(2020-10-29) Le Cunff Interview Collective Intelligence With Scihubs Alexandra Elbakyan

Anne-Laure LeCunff Interview: on Collective intelligence with SciHub's Alexandra Elbakyan. Sci-Hub, a website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books/

Alexandra was born in Kazakhstan in 1988

In 2014, frustrated by the closed access to research literature, she started working on Sci-Hub, with an instant reaction from the publishing industry: in 2015, Alexandra was sued in the United States by Elsevier, which publishes more than about 500,000 articles in 2,500 journals every year. Elbakyan is currently in hiding due to the risk of extradition, but she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Science in an undisclosed location.

You started programming at a very early age. One of your ideas was to create a Tamagotchi with artificial intelligence. How did you get that idea?

I do not want to do this anymore, but now I want to apply some artificial intelligence to Sci-Hub database of 84 million research articles.

I think one of your most exciting ideas is the creation of a global brain, where everyone’s consciousness would be connected together via the Internet. Is Sci-Hub a way to get closer to this global network of conscious minds?

Sci-Hub in essence is a tool to connect one brain to another, using research papers as a medium. Using brain-machine interfaces we could possibly connect brains directly to each other, in a neuron-to-neuron way. Then, out of many brains connected directly to each other over the Internet, a big “global brain” will emerge. Sci-Hub is the alpha version of it.

What do consciousness, religion, and communication have in common? They are all information

Currently, we have many theories of consciousness trying to answer the question: what is consciousness?

the Information Integration Theory that I mentioned earlier is a promising theory that could potentially solve these puzzles, and that is more than just abstract thinking.