Collective Intelligence On a recent flight I was reading Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. I got stuck somewhere in the middle and then dozed off watching Avatar. (Brilliant. “The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. And later, in a section “Why It Matters,” he writes “Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of the society.” I am very sympathetic to many points Lanier is making, but I dislike the “Manifesto”-style in which he's trying to lead his arguments. Setting the Stage First, let us be clear on what we're talking about: A collective or a group or a crowd will in the following simply be a set with elements. I further do not actually want to talk about the “intelligence” of a collective in the common sense for two reasons. Thus, what I will mean in the following with “collective intelligence” is the ability of a set of elements operating on some input to perform processes that are beneficial for the collective. Limitations Summary
Metalogue: The Evolution of Mind, Consciousness, and the Web (this is my final paper for cybernetics class and for graduate school. it is a theoretical metalogue between myself and gregory bateson. many of his phrases and passages are pulled directly from the book Steps To An Ecology of Mind) vm: i want to understand the ecology of mind, how it works. I want to understand how technology is accelerating intentional evolution, and what the Web is becoming… a collective intelligence? gb: You certainly are full of questions. vm: Yeah, it’s a curse. gb: Perhaps, but an exploration of mind and self is a worthy endeavor. vm: Please explain. gb: We are complex, self-corrective systems. vm: Yes, that makes sense. gb: Indeed. vm: Sounds like a holistic approach. gb: Well, the meaning of terms like “better” or “worse” are contingent upon whom you ask. vm: Which are? gb: There is the human individual, with its physiology and neurology, chemistry and psychology, all these arrangements of conservative loops. vm: Sounds dangerous. gb: Conscious purpose. vm: Agreed.
Augmented Collective Intelligence Collective Conciousness and how the Internet is changing the world There can be no doubt that we are now at a point of being inexplicitly dependant on the Internet. The more I think about the evolution of the internet the more I am convinced about the emergence of a new collective conciousness which has formed an almost symbiotic relationship between man and machine through which we are now globally connected. There is almost no part of our lives which it does not touch and if it were to collapse tomorrow the results would be devastating. For a quick recap of how it all started check out the short film below - Looking at what’s going on in the world right now; we have the outsourcing of jobs, the open-sourcing of software, and the crowdsourcing of just about anything to anyone with the right skills. We could perhaps give a further analogy of an ant colony where the ants appear chaotic but operate as a unified entity, collectively working together to support the colony.