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Collective intelligence

2008-12-16 06:34:16

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ollective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the

collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence

appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria,

animals, humans, and computer networks. The study of collective intelligence

may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer

science, of mass communications and of mass behavior a field that studies

collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant,

animal, and human societies.

The above definition has emerged from the writings of Peter Russell (1983), Tom

Atlee (1993), Pierre L vy (1994), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen

(1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress

(2003) and other theorists. Collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic

intelligence by Norman L. Johnson.

Some figures like Tom Atlee prefer to focus on collective intelligence

primarily in humans and actively work to upgrade what Howard Bloom calls "the

group IQ". Atlee feels that collective intelligence can be encouraged "to

overcome 'groupthink' and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a

collective to cooperate on one process while achieving enhanced intellectual

performance."

Collective intelligence (CI) can also be defined as a form of networking

enabled by the rise of communications technology, namely the Internet. Web 2.0

has enabled interactivity and thus, users are able to generate their own

content. Collective Intelligence draws on this to enhance the social pool of

existing knowledge. Henry Jenkins, a key theorist of new media and media

convergence draws on the theory that collective intelligence can be attributed

to media convergence and participatory culture.[1] Collective intelligence is

not merely a quantitative contribution of information from all cultures, it is

also qualitative.

One CI pioneer, George P r, defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as

"the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity

and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and

integration, competition and collaboration."[2] Tom Atlee and George P r state

that "collective intelligence also involves achieving a single focus of

attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of

action". Their approach is rooted in Scientific Community Metaphor.

Levy and de Kerckhove consider CI from a mass communications perspective,

focusing on the ability of networked ICT s to enhance the community knowledge

pool. They suggest that these communications tools enable humans to interact

and to share and collaborate with both ease and speed (Flew 2008). With the

development of the Internet and its widespread use, the opportunity to

contribute to community-based knowledge forums, such as Wikipedia, is greater

than ever before. These computer networks give participating users the

opportunity to store and to retrieve knowledge through the collective access to

these databases and allow them to harness the hive (Raymond 1998; Herz 2005

in Flew 2008). Researchers[3] at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

research and explore collective intelligence of groups of people and computers.

Contents

[hide]

[edit] General concepts

Howard Bloom traces the evolution of collective intelligence from the days of

our bacterial ancestors 3.5 billion years ago to the present and demonstrates

how a multi-species intelligence has worked since the beginning of life.[4]

Tom Atlee and George P r, on the other hand, feel that while group theory and

artificial intelligence have something to offer, the field of collective

intelligence should be seen by some as primarily a human enterprise in which

mind-sets, a willingness to share, and an openness to the value of distributed

intelligence for the common good are paramount. Individuals who respect

collective intelligence, say Atlee and P r, are confident of their own

abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any

individual parts.[citation needed]

From P r and Atlee's point of view, maximizing collective intelligence relies

on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden

Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member. Groupthink

often hampers collective intelligence by limiting input to a select few

individuals or filtering potential Golden Suggestions without fully developing

them to implementation.

Knowledge focusing through various voting methods has the potential for many

unique perspectives to converge through the assumption that uninformed voting

is to some degree random and can be filtered from the decision process leaving

only a residue of informed consensus. Critics point out that often bad ideas,

misunderstandings, and misconceptions are widely held, and that structuring of

the decision process must favor experts who are presumably less prone to random

or misinformed voting in a given context.

While these are the views of experts like Atlee and P r, other founding fathers

of collective intelligence see the field differently. Francis Heylighen,

Valerie Turchin, and Gottfried Mayer-Kress view collective intelligence through

the lens of computer science and cybernetics. Howard Bloom stresses the

biological adaptations that have turned most of this earth's living beings into

components of what he calls "a learning machine". And Peter Russell, Elisabet

Sahtouris, and Barbara Marx Hubbard (originator of the term "conscious

evolution") are inspired by the visions of a noosphere a transcendent,

rapidly evolving collective intelligence an informational cortex of the

planet.

