Before I knew it, AI had caught up to an idea from 15 years ago, the precursor to Inclr.
I was sitting in a hotel room in Bangkok. I was in a period in my life best described as a mixture of creative fervour and overloaded aloofness. I had a lot of ideas, a few projects going on and little progress on the journey to truth or destiny. But an idea came to me in that hotel room, an idea that would keep my attention for years to come. It was called Cluster - interconnected second brains through word semantics.
Basically the idea was to calculate distances between words to generate a somewhat intelligent visual map in 3D of your second brain. Then to compare two brains and see what we could learn. It was a powerful idea and I told people I knew about it, but at the time it was an immensely difficult task for me to execute. Machine learning wasn't popular nor easy. To compare billions of permutations between words would have been near impossible nor accessible to a non-programmer like myself at the time. So after a few years I gave up and moved on, all the while it hid in the back of my mind, the tip of its fangs dug firmly into the edge of my consciousness.
When Inclr came about, machine learning was still not easy. I invented Inclr surmising that a circular interface, as a starting point, for replacing simplistic nodes, would solve some of the problems I had with Cluster. Cluster still used simple nodes which restricted it's use case to research and business intelligence, much of which had been done with BI tools like Tableau, or were dedicated to researchers. This didn't align with my goal - to create a new architecture to connect the world. I needed something to allow anyone to visualise their intelligence, not just data scientists, and I thought a visual structure like Inclr would allow users to inhabit an otherwise boring mindmap. And it didn't rely on machine learning which Cluster did. Richness came from design, not just intelligence. Users could feel emotive connection from every interaction, not just from calculated results.
We're now in a much different world from those previous starting points. Machine learning is accessible. Inclr is out in the wild and a lot of Inclr fans have told me how they've longed for some visual way to organise information and how Inclr has manifested it. I'm so thrilled to hear these reviews, so keep them coming! But we're still just touching the tip of the iceberg. I don't know how deep the rabbit hole is, but I can assure you there's plenty left in store.
So I wanted to let you know that AI will be coming to Inclr. We will create that interconnected second brain. I won't let out all the details, and I don't yet have a timeline for this, but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the next phase of Inclr - Sharing, Community and AI.
Keep the feature requests coming! There's always room in Inclr for your visions.
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