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Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace / Mark Tovey, Editor |
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Published 2008 by EIN Press. 648 pages. ISBN-10: 097156616X / $39.95
(cloth) How can we build the world we want, quickly, in a way which is as inclusive as possible, and which generates peace and prosperity? Changing the world is difficult work, even with many minds engaged in the problem. Technology and global culture have created unprecedented problems, but they also offer unprecedented remedies. Summary | Excerpts | Cite
FRONT
MATTER What is collective
intelligence and what will we
do about it? /
Thomas W.
Malone, MIT Center for CI Foresight | Dialogue & Deliberation | Civic Intelligence | Electronic Communities & Distributed Cognition | Privacy & Openness | Integral Approaches and Global Contexts
Altruism, Group IQ, & Adaptation
| Crowd
Wisdom & Cognitive
Bias | Semantic Structures
& the Semantic Web | Information
Networks | Global Games,
Local Economies & WISER | Peer
Production
& Open Source Hardware | Free
Wireless, Open Spectrum &
Peer to
Peer | Mass Collaboration
& Large-Scale Argumentation
The Internet and the
revitalization of democracy
(Afterword) Epilogue / Tom Atlee GlossaryIndex Purchase hardcover from Amazon.com
Summary (links to relevant chapters in brackets) This
book is not about collective intelligence as an abstraction, but
collective intelligence directed towards a specific end. It attempts to
get some traction on difficulties that seem almost impossible to
address—dealing with poverty and hunger, corruption and
terrorism, climate change and resource shortages—while at the
same time building a more livable and less violent world. This involves bridging diverse viewpoints. When we are dealing with as many points of view as are expressed in such institutions, facilitated discussions can be very helpful. There are specific principles that can help diverse groups of people engage in dialogue with each other in a way that is unencumbered by ego (I-02-01). Indeed, it seems important to have groups that are as diverse as possible, groups where tensions are inevitably going to arise, and where they can be safely examined and understood (I-02-03). Anyone who has spent time observing (or participating in) a flame war on an Internet news group knows that these kinds of principles are just as urgently needed in the electronic sphere. As we attempt to scale up our deliberative discussions through electronic communities (I-04-02), argumentation systems (II-08-03), and social networking (I-04-01), a deep understanding of these principles, and how they can be applied in a variety of domains, will be needed. To do this, we must ask questions that matter (I-02-02). Questions serve at least two purposes: channeling and encouraging fruitful dialogue (I-02-03), and leading to further inquiry and knowledge generation (I-02-04). Whatever we learn about how to ask the right questions will have great applicability across the board, whether in designing appropriate technology (II-06-03), doing foresight (I-01-01), or writing group blogs (I-08-03). There are projects now underway to articulate the principles of successful civic interaction (I-03-01). How can we invite ordinary citizens into the
decision-making process in a way that is likely to produce generally
accepted results (I-02-05)?
Virtual models of a city could
significantly engage citizens by allowing them to visualize and plan a
better future more easily (I-03-05).
How can we winnow If it is important to have not just a few individuals, but all members of a society, capable of thinking carefully about the challenges we face, how do we enable everyone to do so (I-03-04)? Are there ways that we can invite people to think more globally, to take not just their communities, but the whole of humanity, the whole biosphere, into consideration (I-03-02)? As more and more of the world is enabled to
connect, we need tools to analyze how we are connecting (I-04-01) so
that we can design electronic communities that encourage thought and
substantive discussion (I-04-02),
where expertise is readily shared
(I-04-03). We need an
Internet where individuals will have greater
control over how their information is used by companies (I-05-01),
which may encourage them to be more open with their information
(I-05-02). How do we think clearly about problem solving
(I-06-01)? How do we improve
our facility with producing collective
intelligence (A, B,
I-06-03)? How do
we re-think hierarchy (I-06-02)
in
an increasingly peer-produced world (II-07-02)?
These are not easy questions, but we can draw
inspiration from nature (biomimicry) (II-01-02),
to help design better
collectively intelligent systems. If we learn more about how locusts or
starlings swarm, we will gain insight into effective systems of
collective online production (II-01-01).
Our understanding To avoid information-overload, we need to invent
systems to structure our information semantically (II-03-01, C),
and to
roll these systems out onto the Internet (II-03-02).
These are the
foundations for a sophisticated system of information creation,
retrieval (II-04-03), and
interaction that one might call a Whether the development of such a system would
lead to a society of richly interconnected individuals (II-04-01),
collaborating effectively in high-performance teams (II-04-02), or
whether they would result in a society which suppresses individualism
(II-02-03), is a question
that deserves more than passing attention. One of the things that can help us maintain our individuality is a powerful set of technologies encouraging communities to design (II-06-03), tinker with (II-06-01), and manufacture (II-06-02), their own stuff: to create their own electrical grids with locally generated electricity (II-07-02), maintain their own broadcast and mesh networks (II-07-03), and produce robust local currencies that can work seamlessly with the global economy (II-05-02). Such activities are also precisely the kinds of de-coupling measures we need to create societies that are resilient against system shocks in an increasingly uncertain world. We are seeing the development of tools that will
enable us to move towards a world that is more fiscally (II-05-01, II-08-02)
and environmentally (II-05-03,
II-05-04)
sound. Indeed,
open-source and mass collaborative methodologies (II-08-02) are
enabling social entrepreneurs of every stripe (II-08-01)
to band
together and solve the tough problems the world faces (II-08-04). At a
local level, community wireless gets people out into cafés,
enabling them to meet their neighbors (II-07-01);
the more they know
about their neighborhood, the more likely they are to feel a sense of
connectedness and responsibility towards the community they are living
in. With luck, these methodologies will help to However, we are not there yet. Foresight (I-01-01)
and scenario planning (II-08-02)
can help us see both opportunities and
pitfalls in the adoption of new technologies. Looking back from a
possible future (I-03-06) is
a useful way of imagining not utopian
worlds, or dystopian nightmares, but topias: imperfect, but livable,
visions of the future—realistic futures we might actually
want to live in. All of these forms of openness can be seen to
support and facilitate each other, can be seen as elements of an
emerging culture, one that values safe, open, and local participation.
