Collective intelligence is a theory that describes a type of shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, and computer networks. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. This broader definition involves consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Everything from a political party to a public wiki can reasonably be described as this loose form of collective intelligence.
It can be understood as an emergent property from the synergies among: 1) data-information-knowledge; software-hardware; and 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. Or more narrowly as an emergent property between people and ways of processing information. This notion of collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic intelligence by Norman Lee Johnson. The concept is used in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction.
Writers who have influenced the idea of collective intelligence include Douglas Hofstadter (1979), 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).
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Famous quotes containing the words collective and/or intelligence:
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)