Citizendia

Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Intelligence (also called intellect) is an Umbrella term used to describe a property of the Mind that encompasses many related abilities such as the capacities Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers. WikipediaConsensus here as this is the article namespace and that information is irrelevant to the reader The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, 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. Sociology (from Latin: socius "companion" and the suffix -ology "the study of" from Greek λόγος lógos "knowledge" Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their A field founded by multi-disciplinarian Howard Bloom in the 1990s

The above definition has emerged from the writings of Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Pierre Lévy (1994), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003) and other theorists. Peter Russell MA DCS (born May 7, 1946) is a British author of ten books and producer of three films on Consciousness, Spiritual awakening Pierre Lévy (born 1956 in Tunis) is a Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa. Howard Bloom (born 1943 in Buffalo New York) is a science writer former magazine editor and author Francis Heylighen (born 1960 is a Belgian cyberneticist. He works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking Free Dr Douglas C Engelbart (born January 30 1925 is an American Inventor. Ron S Dembo is a financial engineer and business entrepreneur Collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic intelligence by Norman L. Johnson. Norman Lloyd Johnson ( 9 January, 1917, Ilford, Essex, England – 18 November, 2004, Chapel Hill,

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. Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing analyzing and evaluating ideas For an article about the conceptual problems of the mind see Cognitive closure (philosophy. "

One CI pioneer, George Pór, 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. "[1] Tom Atlee and George Pór 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. In Computer science, the Scientific Community Metaphor is one way of understanding scientific communities.

Contents

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. [2]

Tom Atlee and George Pór, 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. A group mind or group ego in science fiction is a single consciousness occupying many bodies Individuals who respect collective intelligence, say Atlee and Pór, are confident of their own abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any individual parts.

From Pór 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. Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing analyzing and evaluating ideas

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 Pór, 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. Elisabet Sahtouris is a Greek-American Evolutionary biologist, futurist business consultant event organizer and UN consultant on indigenous peoples Barbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx in 1929 is a prolific Futurist, Writer and Public speaker. In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere (sometimes spelled noösphere) can be seen as the " sphere of

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. William Morton Wheeler, PhD ( March 19, 1865 - April 19, 1937) was an American Entomologist 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, Émile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical thought. Émile Durkheim ( April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French Sociologist whose contributions were instrumental He argues in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that society constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over space and time. [3]

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 Lévy 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. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Володимир Іванович Вернадський/Владимир Иванович Вернадский ( - January 6 1945 In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere (sometimes spelled noösphere) can be seen as the " sphere of Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 &ndash 13 August 1946 He was an outspoken socialist and a pacifist, his later works becoming increasingly political Pierre Lévy (born 1956 in Tunis) is a Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa. Howard Bloom (born 1943 in Buffalo New York) is a science writer former magazine editor and author The Global Brain is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by humans together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them Howard Rheingold (born July 7, 1947) is a critic and writer his specialties are on the cultural social and political implications of modern communication media such For other people named Robert Steele see Robert Steele (disambiguation. 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 [4]. Connectionism is an approach in the fields of Artificial intelligence, Cognitive psychology / Cognitive science, Neuroscience and Philosophy In Evolutionary biology, group selection refers to the idea that Alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow on groups regardless 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. John Holland is the name of several notable persons in history John L [2]

David Skrbina [5] 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). David Skrbina (born June 11 1960) is a pioneer of Ecophilosophy. 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. Founding Fathers are persons instrumental in the establishment of an Institution, usually a political institution especially those connected to the origination of its Ideals Thomas Jefferson (April 13 1743 – July 4 1826 was the third President of the United States (1801–1809 the principal author of the Declaration of Independence " 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.

Types of collective intelligence

Image:CI_types1s.jpg

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 are using collective intelligence in order to bypass marketing agencies.

Improvisational actors also experience a type of collective intelligence, which they term 'Group Mind'.

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. An Intelligence Quotient or IQ is a score derived from one of several different Standardized tests attempting to measure Intelligence. A metric is a standard unit of measure such as Meter or Gram, or more generally part of a system of parameters or Systems of measurement, or a set of Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing analyzing and evaluating ideas Stupidity (also called fatuity) is the property a Person, action or Belief instantiates by virtue of having or being indicative

In 2001, Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba from the AGH University in Poland proposed a formal model for the phenomenon of Collective Intelligence. AGH University of Science and Technology ( Polish Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza im It is assumed to be an unconscious, random, parallel, and distributed computational process, run in mathematical logic by the social structure. [6].