It is a culture that invites people to be where they are, and gives
them inviting spaces in which to do that. Suffixing
“2.0” to institutions, whether the Web, the
University, or Democracy, speaks to a culture of engagement,
contribution, transparency, and creativity, where reuse of both
information and physical objects are part of the culture. Gender,
class, background, or ethnicity matter less than what someone
contributes. In fact this diversity acts not to divide, but to enrich.
These are the kinds of values that will be required for successful
trans-institutional cooperation and engagement, which is necessary to
deal with the challenges that face us as a species, and to create a
more peaceful and prosperous world for everyone.
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at PeaceMark Tovey, Editor, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace  Published April 2008 by EIN Press. 648 pages. ISBN-10: 097156616X / $39.95
(cloth) View Full Text [iPaper] Table of Contents with chapter
excerpts Publisher’s
Preface [DOC] The
Wealth of Networks: Highlights remixed (Foreword) For
all of us, there comes a time on any given
day, week, and month, every year and in different degrees
over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way that is oriented
toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our
market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our
motivational structure that social production taps, and on
which it thrives. [DOC] Editor’s Preface [DOC] What is
collective intelligence and what will we
do about it? With
new information
technologies—especially the Internet—it is now
possible to harness the intelligence of huge numbers of people,
connected in very different ways and on a much larger scale than has
ever been possible before. In order to take advantage of these
possibilities, however, we need to understand what the possibilities
are in a much deeper way than we do so far. So, it’s time to
make collective intelligence a topic of serious academic
study. And that is our goal in the Center for Collective
Intelligence. The key question we’re using to organize our
work is: How can people and Co-Intelligence,
collective intelligence, and
conscious evolution My
work on collective intelligence evolved out of
my progressive social change activism. On the 1986
cross-country Great Peace March, I had a number of profound experiences
of leaderful self-organization and group mind solving collective
problems, e.g., taoofdemocracy.com/prologue.html. I wanted to
bring that capacity to progressive groups. My research led me
to work with corporate consultants—with whom I would not have
otherwise had any contact as an activist!—doing
leading-edge work on group intelligence and organizational
learning. When I realized that this approach
could be used to convene diverse perspectives into
collectively wise democratic guidance systems for communities and
nations, my activism shifted from a partisan to a holistic worldview,
and I coined the term “co-intelligence” to cover
all ways to evoke the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole.
[DOC] The
universe of communication opened up to us by
the interconnection of digital data and automatic manipulators of
symbols—in other
words, cyberspace—henceforth constitutes the virtual memory
of
collective human intelligence. Yet, at the symbolic level, important
obstacles hinder
digital memory from working fully in the service of an optimal
management of knowledge. These obstacles can be decomposed into two
interdependent
sub-groups. [DOC] This story was originally written to summarize ideas generated at the Prospective Protective Futures Security Workshop, a look at Canada's security future held in Ottawa in March of 20062. “Safety Glass” is an attempt to put many different lines of thought into a single scenario. While capturing something of the flavour of the workshop, in no way does it represent the participants’ consensus view of 2020 A.D. It merely shows one constellation of (maybe Orwellian, maybe Utopian) future possibilities. [DOC] 2007
State of the Future / Jerome
C. Glenn &
Theodore J. Gordon In many areas the world is getting better. Life expectancy is increasing, infant mortality is decreasing, literacy, gross domestic products per capita and the number of global Internet users are increasing, and—despite Darfur and Iraq—there are fewer global conflicts. But, the picture is not entirely rosy, according to 2007 State of the Future’s track of global progress. CO2 emissions, terrorism, corruption, global warming, and unemployment are increasing as the percentage of voting populations decreases. The new report, a slim print volume and a 6000-page companion CD, provides view of the world as it is, and what it might become without a collective worldwide effort to resolve what the report identifies as the top 15 global challenges. These include the obvious—water, energy, global warming, health, sustainable development, terrorism—and some not always considered global problems, such as organized crime, which on a global basis makes more money than the world’s military budgets combined, improving the capacity to decide as the nature of work and institutions change, and the need to accelerate scientific and technological breakthroughs. [DOC] We’ve all heard by now about the “wisdom of crowds”—the notion that the aggregated intelligence of any group is nearly always superior to the intelligence of any individual in that group. We know, for instance, that if a group of us average our guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, our “collective guess” will usually come closer to the mark than the best individual guess in the room. We know that this principle accounts for the wisdom that regulates markets, and that consistently returns good search results on Google. Why, then, is it so often the case that when it comes to critical decision-making, thinking together as a small group tends to make us stupid rather than smart? Why do even our best attempts at collaboration often leave us secretly wishing for the simplicity and sharpness of outmoded “command and control” decision-making? With “groupthink” phenomena now well-studied, we know that primitive social drives for control, belonging and status can imperceptibly sabotage our collective pursuit of clarity. But, what prevents this knowledge from being integrated to the point that our collective intelligence is not only an aggregate phenomenon but a lived experience? [DOC] The World
