Tel Aviv, who has been doing breakthrough research in microbiology, in the behavior of bacteria and the behavior of self-assembling neurons for the last 10 years, sends me an article, which he did last night—he sent me three—an article on work he has just done about how neurons self-assemble on a wafer of silicon implanted with many electrodes to sense what those neurons are doing as they are self-assembling—I do not need it in gibberish. I received it first of all in a form of gibberish, a PDF file. PDF locks me out of accessibility.

I need to read information in such a way that I can underline it and bold it as I read. I need to be able to make my notes as I am going along. I need to be able to take little bits of it and park them in my files. In other words, I need to read it on a computer. My own work is organized in 2,600 chapters in my computer. I have 200 megabytes of my own work. I need to be able to take the concepts from Eshel's lab and tuck those into exactly the right chapters in my own work so that they are accessible to me the day that I need them, the day that I write the book that has a chapter that covers Eshel's stuff.

I need this not in technolese; I need this not in the jargon, the arcane language used in Eshel's journals of physics; I need this in English. Not only do I need it in English, but I need to be able to see it. When I get a visualization in my brain of what these neurons must look like as they are growing on a chip, that is one thing, but I don't know if it is accurate. If you gave me a video and explained it to me in English and made it instantly accessible to me, I would know infinitely more than I know now.

Right now my job is to make these incomprehensible things accessible to people. But, again, I may be getting them wrong, and I need you to do that work, so that I can go on to do what I do best, which is knitting the concepts together and showing you how these self-assemblies of neurons relate to the way we think, relate to the way we feel, relate to the way we create culture, relate to the ways we make history, relate to the history we are going to be making over the next 10 years, relate to the conflicts we are going to have to watch out for in the world, relate to the opportunities, relate to the visions that we are going to have for the future, relate to everything that we can possibly imagine or make of them.

The more you make available to me in accessible form, the better it is. I need journal articles translated from their technical language into English. Right now I do this, and it is a painful process. I need other people who will do it for me.

If you can give me information in the forms of technology which are not available yet, so that I can see it and feel it and touch it and smell it, I will deliver to you, I promise you, concepts that will blow your minds. Why? Because they will blow mine, because my curiosity is so insatiable and tastes and smells of things are so incredible. In putting together the tastes and smells, my task is to take all the cosmos and show you how our souls are reflected in it. What do I mean by "our souls"? I am an atheist. I don't believe that there is a soul that transcends the body. I mean our passions; I mean our emotions.

Do you realize how many emotions you go through in a day? According to one study, the average adult goes through seven major mood swings a day. If you put that in Bloomian terms, that means that seven times a day you dip into hell and seven times a day you rise from hell to heaven. What is hell and heaven in our minds? What is the nature of that confusion that takes us over so frequently? What is the source of the kindling that drives us to new imaginings, that makes me tell you the kind of library I so need?

I Want Add-ons to My Own Intelligence

Here is what I really want from you. Are you ready? This is a big plan. I want something the equivalent of a protein chip that is less than the size of one of those little round Band-Aids. I want to be able to put it right behind my ear. You know how you walk around the house—I do—and come up with 15 ideas that are incredible and you think you are going to remember them, but you have something else you have to do, like getting dressed or taking care of something that you have made an appointment for? But you are sure that those ideas will stick with you because they are incredibly important. And when you are finished with what you have to do, there is either still no time to write them down or you have forgotten them totally.

I want infinite memory capacity in my little protein chip. I want to be able to park the ideas. In addition to parking the ideas, if I come up with a question like exactly who would have been in a room in Brussels in 1859 at a given conference, I don't want to have to come to my computer and look it up. I want it there in my brain immediately. In other words, I want to access your databases with something that is completely portable, that travels around with me everywhere.

I want to access your databases with something that is completely portable, that travels around with me

My wife and I used to go once a week to a restaurant so that we could sit across from each other at a table with no televisions around and nothing to distract us from talking. Because both of us are very curious people, we carried with us an encyclopedia. We could have used far more than an encyclopedia. We could have used all of your databases, combined. Had they all been combined and instantly available to us no matter where we went, with total accessibility and total portability, if we had been able to know what was being published in People's Daily in China that day, what was being published in the United Arab Emirates that day, what was being published that day in Saudi Arabia—in other words, if we had had instant access to instant translation, not only translations from arcane academic and scientific languages but from all the languages of the world, our conversations would have been much richer and I would have been able to deliver you much better books.