Perhaps we may draw parallels between this informational cortex and the

Internet. Defined by the Internet Society in 1995 as ... the global

information system that... provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly

or privately, high level services layered on... communications and related

infrastructure... (Leiner et al. 2003) we can see how the Internet lends

itself to becoming this cortex . Developing as far back as the late 1950 s, it

wasn t until 1991 that WWW (World Wide Web) was released. In 2005, there were

as many as 1,018, 057, 389 Internet users worldwide (CIA 2008). So many users

accessing the Internet can only mean one thing a meeting of minds and

collaboration of knowledge. The Internet is an information and communication

tool, whether it be checking on the stock market or a celebrity gossip site,

humans are primarily interested in the sharing of information, and the Internet

serves this purpose.

According to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, collective intelligence is

mass collaboration. In order for this concept to happen, four principles need

to exist. These are openness, peering, sharing and acting globally.

Openness - During the early ages of the communications technology, people and

companies are reluctant to share ideas, intellectual property and encourage

self-motivation. The reason for this is these resources provide the edge over

competitors. Now people and companies tend to loosen hold over these resources

because they reap more benefits in doing so. By allowing others to share ideas

and bid for franchising, their products are able to gain significant

improvement and scrutiny through collaboration.

Peering - This is a form of horizontal organization with the capacity to create

information technology and physical products. One example is the opening up

of the Linux program where users are free to modify and develop it provided

that they made it available for others. Participants in this form of collective

intelligence have different motivations for contributing, but the results

achieved are for the improvement of a product or service. As quoted, Peering

succeeds because it leverages self-organization a style of production that

works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

Sharing - This principle has been the subject of debate for many, with the

question being Should there be no laws against distribution of intellectual

property? Research has shown that more and more companies have started to

share some, while maintaining some degree of control over others, like

potential and critical patent rights. This is because companies have realized

that by limiting all their intellectual property, they are shutting out all

possible opportunities. Sharing some has allowed them to expand their market

and bring products out more quickly.

Acting Globally - The emergence of communication technology has prompted the

rise of global companies, or e-Commerce. E-Commerce has allowed individuals to

set up businesses at almost no or low overhead costs. As the influence of the

Internet is widespread, a globally integrated company would have no

geographical boundaries. They would also have global connections, allowing them

to gain access to new markets, ideas and technology. Therefore it is important

for firms to stay globally competitive and updated or they will face a

declining rate of clientele.[5]

[edit] History

An early precursor of the concept of collective intelligence was entomologist

William Morton Wheeler's observation that seemingly independent individuals can

cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism. In

1911 Wheeler saw this collaborative process at work in ants, who acted like the

cells of a single beast with a collective mind. He called the larger creature

that the colony seemed to form a "superorganism".

In 1912, mile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical

thought. He argues in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that society

constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over

space and time.[6]

Collective intelligence, which has antecedents in Vladimir Vernadsky's concept

of "noosphere" as well as H.G. Wells's concept of "world brain," has more

recently been examined in depth by Pierre L vy in a book by the same name, by

Howard Bloom in Global Brain (see also the term global brain), by Howard

Rheingold in Smart Mobs, and by Robert David Steele Vivas in The New Craft of

Intelligence. The latter introduces the concept of all citizens as

"intelligence minutemen," drawing only on legal and ethical sources of

information, as able to create a "public intelligence" that keeps public

officials and corporate managers honest, turning the concept of "national

intelligence" on its head (previously concerned about spies and secrecy).

In 1986, Howard Bloom combined the concepts of apoptosis, parallel distributed

processing, group selection, and the superorganism to produce a theory of how a

collective intelligence works.[7] Later, he went further and showed how

collective intelligences like those of competing bacterial colonies and of

competing human societies can be explained in terms of computer-generated

"complex adaptive systems" and the "genetic algorithms", concepts pioneered by

John Holland.[4]

The developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has made it with the goal

to promote sharing and publishing of information globally. Later, his employer

opened up the WWW technology for free use. In the early 90s, the Internet s

potential was still untapped, until the mid 90s where critical mass , as

termed by the head of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), Dr. J.C.R.