Café / Juanita
Brown, David Isaacs,
and the World Café Community It is through our conversations that the stories of our future unfold, and never has that process been more critical. We now have the capacity, through neglect of the planetary commons on which our lives depend, to make this precious earth, our home, uninhabitable. We now have the capacity, through escalating violence and weapons of mass destruction, to make our precious human species, along with many others, extinct. [DOC] Collective
intelligence and the emergence of
wholeness / Peggy Holman The trajectory of my life's work has been towards the liberation of the human spirit in the context of the whole, such that the good of the individual and the good of the collective are both well served. This embraces and reaches beyond concepts of "intelligence" and, in doing so, reframes intelligence—including collective intelligence—in terms that may better suit our 21st century challenges. [DOC] Knowledge
creation in collective intelligence / Bruce LaDuke Definitions of intelligence across disciplines proposed to date are both broad and varied. They include concepts like judgment, application, problem-solving, adaptation, cognition, goal-setting, physical capacities, analysis, environmental response, and pattern-recognition. Artificial intelligence is simply an artificial capacity to have and/or execute intelligence. But what is intelligence? [DOC] The
Circle Organization / Jim
Rough The faculty of a Seattle high school was in bitter conflict. They had endured six different principals in seven years and the culture had devolved into low trust, fear, disrespect, anger, and childish behaviors. Many were expressing the desire for a principal to make decisions that would stick. Others wanted people to abide by votes that had already been taken. A third group was wondering, “Why can’t we just talk these issues through?” They wanted the ideal, where people work together in trust achieving excellence in a spirit of mutual appreciation. The school had recently received a substantial grant from a philanthropic foundation to transform itself to a process of participative decision-making. But the grant became part of the problem when those on the committee were paid overtime while other teachers on other committees were not. The union became involved, advocating that everyone should be paid for any activity after school, which was impossible. So the effort at transformation was making things worse. [DOC]
Although I didn't realize it until relatively recently, I've been working in the field of “civic intelligence” for over twenty years. Civic intelligence is the ability of groups and organizations and, ideally, society as a whole to conceive and implement effective, equitable, and sustainable approaches to shared problems. I've organized ten “big tent” conferences that encouraged people to work together on shared concerns and I am a co-founder of the Seattle Community Network, an influential, free public-access, community-oriented computer network that provided free e-mail years before Hotmail and Gmail were created. Recently I worked with over 200 authors on an online and print “pattern language” project to present a holistic system of 136 “patterns” of thought and action that pushes for positive social change. This work (including 9 contextual chapters) will be published in 2008 by MIT Press as Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communications Revolution. I would characterize all of this work as meliorist. This means that it is neither optimistic, where good things are always expected, or pessimistic where bad things are always expected. A meliorist stance allows for the possibility of good happening in the world. It places the burden on humankind who, within this conceptual framework, has some capability, whether employed or not, of ushering in positive outcomes while slowing down or preventing negative ones. Meliorism is both weak—in the sense that it only allows for the possibility of possibility of change—and strong—since it ultimately demands that humankind takes a good share of the blame for the past and responsibility for the future. Although not often embraced as an orienting concept, meliorism is a doctrine that is hopeful yet skeptical, utopian but practical. [DOC] Civic
intelligence and the security of the
homeland / John Kesler
with Carole and David Schwinn When we were told by our nation’s leaders after the tragic events of 9/11 that our job as citizen fighters of terrorism was to carry on with our normal day-to- day activities, the message conveyed was that it is the government’s job to take care of us in times of crisis at home and abroad. Those who took comfort in those words, assuming that the government did, indeed, have the intelligence, integrity, capacity and range of options available to address any looming threats to our security, soon learned that the government’s intelligence was flawed, its integrity questionable, its capacity severely limited, and that the primary and preferred means of intervention were military incursions abroad and restraints on civil liberties at home. [DOC] Creating a Smart Nation / Robert Steele This
chapter outlines both the requirement for,
and a recommended approach to the creation of a National Information
Strategy. Despite the fact that
we have leaders in both the administration and the legislature who
understand
the critical importance of information as the foundation for both
national
security and national competitiveness at the dawn of the 21st century,
our
leadership has failed to articulate a strategy and a policy which
integrates national
intelligence (spies, satellites), government information, and
private-sector
information objectives and resources. In the Age of Information, the
absence of a
National Information Strategy is tantamount to abdication and
surrender—the equivalent of
having failed to field an army in World War II, or having failed to
establish a nuclear
deterrent in the Cold War. This chapter is both an orientation for
citizens and
bureaucrats and a call to arms for both policymakers and legislators.
It is a
fundamental premise of this chapter that in the Age of Information, the
most
important role of government—at the Federal, state, or local
level—will be the nurturing of the "information commons."
