Towards an intelligent network for matching offer and demand: From the sharing economy to the global brain

We analyze the role of the Global Brain in the sharing economy, by synthesizing the notion of distributed intelligence with Goertzel's concept of an offer network. An offer network is an architecture for a future economic system based on the matching of offers and demands without the intermediate of money. Intelligence requires a network of condition-action rules, where conditions represent challenges that elicit action in order to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity. In society, opportunities correspond to offers of goods or services, problems to demands. Tackling challenges means finding the best sequences of condition-action rules to connect all demands to the offers that can satisfy them. This can be achieved with the help of AI algorithms working on a public database of rules, demands and offers. Such a system would provide a universal medium for voluntary collaboration and economic exchange, efficiently coordinating the activities of all people on Earth. It would replace and subsume the patchwork of commercial and community-run sharing platforms presently running on the Internet. It can in principle resolve the traditional problems of the capitalist economy: poverty, inequality, externalities, poor sustainability and resilience, booms and busts, and the neglect of non-monetizable values. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.