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. Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (ˈt(jʊ(ərɪŋ (23 June 1912 &ndash 7 June 1954 was an English Mathematician 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. Social structure is a term frequently used in Sociology and Social theory — yet rarely defined or clearly conceptualised (Abercrombie et al 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. [6]

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. Inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm (often abbreviated to GBH) is a phrase used in English Criminal law which was introduced in sections 18 and 20 Mass mobilization (also known as social mobilization or popular mobilization) refers to Mobilization of Civilian Population as part 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. " Anti-globalization " is a term that encompasses a number of related ideas John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist Philosopher and author Carol Moore (born 1948 is an Ethicist and systems theorist best known for her theories of Secession and her analysis of Mahatma Gandhi 's Starhawk (born Miriam Simos) ( June 17, 1951) is an American Writer, Anarchist activist, and self-described 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". WikipediaConsensus here as this is the article namespace and that information is irrelevant to the reader

Harsh critics of artificial intelligence on ethical grounds are likely to promote collective wisdom-building methods, such as the new tribalists and the Gaians. New tribalists are adherents of Neo-Tribalism. They propose a New Tribal Revolution outlined in the Ishmael series by Daniel Quinn. 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. William Nelson Joy (born Nov 8, 1954) commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American Computer scientist.

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. " Anti-globalization " is a term that encompasses a number of related ideas 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. The Independent Media Center (aka Indymedia or IMC) is a global participatory network of journalists that reports on political and social issues

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.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ George Pór, Blog of Collective Intelligence
  2. ^ a b Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, 2000
  3. ^ Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912. Systems intelligence is human action that connects sensitivity about a systemic environment with Systems thinking, thus spurring a persons Problem solving capabilities In Mathematics and Computer science, connectivity is one of the basic concepts of Graph theory. Collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society Social choice theory studies voting rules that govern and describe how individual preferences are aggregated to form a collective preference Collective effervescence (CE is a perceived Energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event a Carnival, a Rave, or Collaborative filtering (CF is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents viewpoints data sources etc Collaborative intelligence is a measure of the collaborative ability of a group or entity The Collaborative Human Interpreter ( CHI) is a proposed software interface for Human-based computation (first proposed as a programming language on the blog Google Collaborative software (also referred to as groupware or workgroup support systems) is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content using a simplified Markup language. Crowd psychology, or social facilitation theory, is a branch of Social psychology. Crowdsourcing is a Neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or Contractor, and Outsourcing it to an undefined generally Customer engagement refers to the engagement of customers with one another with a company or a brand Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the Structure of Complex systems especially Communication processes control mechanisms and Feedback Distributed cognition is a theory of Psychology developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Facilitation in Business, Organizational development (OD and in Consensus decision-making refers to the process of designing and running a successful A facilitator is someone who helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them to plan to achieve them without taking a particular position in the discussion Group behavior in Sociology refers to the situations where people interact in large or Small groups The field of Group dynamics deals with In Computer science, human-based computation is a technique when a computational process performs its function via Outsourcing certain steps to humans (Kosorukoff The “Hundredth Monkey Effect” is a supposed Phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical " Keeping up with the Joneses " is a popular Catchphrase in many parts of the English -speaking world A meme (miːm consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere (sometimes spelled noösphere) can be seen as the " sphere of This article is a subset article in a series under Intelligence collection management. The open-space meeting or open space meeting is a generic term describing a wide variety of different styles of meeting in which participants define the agenda with a relatively Preference elicitation refers to the problem of developing a Decision support system capable of generating Recommendations to a user thus assisting him in decision Recommender systems form a specific type of Information filtering (IF technique that attempts to present information items ( movies, Music, Books Social commerce is a subset of Electronic commerce in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous indirect Coordination between agents or actions where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the Swarm intelligence (SI is Artificial intelligence based on the Collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated intelligent emergent behavior A superorganism is an Organism consisting of many organisms This is usually meant to be a Social unit of eusocial animals where Division of labour The Bees Algorithm is a population-based Search algorithm first developed in 2005 A group mind or group ego in science fiction is a single consciousness occupying many bodies The Wisdom of Crowds Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business Economies Societies and Nations, first published in 2004 is a book
  4. ^ Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 1995
  5. ^ Skrbina, D. , 2001, Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview [1], ch. 8, Doctoral Thesis, Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice, School of Management, University of Bath: England
  6. ^ a b Szuba T. , Computational Collective Intelligence, 420 pages, Wiley NY, 2001

References

External links

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