[DOC] University
2.0 / Nancy
Glock-Grueneich Our society, now global, is the first that must cope with the possible demise of our species—and of much life on our planet—as the result of our own actions. At the same time, we are also the first with instantaneous access to most of the recorded knowledge possessed by humankind. In response to both of these realities, we are in the midst of a rapidly escalating, self-organizing, global movement converging on a space of great potential good, a phenomenon Paul Hawken has named “the movement without a name”. This massive instance of collective intelligence, with over a million independently initiated organizations and projects already in play, is without leader, ideology, organized agenda or center. And it is growing daily. It is a movement of individuals and organizations reacting to what they perceive, each in their own way, with their own networks. Some are responding to global threats, some to needs and opportunities in their immediate vicinity. Taken together these three facts have brought humanity both to the brink of breakdown and within reach of breakthrough. We have some reason to hope, for perhaps the first time in history, that we might create a truly livable future. Not a perfect world, but a world, as Sharif Abdullah writes, “that works for all.” [DOC] Producing
communities of communications and
foreknowledge / Jason
“JZ” Liszkiewicz Airplanes,
trains, and buses import and export the
human value and personality of cities. Obviously, all of us can gain
some foreknowledge before
visiting a new city—by reading, watching videos, talking with
people
who’ve lived there, and speaking with citizens upon arrival.
However, as we fly from one
city to another, it would be nice to provide some foreknowledge of the
destination. We could, in particular, allow people to see the specific
routes and
destinations they plan on traveling through. This would welcome them,
and respect their
time. Broadly, since their inception, airports and train
stations have posted
such foreknowledge in the form of updates for arrivals, departures, and
cancellations. Global
Vitality Report 2025 / Peter+Trudy
Johnson-Lenz The intolerable tensions and breakdowns fueled by global implosion finally forced us to take more responsibility and forge the tensions of our competing and sometimes warring interests into interdependent and adaptive intelligence before it was too late. It became imperative to think and act together to solve the enormous problems coming at us at unprecedented rates. It was close to the point of no return: Learn or burn. [DOC] The evolution of the Internet has enabled millions of independent minds from around the world to coordinate their attention to form bottom-up (emergent) systems for media production, evaluation, and distribution. Some of the primary drivers of this new media landscape are online social networks, such as Myspace.com, which have made participation in virtual communities a ubiquitous part of growing up in America. Digital media exchanges are now a common element of typical social interactions among the youth of America. [DOC] A slice
of life in my virtual community / Howard
Rheingold I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone in a room with my words and my thoughts. On occasion, I venture outside to interview people or to find information. After work, I reenter the human community, via my family, my neighborhood, my circle of acquaintances. But that regime left me feeling isolated and lonely during the working day, with few opportunities to expand my circle of friends. For the past seven years, however, I have participated in a wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding, sometimes painful, and often intensely emotional ongoing interchange with dozens of new friends, hundreds of colleagues, thousands of acquaintances. And I still spend many of my days in a room, physically isolated. My mind, however, is linked with a worldwide collection of like-minded (and not so like-minded) souls: My virtual community. Virtual communities emerged from a surprising intersection of humanity and technology. When the ubiquity of the world telecommunications network is combined with the information-structuring and storing capabilities of computers, a new communication medium becomes possible. As we've learned from the history of the telephone, radio, television, people can adopt new communication media and redesign their way of life with surprising rapidity. Computers, modems, and communication networks furnish the technological infrastructure of computer-mediated communication (CMC); cyberspace is the conceptual space where words and human relationships, data and wealth and power are manifested by people using CMC technology; virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace. [DOC] Shared
imagination / Dr.
Douglas C. Engelbart When I agreed to be a judge for the National Infocomm Awards in Singapore, quite honestly I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. When the boxes of paper started arriving in multiple DHL packages in California, describing a lot of different interesting, innovative projects, I thought, "Oh Oh, how ever am I going to be able to evaluate these people? How can I do the job I want to as a judge when I have no idea how innovative these products are in the US? Much less in Asia?" [DOC] Privacy
& Openness William Gibson, “Father of Cyberpunk,” long known for his prescience, has put his finger on a fundamental truth about the world we live in today. His new book, Spook Country, contains a couple passages everyone concerned with media business models and the preservation of democracy should read and consider (along with the rest of the book, which is a pretty good yarn about the hidden currents of American paranoia). When developing media offerings these days, we developers still think of an “audience.” These are people whose attention we own and attempt to control. At least, that was the habitual practice of newspaper, magazine and broadcast television network folks. Gibson’s first observation, that we have moved from a time when mass media was something we observed to one when we are all part of mass media, that it has become the channels through which we interact with one another, is a spot-on analysis of the problem with trying to treat the “audience” as something outside the medium. [DOC] This paper explains very simple, cheap, low-risk things, that each of us can do, to bring us closer to this world. I ask each and every reader of this paper, save those with very specific circumstances, to do these things. I write this during the first half of November, 2007. In the world that is possible, I get an e-mail from a near-by activist, who is working on growing a local pot-luck culture, amongst activists. She’s arranging a vegetarian cooking night, and trawling the local area for people who are activists, political bloggers, geeks, transportation people, and inviting them over for a dinner, to be held once every three months. We will step out our doors, walk down a street, knock on her door, and she’ll let us in, and we’ll talk over dinner. There will be 20–30 of us. Not only is that happening here in Bothell, but it is happening all over the globe. [DOC] Integral
