collective intelligence
Collective intelligence is evident in non-human as well as human societies and systems. In human systems, as others, it is NOT consensus.
A prime example of collective intelligence is with the 'social' insects, such as bees (see left), wasps, ants and termites. Hence a shorthand for this kind of intelligence is sometimes referred to as 'dumb ants, smart colony'.
James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds (see youtube extract below) asserts 'smart' decisions, i.e. collective intelligence happens when four conditions are met:
First, diversity of agents (whether human or not), secondly, independence of the agents and thirdly, decentralisation (agents are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge) and lastly, aggregation (some mechanism exists to take individual judgments into a collective decision). In such systems, human bias, irrationality, belief in individual judgment and social status make no difference.
Collective intelligence is often (but not always) good at solving three kinds of problems:
- COGNITION problems: e.g. finding a lost submarine, identifying the SARS or swine flu genome, Google's PageRanking algorithm
- COORDINATION problems: e.g. social insect technologies such as air-conditioning and fungi farming, traffic flows, finding the perfect gift
- COOPERATION problems: e.g. non-simultaneous sharing of resources such a food, buying and selling in the automotive supply chain