web

Exploring Humanity’s Evolving ‘Global Brain’

Photo
Thomas W. Malone is the founding director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Credit MIT

Over the last several years, I’ve become familiar with the work of Thomas W. Malone and the Center for Collective Intelligence, the lab he directs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center is studying, and trying to make the most of, the human species’ fast-growing capacity to think outside the box — with the box in this case being an individual’s skull and cerebral cortex.

Malone discussed his goals, work and background in a session recorded and transcribed by Edge.org, the Web site developed by the literary agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman as something of an online science salon.

Needless to say, Malone’s work on what he calls the evolving “global brain” relates powerfully to the thread of posts I’ve been writing on what I call Knowosphere. Here’s an excerpt from Malone’s remarks and a link to the video and full transcript:

Collective Intelligence

Pretty much everything I’m doing now falls under the broad umbrella that I’d call collective intelligence. What does collective intelligence mean? It’s important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. In fact, I’d define collective intelligence as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.

It’s also possible for groups of people to work together in ways that seem pretty stupid, and I think collective stupidity is just as possible as collective intelligence. Part of what I want to understand and part of what the people I’m working with want to understand is what are the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity. But in whatever form, either intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior has existed for a long time.

What’s new, though, is a new kind of collective intelligence enabled by the Internet. Think of Google, for instance, where millions of people all over the world create web pages, and link those web pages to each other. Then all that knowledge is harvested by the Google technology so that when you type a question in the Google search bar the answers you get often seem amazingly intelligent, at least by some definition of the word “intelligence”….

Our future as a species may depend on our ability to use our global collective intelligence to make choices that are not just smart, but also wise. [Read on.]

For relevant background and research, explore the papers aggregated on the Web site of Collective Intelligence 2012, a conference co-led by Malone at M.I.T. last April.

The plenary talks are all on YouTube. Particularly interesting to me is “Social Design for Collective Intelligence,” a lecture in which Robert Kraut, a professor of computer-human interaction (I kid you not) at Carnegie Mellon University, notes how Wikipedia, despite its merits, suffers from “misalignment” of the crowd’s interests:

As he notes:

Wikipedia’s really good at popular culture, so here’s this article about the superhero Iron Man that’s 10,000 words long. All of sixteenth century philosophy is 66 words long. If you want to have the world’s best encyclopedia, what’s more important? Maybe it’s “Iron Man,” but I doubt it.

Here’s a sampler of papers presented at the meeting:

Tracking the 2011 Student-Led Movement in Chile through Social Media Use
Cristobal Garcia
(paper  CollectiveIntelligence/2012/53 )
An Existing, Ecologically-Successful Genus of Collectively Intelligent Artificial Creatures
Benjamin Kuipers
(paper  CollectiveIntelligence/2012/57)
Learning to Predict the Wisdom of Crowds
Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, Cynthia Rudin (paper CollectiveIntelligence/2012/62)
Collaborative Development in Wikipedia
Gerald Kane, Sam Ransbotham
(paper  CollectiveIntelligence/2012/74)
Crowdsourcing Collective Emotional Intelligence
Rob Morris, Rosalind Picard
(paper  CollectiveIntelligence/2012/81)