Approaches & Global Contexts “Children,
clean up your
mess!” If only the public messes we have made as adults were
as easy to clean up as our childish messes were. Instead,
we need to investigate, analyze, legislate, negotiate, decide, learn,
train,
supervise, and otherwise roll up our sleeves to tackle our tangle of
messy social,
political, economic, and environmental conditions. It required
no intelligence for us to make these collective
messes. It requires meta-intelligence to know how to clean them up, and
to
actually do so. Whether we work in international agencies, governments,
think tanks, corporations, NGOs, education, activism, or our own
communities, to
make long-lasting positive changes demands a particular kind of
meta-intelligence. My research suggests we can scaffold, co-construct,
and deploy
collective meta-intelligence while and by working on complex issues. I
posit that
a particular range of structured methods are required to achieve
results
that address complex issues systemically with the requisite
meta-intelligence. This chapter introduces a new paradigm for doing
just that. [DOC] The
main stakes for humanity are not hunger,
poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education, economy, natural
resources or a host of other
issues but our capability to build new social organizations to replace
those that
no longer provide such outcomes. Our main stake is Collective
Intelligence. Today large organizations encounter insurmountable
difficulties when dealing with the complexity and the unexpectedness of
the world when operating against a global backdrop. They undergo
conflicts of interest
in many areas—between profitability and sustainability,
secrecy and
transparency, values and value, individual and collective dynamics, and
knowledge fertilizing—that opens—and
competition—that closes. What most medium and large
organizations have in common is an infrastructure based on pyramidal
hard-coded social maps, command and control, labor division, and a
monetary system stimulated by scarcity.
Until recently, this social architecture was the only information
system at
our disposal to pilot and organize complex human edifices. We call it
pyramidal
collective intelligence. It remains efficient as long as the
environment remains
stable, but it becomes vulnerable and inefficient in fluctuating
contexts, namely
when markets, knowledge, culture, technology, external interactions,
economy
or politics keep changing faster than the capability of the group to
respond. [DOC] Hierarchy, as the dominant form of organization is becoming irrelevant to meet the challenges of the current tsunami of increasing complexity. Every new turn of scientific and technological development increases the size of the complexity waves coming at us and all our institutions. There’s no way to turn our back on it and run. The bad news is that most organizations are stuck in a form of organizing their value-creation processes and relations with their internal and external stakeholders, which is increasingly inadequate to our fast-changing world. The good news is that it inspires renewal, including new forms of organizing work, governance, learning, and commerce, better poised to face the multiple challenges of our global situation. There’s a narrow, safe passage through the looming Perfect Storm. Our best chance to go through with the least casualties lies in mobilizing all that we have to outsmart it: the wisdom of women and men, youth and elders, future-responsive change agents and communities in business, government, and civil society. [DOC] SECTION
II - LARGE-SCALE COLLABORATION The widespread proliferation of online participatory systems such as wikis and blog networks helped popularize the idea of collective intelligence. Value that emerges from these systems shows that a whole system can appear more intelligent than any individual contribution. As these online participatory systems continue to broaden in application and increase in sophistication, they take on a more targeted and significant role as tools to accomplish focused, productive work. More specifically, online environments will be constructed to collectively solve complex and multifaceted problems. Imagine the possibility of adjusting aspects of an existing, productive online community in order to stimulate the ideal resolution of specific problems, much like a marketplace might be arranged over time to produce the most efficient and valuable transactions. Existing participatory systems are designed to separately invite online user contributions in one capacity, and to aggregate collective value in another, but few environments attempt to holistically address the production of useful outcomes by moving participation towards meaningful and intelligent results. This determined focus on how best to design participatory environments to solve problems is particularly relevant given the world’s abundance of complex and urgent problems to be addressed. Methods for solving them collectively online have only begun to be explored. [DOC] Who’s
smarter: chimps, baboons or
bacteria? The power of Group IQ / Howard Bloom Which have bigger brains, chimpanzees or baboons? If you guessed chimps, you’re right. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives on the planet. They share between 98.6% and 99% of our genes, depending on who’s counting. They are way up there in animal brainpower. An average chimp’s brain is more than twice as large as the brain of a baboon. Now for question number two. Which are smarter, chimpanzees or baboons? The answer is...baboons. But how could that be? Chimps are brainier. Shouldn’t they also be, well, umm, brainier? Brighter by far? If baboons are winners on IQ measures, doesn’t that mean that intelligence is not just a matter of brain matter? The answer is yes, there’s more to intellect than the number of neurons in your skull. So what’s the extra ingredient you need to turn brains into smarts? The answer is a bit surprising. Nimble minds need more than just a lot of synapses between brain cells. They need the power of groups. They need a force that pulses from the web of connection between group members...from the sum that’s bigger than its parts. They need what Gerardo Beni calls “swarm intelligence,” what Tom Atlee and Robert D. Steele call “Collective Intelligence” and what I call “Group IQ.” [DOC] A
collectively generated model of the world / Marko A. Rodriguez The world, for some reason, is not random. All non-random information can be compressed into a simplified description called a model. The purpose of a model is to capture the essential characteristics, or patterns, of the original system. Every living organism makes use of some model of the world. Sometimes a world model is encoded solely in the genetic structure of the organism and other times, the model is simultaneously represented neurologically in the organism’s plastic, neural network. For example, the human skeletal structure is equipped to expect a particular amount of gravity pulling it downward towards Earth and the human eye expects a certain amount of sunlight for it to function. Gravity on Earth, through the ages, has remained constant. Likewise, the sun burns in a relatively stable manner. The human genetic code accounts for these consistent, non-random properties of the world and uses them to create a well-adapted organism capable of reproducing. Neurologically, the human brain builds a model of the world. Over time, it learns the grammars of language, expects particular culturally driven behaviors from others, and more generally, realizes an enormous amount of social and environmental patterns. This neural-encoded model represents those worldly variations that enable the human to make utility-driven, non-random decisions. A good mental model of the world yields a well-adapted, successful individual. At the level of the collective, a good collectively generated world model yields a well-adapted, successful society. [DOC]