So, all I want from you is the entire world of knowledge as we know it, translated into totally accessible terms and accessible to me instantly every minute of the day.

And, I want add-ons to my own intelligence. I want intelligent agents. My friend Alexander Chislenko worked on intelligent agents until he died two years ago. Alex was working on intelligent agents that would come and learn through evolutionary algorithms your interests, learn your whims, learn those things that really turned you on, that really made you passionate, and would go out and find them for you. If you wanted to get a bit of information, the agent would also anticipate the information you needed. Imagine this intelligent agent coupled with this infinite storage that taps me into you full-time.

All of a sudden my intelligent agent would say, "Hey, something has just happened today that I think you will find interesting" and present it to me, or it would say, "That thought that you are having, you had a similar thought two years ago. Let me give it to you. In fact, you have had seven similar thoughts at different times. Let me give them to you. You might find them relevant."

I Will Make a Deal...

I need that. If I can have that, I can stop doing those things myself and I could go on to doing higher levels of conceptual things and deliver you packages that put together knowledge in ways that you have never believed.

If I have this little chip, ultimately I can change science. Why? Science is very aware of what goes on with the stars. Science is very aware of what goes on with the galaxy. Science is very unaware of what goes on in my heart, of what goes on in my soul. Studying the soul through the eyes of science has been my business since I was 13, but we need new ways to do studies. We can't just study the human soul by putting 22 college students in a room and paying them $2 an hour to participate in an artificial experiment. We have to go out, as I have, into the world of pop culture where Michael Jackson is. We have to go out into the crowds of 90,000 people that gather in a frenzy for a Jackson tour, which I did. We have to be able to find out what is going on in these people's heads.

... Knowledge in ways that you have never believed

If all of us were microchipped up.... I know that one of our speakers has talked about the menace of Big Brother and the danger of censorship and, worse, the danger of reaching into our brains. Frankly, I want to be able to make a deal with you that says that, in exchange for certain services, I will make my brain accessible to you and you can study me under certain circumstances. This will give people like my friend Jaak Panksepp new opportunities. Jaak is a brilliant researcher on emotions, their neurobiology, and their neurochemistry. He has urged me to translate my concepts in ways that can be tested in the lab. They have to be tested in the tough and dirty world of reality. The microchip I'm requesting will give Jaak the opportunity to do what I did, dive into the real world and see masses and tens of millions of humans in their frenzies. It will give him the ability to measure those frenzies, to sense their rhythms, and to see the underlying patterns of them in ways that nourish me and nourish you. So I will make a deal. If you give me access to certain things, I will give you access to my brain under certain circumstances.

Instead of studying 22 students in a college lab, Jaak Panksepp can study 200,000 people like me who are willing to make themselves available under real-life circumstances for scientific purposes. In other words, you give me accessibility—be it instant translation, be it instant visualization, be it instant animation, and be it a sense of being anywhere at any place that has ever been studied by human beings—and I will give you the cosmos wrapped up in just a dewdrop of your own soul. I promise you. I promise you. That's all I want of you: Everything.

More on the Web: www.howardbloom.net

From the Discussion that Followed

Discussion grappled with whether and how librarians can address the kinds of needs Bloom described—whether they have a role in providing tools to interpret or work with content, or in repackaging content for access or even experience.

Participant 1: We have clients like that every day. We try, but what they always say to us is, "Why don't you just ...?" Fill in the blanks; the list is terrible. The question is, How do we afford that? It gets back to the reality of resources and what you can provide. It is a dilemma that we face.

Participant 2: I am becoming puzzled about users like Mr. Bloom. It has to do with the border between providing information and interpreting and using the information. I know that border is an artificial construct, but nonetheless it is one that our professions tend to depend upon.

To give a specific example, in systems design one has to determine the degree to which information should simply be delivered or tools provided for its actual use. For instance, someone might download a huge text where he says, "I want to be able to annotate it and underline it," etc.

Now we are moving into tools that are more about using information than retaining the information. Although people tell us from time to time that they want those things together, at other times they tell us that they don't, because a lot of users are very savvy and want their own tools—"I prefer this use tool over that use tool, so don't restrain me with your tools."

At the individual level it is easy to understand when someone wants something. If you have to generalize it to a large group of users, it is not really clear where to draw those lines.