Licklider demanded for more accessibility and utility of the Internet.[8]

Hence, it can be said that the driving force behind collective intelligence is

the digitization of information and communication. This is because existence of

hyperlink has made it easier to search and create websites and pages. Knowledge

can be built in just a matter of minutes.

David Skrbina[9] cites the concept of a group mind as being derived from

Plato s concept of panpsychism (that mind or consciousness is omnipresent and

exists in all matter). He follows the development of the concept of a group

mind as articulated by Hobbes in relation to his Leviathan which functioned as

a coherent entity and Fechner s arguments for a collective consciousness of

mankind. He cites Durkheim as the most notable advocate of a collective

consciousness and Teilhard as the thinker who has developed the philosophical

implications of the group mind more than any other.

Collective intelligence is an amplification of the precepts of the Founding

Fathers, as represented by Thomas Jefferson in his statement, "A Nation's best

defense is an educated citizenry." During the industrial era, schools and

corporations took a turn toward separating elites from the people they expected

to follow them. Both government and private sector organizations glorified

bureaucracy and, with bureaucracy, secrecy and compartmentalized knowledge. In

the past twenty years, a body of knowledge has emerged which demonstrates that

secrecy is actually pathological, and enables selfish decisions against the

public interest. Collective intelligence restores the power of the people over

their society, and neutralizes the power of vested interests that manipulate

information to concentrate wealth.

[edit] Types of collective intelligence

Image:CI types1s.jpg

[edit] Examples of collective intelligence

The best-known collective intelligence projects are political parties, which

mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates and to

finance and run election campaigns. Military units, trade unions, and

corporations are focused on more narrow concerns but would satisfy some

definitions of a genuine "C.I." the most rigorous definition would require a

capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance

from "law" or "customers" that tightly constrain actions. Another example is in

which online advertising companies like BootB and DesignBay are using

collective intelligence in order to bypass traditional marketing and creative

agencies.

Improvisational actors also experience a type of collective intelligence, which

they term 'Group Mind'.

Another form of collective intelligence is the Learner generated context in

which a group of users collaboratively marshall available resources to create

an ecology that meets their needs often (but not only) in relation to the

co-configuration, co-creation and co-design of a particular learning space that

allows learners to create their own context.[10][11][12] In this sense, the

learner generated contexts represents an ad hoc community which facilitates the

coordination of collective action in a network of trust.

The best example of Learner generated context is perhaps found on the Internet-

a group of collaborative users pooling knowledge to result in a shared

intelligence space. As the Internet has developed, so has the concept of CI as

a shared public forum. The global accessibility and availability of the

Internet has allowed more people than ever to contribute their ideas and to

access these collaborative intelligence spaces. (Flew 2008)

Ant societies exhibit more intelligence than any other animal except for

humans, if we measure intelligence in terms of technology. Ant societies are

able to do agriculture, in fact several different forms of agriculture. Some

ant societies keep livestock of various forms, for example, some ants keep and

care for aphids for "milking". Leaf cutters care for fungi and carry leaves to

feed the fungi.

However, a majority will agree that the medium that displays collective

intelligence in full is Wikipedia. It is an encyclopedia that can be altered by

virtually anyone at any time. This concept is termed wikinomics by Don

Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in their book similarly named, they quote

Sunday Times, wikinomics is the new force that is bringing people together

on the net to create a giant brain .[13] Through this application, the lines

between a consumer and producer have been blurred, inventing the term

prod-user or prosumer .

More examples on collective intelligence can be seen in games. Games such as

The Sims, Halo or Second Life are designed to be more non-linear and depend on

collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually

evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations.[14]

For them, collective intelligence has become a norm.

[edit] Mathematical techniques

One measure sometimes applied, especially by more artificial intelligence

focused theorists, is a "collective intelligence quotient" (or "cooperation

quotient") which presumably can be measured like the "individual" intelligence

quotient (IQ) thus making it possible to determine the marginal extra

intelligence added by each new individual participating in the collective, thus

using metrics to avoid the hazards of group think and stupidity.