If
you are reading this book, then very likely you
are a believer in collective intelligence (CI)—and likely a
champion. My history begins in
the mid-90s when a group of similar-minded scientists at Los Alamos
National
Laboratory considered the future of the Internet—the
Symbiotic
Intelligence Project. Collectively
intelligent systems / Jennifer
H. Watkins From a psychological perspective, the laundry list of ways in which humans fail to make good decisions is extensive. Cognitive biases, as they are called, confound a sizable portion of our thinking. An individual may use a few salient examples of negative comments from her boss to conclude that she is going to lose her job (attribution bias). She subconsciously begins to seek out additional information confirming this belief, ignoring the fact that she just received high marks in her annual performance review (confirmation bias). Eventually, her fear over losing her job affects her performance enough that she is fired (self-fulfilling prophecy) and when she looks back she can say with total confidence that she saw it coming the whole time (hindsight). When we consider individuals acting in a group, the situation only worsens. Indeed, if we are to believe the anecdotes of MacKay’s mad crowds, when people act together their worst characteristics are only magnified. More recently, this phenomenon has been characterized as groupthink, the bane of every boardroom. In fact, if we refer to the cognition literature, groupthink is only one of many socially based cognitive biases that boardroom executives should fear. [DOC] A contrarian view / Jaron Lanier My views are different from those of the other people commonly associated with the collective intelligence movement and its varied threads. I observe that meta-human or crowd wisdom processes can be effective, and often essential, but they are also “evil” in the sense that they destroy individual people, cultures, species, or other things that for whatever reason are outside of the boundaries of whatever the crowd process is optimizing for at the moment. A crowd is a blunt instrument, not a delicate one. For example, the free market is effective, essential, the only proven means to wealth and continuous innovation; All that is true, and yet it also produces victims. It is sometimes cruel, generally impersonal and cold, and often dehumanizing, even to the winners in the system. The good it does is greater than the harm it causes, however, and therefore I am, overall, committed to capitalism. [DOC]
The
problems of semantic operability are rather
simple and clear. There are many natural languages and there
are no simple and reliable means
of automatic translation. This is the first point.
The
second is that we have many cataloguing systems, taxonomies,
ontologies, and so on, and they are
not compatible. In addition, the great majority of them were
designed before the computer, like those that are employed by
librarians. So they
are not designed to exploit the new computing capabilities and the very
important fact
that in the near future, all the documents will be digitized and on
line. Harnessing
the collective intelligence of the
World-Wide Web / Nova
Spivack We are about to enter the third decade of the Web, sometimes referred to as “Web 3.0.” During this decade, the Web will evolve from a globally distributed fileserver into a globally distributed database. This shift will be enabled by a set of emerging technologies called The Semantic Web, which add a new layer of machine-understandable metadata about the meaning of information to the content of the Web. The Semantic Web will catalyze a new era in collective intelligence. Individuals, groups, organizations and communities will be able to create, connect, find and share knowledge more intelligently and productively than ever before. Ultimately it will enable the Web itself, and all the people and applications that participate in it, to become more collectively intelligent. [DOC] The
emergence of a global brain / Francis
Heylighen There is little doubt that the most important technological, economic and social development of the past decades is the emergence of a global, computer-based communication network. This network has been growing at an explosive rate, affecting—directly or indirectly—ever more aspects of the daily lives of the people on this planet. A general trend is that the information network becomes ever more global, more encompassing, more tightly linked to the individuals and groups that use it, and more intelligent in the way it supports them. The web doesn't just passively provide information, it now also actively alerts and guides people to the best options for them personally, while stimulating them to share their experience. To support this, the web increasingly builds on the knowledge and intelligence of all its users collectively, thanks to technologies such as blogs, wikis, ontologies, collaborative filtering, software agents, and online markets. It appears as though the net is turning into a nervous system for humanity. The “Global Brain” is a metaphor for this emerging, collectively intelligent network that is formed by the people of this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect them together. This network is an immensely complex, self-organizing system. It not only processes information, but increasingly can be seen to play the role of a brain: making decisions, solving problems, learning new connections, and discovering new ideas. No individual, organization or computer is in control of this system: its knowledge and intelligence are distributed over all its components. They emerge from the collective interactions between all the human and machine subsystems. Such a system may be able to tackle current and emerging globalproblems that have eluded more traditional approaches. Yet, at the same time it will create new technological and social challenges that are still difficult to imagine. [DOC] Mark
Buchanan (2004) wrote about what a billion
brains could do, working collectively. He reported on the teamwork, and
cooperation that can be seen in the very structure of things. Another
kind of `big science for a global age’ could be seen if all
departments of a university, and of many universities Achieving
tomorrow's high-performance
organizations will involve massive changes throughout their capability
infrastructures. The complexity of implementing these changes will be