Moderator: What is the link between this talk and what we heard yesterday? He said it: "I want total accessibility and total portability." I think these two are very important trends for the future. As we heard yesterday, technology makes it possible to be virtual, to have different personae, to have multitasking with different agents at any place, any time. That is the sort of thing we are getting.

Participant 3: What we cannot do is the experience. He wants us to interpret what it was like to have been somewhere. We might be able to convey what it was like to be in a room in Brussels in 1859. There are records of people who were there. What we cannot convey is what it was like to be somewhere where there are no records. We can convey the artifacts and the architecture and things of that kind, but we cannot convey the experience. Asking for that is asking for the impossible. There are limits to what we can do.

Moderator: But that is because there are no sources there. Is he already asking too much in the sense that as librarians and archivists we are used to providing material and saying, "What you do with it is your job." He—and I am afraid he is not the only one—is expecting at least one more step, saying, "Can you, librarians and archivists, repackage?" He is asking for instant translation and instant visualization, provided there are sources to do that.

Participant 4: We in our national library are being pushed down that road. The access-enlarging agenda of government requires us to move away from various available manuscripts digitized and on the Internet. A significant repackaging and interpretation is taking place.

As you were saying earlier, I do think there are many that would resist us doing that. I have difficulties personally. I ought to make the disclaimer that these are not the views of my library. I think there are interpreters of raw data, teachers who are much more skilled in that kind of role.

I do think there is a partnership, and sometimes the partnership is with the scholar: "Here it is. We are leaving it alone. Over to you. You are more expert and don't want us in there." Sometimes it is with other communities. It could be a partnership putting together a package.

Participant 5: What he is really asking for has taken place in corporate libraries. For example, in pharmaceutical companies the corporate libraries have information specialists. When the researcher asks for information, they just don't ask for one article. They would really like the information technologist to do the first screening. That is part of the responsibilities we are asked to do.

Participant 6: There is repackaging and maybe even a little translation in libraries. Usually that happens at the service desk; that has been our traditional mode for doing that sort of thing. It has not been part of our delivery mechanisms.

Moderator: We have so many resources in our collections, but are we paying too much attention to our collections, whereas, outside people like Google and other search engines experience another road of accessing and processing information? Isn't there a risk that we lose the connection between additional values and what people out there are now experiencing?

Participant 7: It seems to me that the presentation raised a question of the autodidact of a social kind. Are libraries and archives set up to serve autodidacts very well? I would say "no," certainly not as well as a university, people who come from a discipline. Disciplines may be very general, but they have limits. People always come with a focus—here is what is important now—but autodidacts don't behave that way. We might accept, of course, that this is our limitation. We help the people in disciplines far better than we help people who are eternally generating ideas.

Moderator: We are so stuck in the disciplinary approach since the 17th century that it is nearly impossible for us to imagine a clientele which doesn't care about these disciplinary boundaries. For the sake of discussion, I may say that if we keep caring for separate disciplines, we cannot create new knowledge. Only by expanding or blurring boundaries between disciplines can we create new knowledge.

I was struck by his insistence on the virtualization of information in a society which, for better or worse, is developing into a visual society, an experiencing society.

Participant 3: It is all very well to produce a virtual recollection of something in Roman history, but that is something which someone else is conceptualizing. I think the danger there is that, rather than forming our own interpretations, we all accept a single standard. On the other hand, if you have many virtualizations, you get back to choices and you have to make those choices. No one can say for all time definitively, "This is how it was," because no one knows.

Participant 8: I find myself totally at odds with what Bloom was saying because I could not conceive of any way I could serve him. We can go so far down the road, but the job is his to take the material and conceptualize it himself.

Participant 9: He seems to assume that all this interpretation work, like translation, visualization, and animation, is a neutral activity. He seemed to assume that from the way he talked. It is not neutral.

Participant 10: What people were pointing out yesterday was that perhaps the actual access and use equal knowledge as much as the content. That is what he was calling for. "Give me those tools. I need to go beyond the content. I want the content, but I also want you to provide me with these other tools."

Participant 11: There is another thread that comes through for me. You made a comment about our young people. If you think of those young people and you think of Howard Bloom's primary message, the importance of a library early in his life for whatever reason, that is true for a lot of people today as well. One of the challenges for us, directly or indirectly, is how we engage that younger generation in the way that he was engaged.