In 2001, Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba from the AGH University in Poland proposed a

formal model for the phenomenon of Collective Intelligence. It is assumed to be

an unconscious, random, parallel, and distributed computational process, run in

mathematical logic by the social structure.[15]

In this model, beings and information are modeled as abstract information

molecules carrying expressions of mathematical logic. They are quasi-randomly

displacing due to their interaction with their environments with their intended

displacements. Their interaction in abstract computational space creates

multithread inference process which we perceive as Collective Intelligence.

Thus, a non-Turing model of computation is used. This theory allows simple

formal definition of Collective Intelligence as the property of social

structure and seems to be working well for a wide spectrum of beings, from

bacterial colonies up to human social structures. Collective Intelligence

considered as a specific computational process is providing a straightforward

explanation of several social phenomena. For this model of Collective

Intelligence, the formal definition of IQS (IQ Social) was proposed and was

defined as "the probability function over the time and domain of N-element

inferences which are reflecting inference activity of the social structure."

While IQS seems to be computationally hard, modeling of social structure in

terms of a computational process as described above gives a chance for

approximation. Prospective applications are optimization of companies through

the maximization of their IQS, and the analysis of drug resistance against

Collective Intelligence of bacterial colonies.[15]

[edit] Stock Market Predictions using Collective Intelligence

Because of the Internet's ability to rapidly convey large amounts of

information throughout the world, the use of collective intelligence to predict

stock prices and stock price direction has become increasingly viable in long

or even short term applications. Utilizing these attributes, websites have been

created to aggregate stock market information that is as current as possible.

Consequently, professional or amateur stock analysts can publish their

viewpoints and participate in creating an aggregate opinion on specific stocks

or the stock market in general. Although it has been commonly expected, at

least within the investment community, for investment banks and brokerages to

publish their ratings and reports on stocks, the Internet has enabled the

amateur or less notorious investors to concurrently submit their financial

opinions. As a result, the opinion of any investor can be weighted on par with

any other. Thus, a pivotal premise of the effective application of collective

intelligence can be more thoroughly applied: the masses, including a broad

spectrum of stock market expertise, could be utilized to, in theory, more

accurately predict the behavior of financial markets.

[edit] Collective Intelligence and the Media

New media is often associated with the promotion and enhancement of collective

intelligence. The ability of new media to easily store and retrieve

information, predominantly through databases and the Internet, allows it for it

to be shared without difficulty. Thus, through interaction with new media,

knowledge easily passes between sources,[16] resulting in a form of collective

intelligence. The use of interactive new media, particularly the Internet,

promotes online interaction and this distribution of knowledge between users.

In this context, collective intelligence is often confused with shared

knowledge. The former is knowledge that is generally available to all members

of a community, whilst the latter is information known by all members of a

community.[17]

Collective intelligence as represented by Web 2.0 has less user engagement than

collaborative intelligence.

[edit] Collective Intelligence in Videogames

In Terry Flew s discussion of interactivity in the online games environment,

the ongoing interactive dialogue between users and game developers[18], he

refers to Pierre Levy s concept of Collective Intelligence (Levy 1998). He

argues this concept is actively at play in videogames as clans or guilds in

MMORG are constantly working together in order to achieve the goals/aims of the

games. Henry Jenkins proposes that the participatory cultures emerging between

games producers, media companies, and the end-users mark out a fundamental

shift in the nature of media production and consumption. Jenkins argues that

this new participatory culture arises at the intersection of three broad new

media trends. [19]Firstly, the development of new media tools/technologies

enabling the creation of content. Secondly, the rise of subcultures promoting

such creations, and lastly, the growth of value adding media conglomerates,

which foster image, idea and narrative flow. Cultural theorist and online

community developer, John Banks considered the contribution of online fan

communities in the creation of the Trainz product. He argued that its

commercial success was fundamentally dependant upon the formation and growth

of an active and vibrant online fan community that would both actively promote

the product and create content- extensions and additions to the game software .

The increase in user created content and interactivity gives rise to issues of

control over the game itself and ownership of the player-created content. This

gives rise to fundamental legal issues, highlighted by Lessig[20] and Bray and

Konsynski[21], such as Intellectual Property and property ownership rights.

