Collective intelligence

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Types of collective intelligence


It can be understood as an emergent property from the synergies among: 1) data-information-knowledge; 2) software-hardware; and 3) experts (those with new insights as well as recognized authorities) that continually learns from feedback to produce just-in-time knowledge for better decisions than these three elements acting alone.[3] Or more narrowly as an emergent property between people and ways of processing information.[4] This notion of collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic intelligence by Norman Lee Johnson.[5] The concept is used in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction. Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as, "It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities."[6] According to researchers Lévy and Kerckhove, it refers to capacity of networked ICTs (Information communication technologies) to enhance the collective pool of social knowledge by simultaneously expanding the extent of human interactions.[7]




A precursor of the concept is found in entomologist William Morton Wheeler's observation that seemingly independent individuals can cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism (1911).[9] Wheeler saw this collaborative process at work in ants that acted like the cells of a single beast he called a "superorganism".

In 1912 Émile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical thought. He argued, in "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" that society constitutes a higher intelligence because it transcends the individual over space and time.[10] Other antecedents are Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of "noosphere" and H.G. Wells's concept of "world brain" (see also the term "global brain"). Peter Russell, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Barbara Marx Hubbard (originator of the term "conscious evolution")[citation needed] are inspired by the visions of a noosphere – a transcendent, rapidly evolving collective intelligence – an informational cortex of the planet. The notion has more recently been examined by the philosopher Pierre Lévy. Doug Engelbart began using the term 'Collective IQ' in the mid 1990s as a measure of collective intelligence, to focus attention on the opportunity for business and society to pro-actively raise their Collective IQ[11]



Bloom traced the evolution of collective intelligence to our bacterial ancestors 1 billion years ago and demonstrated how a multi-species intelligence has worked since the beginning of life.[13] Ant societies exhibit more intelligence, in terms of technology, than any other animal except for humans and co-operate in keeping livestock, for example aphids for "milking". Leaf cutters care for fungi and carry leaves to feed the fungi.

David Skrbina[14] 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 develops the concept of a ‘group mind’ as articulated by Thomas Hobbes in "Leviathan" and Fechner's arguments for a collective consciousness of mankind. He cites Durkheim as the most notable advocate of a "collective consciousness" and Teilhard de Chardin as a thinker who has developed the philosophical implications of the group mind.

Tom Atlee focuses primarily on humans and on 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." 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."[15] Atlee and 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.




Acting Globally


The Global Futures Collective Intelligence System (GFIS) at was created by The Millennium Project in 2012.

Political parties mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates and finance and run election campaigns. Knowledge focusing through various voting methods allows 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.[citation needed]

Military united, trade unions, and corporations satisfy some definitions of CI — the most rigorous definition would require a capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance from "law" or "customers" to constrain actions.Online advertising companies are using collective intelligence to bypass traditional marketing and creative agencies.[citation needed]

In Learner generated context a group of users marshal 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.[17][18][19] Learner generated contexts represent an ad hoc community that facilitates coordination of collective action in a network of trust. An example of Learner generated context is found on the Internet when collaborative users pool knowledge in a "shared intelligence space" such as Wikipedia. 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 and access ideas. (Flew 2008)

Improvisational actors also experience a type of collective intelligence which they term 'Group Mind'. A further example of collective intelligence is found in idea competitions.[20]



The online service Quora is a portal where anyone can ask any question and anyone can answer. The questions are categorized and tagged for easier navigation. A question about, for example, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook will be found in the Apple and CEO category and Apple and Tim Cook will be an individual tag. If someone is wondering, for example, ‘what it is like to work with Tim Cook’ the answer to the question required private or intimate information that is (by definition) not publicly available. Users can answer with their name or anonymously. Obtaining this private information is, of course, valuable to gain an insight or to look behind the scenes.

Often questions refer to first hand experiences and the answers are often carefully curated eposées and detailed logs of it. It gives the user the ability to gain a detailed insights and information is thus democratized. The collection of experiences is a perfect example of collective intelligence.

Mathematical techniques[edit]

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 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 multi-thread 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.[21]

Digital media[edit]


Francis Heylighen, Valentin Turchin, and Gottfried Mayer-Kress are among those who view collective intelligence through the lens of computer science and cybernetics. In their view, the Internet enables collective intelligence at the widest, planetary scale, thus facilitating the emergence of a Global brain. The developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, aimed to promote sharing and publishing of information globally. Later his employer opened up the technology for free use. In the early ‘90s, the Internet’s potential was still untapped, until the mid-1990s when ‘critical mass’, as termed by the head of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), Dr. J.C.R. Licklider, demanded more accessibility and utility.[22] The driving force of this form of collective intelligence[which?] is the digitization of information and communication. 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 (Flew 2008). He criticizes contemporary education for failing to incorporate online trends of collective problem solving into the classroom, stating “whereas a collective intelligence community encourages ownership of work as a group, schools grade individuals”. Jenkins argues that interaction within a knowledge community builds vital skills for young people, and teamwork through collective intelligence communities contribute to the development of such skills. Collective intelligence is not merely a quantitative contribution of information from all cultures, it is also qualitative.

