I am an experimental psychologist by training — a doctorate from Cambridge on speech recognition, then years at Bell Labs researching how people and machines meet.
In 1997 I wrote a patent application for putting speech recognition on the network as a shared resource. Not for tidiness: nothing sitting on a desk could hold that much knowledge of the world, or the power to search it, and something on the network could. That is still true, and more so than it was. It seemed obvious to me at the time. It was shelved anyway, and revived by colleagues after I had left, who were good enough to keep my name on it.
Since 2009 I have hosted Sacred Ground, an online contemplative practice where a group meets — not talks, but meets — at a distance. It has never cost anything and never will. Anyone can come.
The two look to me like the same question: how meaning becomes coherent when separate parts share something between them. I have not managed to shake it in more than half a lifetime, and most of what I write today comes out of it.