Gosney extends this issue of Collective Intelligence in videogames one step

further in his discussion of Alternate Reality Gaming. This genre, he describes

as an across-media game that deliberately blurs the line between the in-game

and out-of-game experiences [22] as events that happen outside the game reality

reach out into the player s lives in order to bring them together. Solving

the game requires the collective and collaborative efforts of multiple players

; thus the issue of collective and collaborative team play is essential to

ARG. Gosney argues that the Alternate Reality genre of gaming dictates an

unprecedented level of collaboration and collective intelligence in order to

solve the mystery of the game.

[edit] Supporting views

Tom Atlee reflects that although humans have an innate ability to gather and

analyze data, they are affected by culture, education and social institutions.

A person, when analysed singularly tend to make decisions motivated by

self-preservation. In addition, humans lack a way to make choices that has a

balance between innovations and reality. Therefore, without collective

intelligence, humans may just drive themselves into extinction based on their

selfish needs.[23]

Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder quotes Bowles and Gintis (1976) that in order to

truly define collective intelligence, it is crucial to separate intelligence

from IQism. They go on to argue that intelligence is an achievement and can

only be developed if allowed to. For example, earlier on, groups from the lower

levels of society are severely restricted from aggregating and pooling their

intelligence. This is because the elites fear that the collective intelligence

would convince the people to rebel. If there is no such capacity and relations,

there would be no infrastructure on which collective intelligence is built.[24]

This reflects how powerful collective intelligence can be if left to develop.

It is also critical to look at the benefits of collective intelligence for

business. Research performed by Tapscott and Williams has provided a few

examples:

Talent Utilization - At the rate technology is changing, no firm can fully keep

up in the innovations needed to compete. Instead, smart firms are drawing on

the power of mass collaboration to involve participation of the people they

could not employ.

Demand Creation - Firms can create a new market for complementary goods by

engaging in open source community. For example, the growing popularity of

Wikipedia provided Jimmy Wales with an idea to come up with Wikipedia-branded

line of books.

Costs Reduction - Mass collaboration can help to reduce costs dramatically.

Firms can release a specific software or product to be evaluated or debugged by

online communities. The results will be more personal, robust and error-free

products created in a short amount of time and costs.[25]

[edit] Opposing views

Skeptics, especially those critical of artificial intelligence and more

inclined to believe that risk of bodily harm and bodily action are the basis of

all unity between people, are more likely to emphasize the capacity of a group

to take action and withstand harm as one fluid mass mobilization, shrugging off

harms the way a body shrugs off the loss of a few cells. This strain of thought

is most obvious in the anti-globalization movement and characterized by the

works of John Zerzan, Carol Moore, and Starhawk, who typically shun academics.

These theorists are more likely to refer to ecological and collective wisdom

and to the role of consensus process in making ontological distinctions than to

any form of "intelligence" as such, which they often argue does not exist, or

is mere "cleverness".

Harsh critics of artificial intelligence on ethical grounds are likely to

promote collective wisdom-building methods, such as the new tribalists and the

Gaians. Whether these can be said to be collective intelligence systems is an

open question. Some, e.g. Bill Joy, simply wish to avoid any form of autonomous

artificial intelligence and seem willing to work on rigorous collective

intelligence in order to remove any possible niche for AI.

[edit] Recent developments

Growth of the Internet and mobile telecom has also highlighted "swarming" or

"rendezvous" technologies that enable meetings or even dates on demand. The

full impact of such technology on collective intelligence and political effort

has yet to be felt, but the anti-globalization movement relies heavily on

e-mail, cell phones, pagers, SMS, and other means of organizing before, during,

and after events. One theorist involved in both political and theoretical

activity, Tom Atlee, quantifies on a disciplined basis the connections between

these events and the political imperatives that drive them. The Indymedia

organization does this in a more journalistic way, and there is some coverage

of such current events even here at Wikipedia.

It seems likely that such resources could combine in future into a form of

collective intelligence accountable only to the current participants but with

some strong moral or linguistic guidance from generations of contributors - or

even take on a more obviously democratic form, to advance some shared goals.