Levy and de Kerckhove consider CI from a mass communications perspective, focusing on the ability of networked information and communication technologies 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[clarification needed], 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; JC Herz 2005 in Flew 2008).[citation needed] Researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence research and explore collective intelligence of groups of people and computers.[23]


Growth of the Internet and mobile telecom has also produced "swarming" or "rendezvous" events that enable meetings or even dates on demand. The full impact has yet to be felt but the anti-globalization movement, for example, relies heavily on e-mail, cell phones, pagers, SMS and other means of organizing. Atlee discusses the connections between these events and the political views that drive them.[citation needed] The Indymedia organization does this in a more journalistic way. Such resources could combine into a form of collective intelligence accountable only to the current participants yet with some strong moral or linguistic guidance from generations of contributors – or even take on a more obviously democratic form to advance shared goals.

Social bookmarking[edit]


Recent research using data from the social bookmarking website Delicious, has shown that collaborative tagging systems exhibit a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics.[25][26][27] Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources has been shown to converge over time to a stable power law distributions.[25] Once such stable distributions form, examining the correlations between different tags can be used to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtained a form of community or shared vocabularies.[28] Such vocabularies can be seen as a form of collective intelligence, emerging from the decentralised actions of a community of users. The Wall-it Project is also an example of social bookmarking.[29]

Video games[edit]

Games such as The Sims Series, and Second Life are designed to be non-linear and to depend on collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations.[22] For them, collective intelligence has become a norm. In Terry Flew’s discussion of 'interactivity' in the online games environment, the ongoing interactive dialogue between users and game developers,[30] he refers to Pierre Levy's concept of Collective Intelligence (Levy 1998) and argues this is active in videogames as clans or guilds in MMORPG constantly work to achieve goals. Henry Jenkins proposes that the participatory cultures emerging between games producers, media companies, and the end-users mark 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.[31] 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 dependent 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".[32]

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[33] and Bray and Konsynski,[34] 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"[35] 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.

Stock market predictions[edit]

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. Websites aggregate stock market information that is as current as possible so professional or amateur stock analysts can publish their viewpoints, enabling amateur investors to submit their financial opinions and create an aggregate opinion. The opinion of all investor can be weighed equally so that a pivotal premise of the effective application of collective intelligence can be applied: the masses, including a broad spectrum of stock market expertise, can be utilized to more accurately predict the behavior of financial markets.[36][37]

Collective intelligence underpins the efficient-market hypothesis of Eugene Fama[38] – although the term collective intelligence is not used explicitly in his paper. Fama cites research conducted by Michael Jensen[39] in which 89 out of 115 selected funds underperformed relative to the index during the period from 1955 to 1964. But after removing the loading charge (up-front fee) only 72 underperformed while after removing brokerage costs only 58 underperformed. On the basis of such evidence index funds became popular investment vehicles using the collective intelligence of the market, rather than the judgement of professional fund managers, as an investment strategy.


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 single person tends to make decisions motivated by self-preservation. In addition, humans lack a way to make choices that balance innovation and reality.[dubious ] Therefore, without collective intelligence, humans may drive themselves into extinction based on their selfish needs.[40]

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 (Brown & Lauder 2000, p. 230). This reflects how powerful collective intelligence can be if left to develop.


Talent Utilization
Demand Creation
Costs Reduction



See also[edit]

Notes and references[edit]

  1. ^ Ngoc Thanh Nguyen (25 July 2011). Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence III. Springer. p. 63. ISBN 978-3-642-19967-7. Retrieved 11 June 2013. 
  2. ^ Ngoc Thanh Nguyen (25 July 2011). Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence III. Springer. p. 69. ISBN 978-3-642-19967-7. Retrieved 11 June 2013. 
  5. ^ Norman Lee Johnson, Collective Science site
  9. ^ Its source can be found in this link wroten by story teller who belongs to SK C&C, story teller explains history of collective intelligence. also, it mentioned principle of collective intelligence. especially, it says William Morton Wheeler studied it at first time. The title is 'collective intelligence that made us who are smarter than me'
  10. ^ Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912.
  11. ^ Engelbart's 1994 definition of 'Collective IQ' – found on Slide 4
  13. ^ a b Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, 2000
  15. ^ George Pór, Blog of Collective Intelligence
  16. ^ a b Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2008). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, USA: Penguin Group
  21. ^ a b Szuba T., Computational Collective Intelligence, 420 pages, Wiley NY, 2001
  23. ^ MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Retrieved on 2013-07-13.
  24. ^ Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
  26. ^ Fu, Wai-Tat (2010). "Semantic imitation in social tagging". ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. doi:10.1145/1460563.1460600. 
  27. ^ Fu, Wai-Tat (Aug 2009). "A Semantic Imitation Model of Social Tagging.". Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Social Computing: 66–72. 
  36. ^ Ma, Ying; Li, Guanyi; Dong, Yingsai; Qin, Zengchang (2010). "Minority Game Data Mining for Stock Market Predictions". Agents and Data Mining Interaction, 6th International Workshopon Agents and Data Mining Interaction, ADMI 2010,. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15420-1. 
  37. ^ Yu, Du; Dong, Yingsai; Qin, Zengchang; Wan, Tao (2011). "Exploring Market Behaviors with Evolutionary Mixed-Games Learning Model". Computational Collective Intelligence. Technologies andApplications – Third International Conference, ICCCI 2011,. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23935-9_24. 
  38. ^ Fama, E.F., (1970), "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work", Journal of Finance, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 383–417
  39. ^ Jensen, M.C, (1967), "The Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period 1945–1964", Journal of Finance, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 389–416, 1967
  40. ^ Atlee, T. (2008). Reflections on the evolution of choice and collective intelligence, Retrieved 26 August 2008


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