Collective Intelligence: Towards a Conversation

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Introduction

This paper explores the basic idea of “Collective Intelligence” – the ability of groups of people to take intelligent collective action – and raises a number of issues in this area that intersect with Art Earth Tech’s broader interest in a wiser society. Collective Intelligence (CI) is exciting in that it depends on emerging science of the mind whilst recognizing the need to look beyond individual, isolated brains towards group thought and action. This is especially important to consider in the present moment, when new possibilities for group deliberation are being created and perfected all the time using information technology.

Collective Intelligence might seem like an unnecessary addition to the list of social sciences, which have long been concerned with how groups of humans function. But investigators of collective intelligence are specifically interested in understanding how groups think well and in conceiving of new ways in which they could think better, using ideas from social science as well as information technology. Collective Intelligence research may help group processes improve in a similar way that research on individual thought has helped individuals engage in meta-cognition – to monitor their own thought for biases or shallow and hasty thinking. For example, researchers at the MIT’s center for collective intelligence have looked at the factors that predict the quality of small groups to perform tasks[1], showing that evenness of input and emotional intelligence play a huge role. Thinkers like the influential researcher Cass Sunstein and Geoff Mulgan, the founder of Demos, are interested in identifying the principles that will allow us to assemble new intelligences composed of individual minds and information processing technologies [2,3]. All of these researchers agree we are in the early days of the field.

In this paper, I try to clarify the concept of Collective Intelligence for readers, arguing that, though it is misguided to expect a perfectly precise definition of Collective Intelligence, it can be usefully be thought of as the ability that allows a group to learn to take useful actions over time. This applies to groups that act in a centrally organized manner (like in a bureaucracy), or in a decentralized manner (as in a market). Just like human intelligence, we will not find a single cause for this ability, but probably a number of principles that

contribute to groups’ effective functioning. Rather than trying to deduce these principles, I then move on to identify a number of issues in Collective Intelligence that are of interest to people interested in promoting a wiser world.

White paper

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