Hybrid Thinking

Hybrid Thinking Incorporates Design Thinking

The concept of hybrid thinking incorporates design thinking with other ways of thinking in order to produce successful results to wicked problems by creating more meaningful human centred experiences. The core of hybrid thinking is the discipline of design thinking.

 Hybrid thinking adds the popular business concept of design thinking with other ways of thinking to take on the wicked problems in business changes, innovation as well as strategy. Fundamental emphasis of design thinking, on creating meaningful human experience tends to provide the core for hybrid thinking. This is an emerging `discipline of discipline’ and hybrid thinking tends to go beyond design thing by incorporating other forms of creative thinking to take on the most uncertaincontradictory as well as complex issues.

Ray Kurzweil, an author, a computer scientist and an inventor and presently serving as Director of Engineering at Google suggested in his March 20, 2014, TED talk that in a couple of decades they would be able to increase the neocortex’s power fold instantly by accessing the processing power of the cloud.

He recommended that this it would be possible due to injection of nano-robots in the brain which would act as interfaces between neo-cortex brain cells and digital brain cells with the capabilities of scaling like a cloud application which was an intriguing idea.

New Brain Feature – Neo-Cortex

Around two hundred million years back, mammal ancestors had developed a new brain feature known as neo-cortex wherein this stamp sized piece of tissue which was wrapped round a brain the size of a walnut, is the key what the human are. Kurzweil recommend that we should now be ready for the next big leap in brain power as we tend to tap in the computing power in the cloud.

His main assumption is that the medium is not important with regards to thinking and biological brain cells are alike to digital brain cells or brain cells made of water pipes provided the functions remain the same. Kurzweil seems to agree with the functional perspective of intelligence and sees no reason why one cannot have an artificial brain cell.

However, having a digital corresponding to the basic unit of information processing in brain does not tend to solve the problem of global information processing of brain besides the problem of the brain being aware of itself.

Hybrid Thinking – Synonym for Digital Schizophrenia

Process of global information is the outcome of highly complex structure together with multi-level positive feedback loops and our brains are not collection of brain cells. It is complex cybernetic systems where the fundamental circuitry though evolved over millennia, tends to undergo changes every second.

This plasticity of the brain together with its self-corrective mechanism indicates a fundamental technological issue with regards to devising smart algorithms for intelligence. Two main problem needs to be solved to gain access to a `cloud of neo-cortex’ and bestow oneself with hybrid thinking, the first being that we solve how developmental human biology converts with the complexity of the brain and we can then decode this to produce artificial intelligence.

The second is that we solve the ability to scale artificial intelligence at will, which could not be possible since it involves contradiction. Hybrid thinking seems to be problematic; the reason being that sharing someone’s consciousness would lead to psychosis. Hybrid thinking seems to be like synonym for digital schizophrenia.