daunting, and deserves a strategic approach. Groupware will support
important, special new knowledge Search
panacea or ploy: Can collective
intelligence improve findability? / Stephen E. Arnold Several years ago, Microsoft asked me what I knew about social search. I wrote a report that identified Eurekster (www.eurekster.com) as an early entrant. I identified a number of research groups and fledgling efforts in Silicon Valley to tap “the wisdom of crowds.” I concluded that social search was one angle that might be used to slow down the Google juggernaut. The big finding was that social search was less of a technology and more of a consequence of the use of the Internet as a spiffed up version of AT&T's party line. Listening in was great fun when families shared telephone lines. Social search and its variants was an outgrowth of the Internet's increasing popularity. [DOC] The recent identification by the United Nations High-Level Threat Panel of the ten high-level threats to humanity, listed below, is most helpful in identifying the related underlying symptoms of global collapse: Poverty, Genocide, Infectious Disease, Other Atrocities, Environmental Degradation, Proliferation, Inter-State Conflict, Terrorism, Civil War, Transnational Crime. As J. F. Rischard puts it in his book HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them (2003), We the People are moving away from hierarchies at the same time that nation-states are struggling (many collapsing), and the lines are blurring among public and private sector enterprises. Nation-states, the most complex of enterprises, are collapsing and turning disasters like Katrina into catastrophes for lack of a proper decision support process and adaptive capabilities that can respond quickly to unanticipated challenges. Indeed, Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) teaches us that as societies become more complex, their ability to manage details from the top down becomes overly expensive and less and less effective; Henry Kissinger, in Does American Need a Foreign Policy? (2004) notes that politics has failed to keep up with globalization and new forms of communication; and there are no fewer than twenty-seven (27) secessionist movements in the United States of America, and six secessionist movements in Canada (as well as hundreds elsewhere around the world). Meanwhile, under the Bush-Cheney regime, failed states have multiplied dramatically, with the United States of America itself no longer in the Sustainable category, but falling to being of moderate concern. Put most simply, the traditional concept of bureaucracy as a means for administering complex organizations, the heart of the public administration paradigm, has failed. At the same time, the Internet and the cellular telephone have made possible completely new forms of collective action in acquiring, making sense of and sharing information. We are in crisis, in an intermediate period where political entities are failing; non-governmental organizations and social networks are emergent, and the majority of individuals have not yet chosen to become active participants in any of a number of collective intelligence enterprises, while a small minority are heavily engaged across a wide variety of networks that dilute the energy of individuals while not yet achieving synergy across divergent activist movements. [DOC] The
Interra Project / Jon
Ramer and many others The
Interra model is based on a simple,
purchasing-based platform that intelligently bundles open source
technologies for community cooperation and empowerment. It works with
any form of payment at the POS and online, promotes education and
awareness of restorative options, drives community From
corporate responsibility to Backstory
Management / Alex Steffen There was a time, not all that long ago, when a company’s responsibilities stopped at the office door. Those days are over. As connectivity increases and activists grow more savvy about forcing transparency in the sourcing of goods (think, for instance, of the blood diamonds campaign or the use of cell phones to reveal the origins of food), William Gibson’s prophetic remarks on accountability ring more true every day: “It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future... will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.” The practical manifestation of this trend is that everything matters. Where once a company was held accountable for what it did, it is increasingly held accountable for that which it caused to happen. As the consulting outfit SustainAbility puts it in their report, The Changing Landscape of Liability, “boundaries of accountability will progressively expand through the value chain and through the whole life-cycle of a product’s development, production, use and disposal.” [DOC] World
Index of Environmental & Social
Responsibility / WISER, by the
Natural Capital Institute WISER
serves the people who are transforming the
world. It is a collaboratively written, free content, open source
networking platform that links NGOs, funders, business, government,
social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists,
scientists, and citizens. WISER creates the
3D
Printing and open source design / James
Duncan REBEARTH™:
Growing a world 6.6 billion
people would want to live in / Marc
Stamos Growing a world that 6.6 billion people would want to live in requires mass collaboration and vision. Several years ago, the author and his collaborators became increasingly concerned about where our collective future was headed. In an effort to be a part of the solution, they started digging. One quote they came across changed the course of his life: “The best way to predict the future is to design it.” (Buckminster Fuller) [DOC] Mark
Tovey: Wow.
So if they have knowledge of who else is
online or recently been online, how can that be used to build
community, or even build a sense of community? The
power of the peer-to-peer future / Jock
Gill As we consider our choices for a better tomorrow, at least a livable tomorrow, it is clear that one requirement is that we take a fresh look at how we use our resources. Are we making the best possible use of them such that they can best serve the greatest number of people while doing the least damage to our challenged natural environment? Clearly, our resources are not infinite and the choices we make in how we use them have serious consequences, unintended and otherwise. We have to discover which of our current choices for managing resources such as electricity, spectrum for communications, water for life, politics, our economy, and so forth, can be managed in new ways that will greatly increase the efficiency with which we use them while increasing the benefits they provide us in a fair and just manner. The primary question is this: Are our current utilization, production, distribution, and consumption models any longer the best choice for our future? Is it good enough to consider citizens as merely one-dimensional consumers? Or are there better ideas afoot? [DOC] Open
spectrum / David
Weinberger We
are not in the age of Information. We are not
in the age of the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection.
Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our
economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger are our
government, businesses, science, culture, and education. Generating
substantive content collectively is
nothing new—witness the thousands of contributors to the
Oxford English Dictionary project. Begun in the late nineteenth
century, it produced, over many years, one of the intellectual edifices
of the twentieth century, unparalleled in any other language. The Interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon / Hassan Masum Hassan
Masum: With
regard to the potential of online tools, what
do you see as the next simple step beyond transmitting and sharing
information? Achieving
collective intelligence via large-scale argumentation / Mark Klein Let us define “collective intelligence” as the synergistic channeling of the efforts of many minds towards identifying and coming to consensus over responses to some complex challenge, i.e. as large-scale deliberation-for-action. How well does current technology enable this? We can divide existing deliberation support technologies into three categories: sharing tools, wherein individuals compete to provide content of value to the wider community; funneling tools, wherein group opinions are consolidated into an aggregate judgment, and argumentation tools, wherein groups identify the space of issues, options, and tradeoffs for a given challenge. By far the most commonly used technologies, including wikis, blogs, idea markets, and discussion forums, fall into the sharing category. While such tools have been remarkably successful at enabling a global explosion of idea and knowledge sharing, they face serious shortcomings. One is poor signal-to-noise ratios. Such tools, especially forums, are notorious for producing repetitive and mixed-quality content. Sharing systems do not inherently encourage or enforce any standards concerning what constitutes valid argumentation, so postings are often bias- rather than evidence- or logic-based. Sharing systems are also challenged when applied to controversial topics: they are all too easily hijacked by a narrow set of “hot” issues or loud voices, leading to such phenomena as forum “flame wars” and wiki “edit wars”. Sharing tools are thus ill-suited to uncovering consensus. Funneling technologies, which include group decision support systems, prediction markets, and e-voting, have proven effective at aggregating individual opinions into a consensus, but provide little or no support for identifying what the alternatives selected among should be, or what their pros and cons are. Argumentation tools fill this gap, by helping groups define networks of issues (questions to be answered), options (alternative answers for a question), and arguments (statements that support or detract from some other statement). [DOC] Scaling up open problem solving / Hassan Masum & Mark Tovey The two experiences of open collaboration efforts we will share could be multiplied a thousandfold—the point is to think concretely about what’s involved in scaling up open collaboration. Getting involved in almost any such endeavor suggests ideas for making better use of tools, modes of interaction, and motivational strategies to rapidly accelerate what we can do together. The first step is to understand the available tools. A home PC can now support distributed small-group collaboration in a variety of ways, such as information sharing, discussions, audio conferencing, small-scale video conferencing, and simultaneous editing. With a little organized support, such efforts can be coordinated and interlinked into larger networks of collaboration to produce sizeable outcomes. But tools are only as good as the way they’re used, leading to the idea of “modes”: design patterns for productive collaboration. Just as we are used to the idea of a debate or a lecture, we will become used to more complex interpersonal idioms, each with different functionality, “feel”, and requirements. Contributing to Wikipedia, engaging in massively parallel brainstorming, or taking part in a multi-site music education and performance session via broadband video are qualitatively new ways of being productive together. Each of these modes holds the promise of radically increased effectiveness for particular tasks. For many involved in such initiatives, a big part of the motivation to spend so much time and effort solving problems is enjoyment of “productive fun”. We posit that doing something rather than nothing about the tough problems out there is natural for most people, given the right opportunities to be part of the solution. Collaboration only happens with motivation, and making collaborative activities more fun is an easy and high-impact step to take. Tools, modes, and motivations come together in the search for practical solutions, to help bridge the “ingenuity gaps” our civilization faces. These gaps might be closed by a problem-solving infrastructure at levels ranging from making one’s own habits more effective to tackling planetary emergencies. While the consequences of failure can keep any thoughtful citizen awake at night, many are inspired by the idea that positive-sum interactions could be amplified on a global basis. [DOC] The Internet
and the revitalization of democracy
(Afterword) PAUL:
Let me give you a practical problem and tell me then what your reaction
to it is. I am heading up a UN commission on how you get local small
business going in the most impoverished countries in the
world. Note that citizen deliberative councils and other citizen deliberation methods are made up of citizens who use stakeholders and experts as sources of information. There is a difference between having diverse stakeholders or diverse ordinary citizens in the deliberative, decision-making role. The stakeholder approach of “resolving the conflicts among interested parties” is very different from citizen-centered approach of “helping diverse citizens figure out the best policies, budgets, candidates, etc., for their community or country.” Ideally, ways would be found to integrate both approaches, such as having a conflicted stakeholder dialogue develop a consensus solution that is then turned over to a citizen deliberative council for consideration as one of several possible solutions. And then if the citizen council is leaning toward a different solution, they can talk with the stakeholders (who are “on tap”, not “on top”), before making their final decision. There is no sign yet that any candidate has this kind of sophistication in thinking about public engagement. We can create the conditions where candidates start doing that. [DOC] Three Lists [DOC] Glossary [DOC]Index [DOC] Purchase hardcover from Amazon.com
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