World Brain

World Encyclopedia

In the wake of the first World War, Wells believed that people needed to become more educated and conversent with events and knowledge that surrounded them. In order to do this he offered the idea of the knowledge system of the World Brain that all humans could have access to. The Wellsian dream of a World Brain was first expressed in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Weekly Evening Meeting, Friday, 20 November 1936. He began with his motivation:

He wished the world to be such a whole "as coherent and consistent as possible". He wished that wise world citizens would ensure world peace. He was a communalist and contextualist and ended his lecture as follows:

The Brain Organization of the Modern World

(Lecture delivered in America, October and November 1937)

This lecture lays out Wells's vision for "a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared". Wells thought that technological advances such as microfilm could be used towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica".

A Permanent World Encyclopedia

(Contribution to the new Encyclopédie Française, August 1937)

In this essay, Wells explains how then-current encyclopaedias failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He asserted that these 19th-century encyclopaedias continued to follow the 18th-century pattern, organisation and scale. "Our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development," he argued, "rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane."

Wells saw the potential for world-altering impacts this technology could bring. He felt that the creation of the encyclopaedia could bring about the peaceful days of the past, "with a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose, and of a commonwealth such as now we hardly dream of".

Wells anticipated the effect and contribution that his World Brain would have on the university system as well. He wanted to see universities contributing to it, helping it grow, and feeding its search for holistic information. "Every university and research institution should be feeding it" (p. 14). "It would become the logical nucleus of the world's research universities and post-graduate studies" (Wells, 1931a, p. 796). He suggested that the organization he was proposing "would outgrow in scale and influence alike any single university that exists, and it would inevitably take the place of the loose-knit university system of the world in the concentration of research and thought and the direction of the general education of mankind" (Wells, 1938, p. 95). In fact the new encyclopedism he was advocating was "the only possible method I can imagine, of bringing the universities and research institutions around the world into effective cooperation and creating an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct collective life" (Wells 1938, p. 48). Ultimately the World Encyclopaedia would be "a permanent institution, a mighty super-university, holding together, utilizing and dominating all of the teaching and research organizations at present in existence" (Wells, 1942a, p. 59).

1930s: World Congress of Universal Documentation

One of the stated goals of this Congress, held in Paris, France, in 1937, was to discuss ideas and methods for implementing Wells's ideas of the World Brain. Wells himself gave a lecture at the Congress.

Reginald Arthur Smith extended Wells's ideas in the book A Living Encyclopædia: A Contribution to Mr. Wells's New Encyclopædism (London: Andrew Dakers Ltd., 1941).

From World Library to World Brain

In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that the construction of what H. G. Wells called the World Brain would take place in two stages. He identified the first stage as the construction of the World Library, which is basically Wells's concept of a universal encyclopaedia accessible to everyone from their home on computer terminals. He predicted this phase would be established (at least in the developed countries) by the year 2000. The second stage, the World Brain, would be a superintelligent artificially intelligent supercomputer that humans would be able to mutually interact with to solve various world problems. The "World Library" would be incorporated into the "World Brain" as a subsection of it. He suggested that this supercomputer should be installed in the former war rooms of the United States and the Soviet Union once the superpowers had matured enough to agree to co-operate rather than conflict with each other. Clarke predicted the construction of the "World Brain" would be completed by the year 2100.

World Wide Web as a World Brain

Brian R. Gaines in his 1996 paper "Convergence to the Information Highway" saw the World Wide Web as an extension of the "World Brain" that individuals can access using personal computers. Francis Heylighen, Joel de Rosnay and Ben Goertzel envisaged the further development of the World Wide Web into a Global brain, i.e. an intelligent network of people and computers at the planetary level. The difference between "global brain" and "world brain" is that the latter, as envisaged by Wells, is centrally controlled, while the former is fully decentralised and self-organizing.

Wikipedia as a World Brain

There are a few similarities that link Wells' World Brain as a precursor to Wikipedia. Two to mention are the noncommercial aspect of both Wikipedia and the World Brain, as well as its international aspect. Wells did not want the Brain to be commercially funded, just as Jimmy Wales has decided not to have ads on Wikipedia, ensuring both were free from commercial bias. In addition, Wells envisioned microfilm as a universal format for which people could share information through the World Brain. His intention of using microfilm as the form for the World Brain mimics the use of the internet because he contended that the use of microfilm would abolish the distance between information and knowledge.

A number of commentators have suggested that Wikipedia represents the World Brain as described by Wells.