Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence (CI) or group intelligence (GI) is the emergent ability of groups, whether composed of humans alone, animals, or networks of humans and artificial agents, to solve problems, make decisions, or generate knowledge more effectively than individuals alone, through either cooperation or by aggregation of diverse information, perspectives, and behaviors. The term swarm intelligence (SI) is sometimes used interchangeably with collective intelligence but is simply one instance of it.

Collective intelligence encompasses not only complex adaptive systems, which self-organize and adapt in dynamic environments, but also creative and cognitive processes observed in social groups, which are often referred to as the wisdom of crowds. In this context, collective judgments, sometimes from non-experts, often exceed the accuracy of expert predictions, as illustrated by Francis Galton's famous experiment on estimating the weight of an ox. Contemporary theorists have posited that intelligence can be interpreted as an emergent collective process that manifests across various biological and social scales, including neural, organismal, and group levels.

The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in the context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus decision-making, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective intelligence should not be conflated with metaphysical theories of panpsychism or with claims about group consciousness. These concern the fundamental nature of the mind, and the possibility that consciousness is a ubiquitous or emergent property. The empirical study of collective intelligence, however, focuses on observable mechanisms by which groups coordinate information, tasks or problem-solving.

The term group intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Anita Woolley presents collective intelligence as a measure of group intelligence and group creativity. The idea is that a measure of collective intelligence covers a broad range of features of the group, mainly group composition and group interaction. The features of composition that lead to increased levels of collective intelligence in groups include criteria such as higher numbers of women in the group as well as increased diversity of the group.

Collective intelligence is attributed to bacteria and animals, but also algorithmic governance. It can be understood as an emergent property from the synergies among:

1. data-information-knowledge
2. software-hardware
3. individuals (those with new insights as well as recognized authorities) that continually learn from feedback to produce just-in-time knowledge for better decisions than these three elements acting alone

Or it can be more narrowly understood 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.

Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as "a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. (...) The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities."

According to Lévy and Derrick de Kerckhove, it refers to capacity of networked ICTs (Information communication technologies) to enhance the collective pool of social knowledge by simultaneously expanding the extent of human interactions.

A broader definition was provided by Geoff Mulgan in a series of lectures and reports from 2006 onwards and in the book Big Mind, which proposed a framework for analysing any thinking system, including both human and machine intelligence, in terms of functional elements (observation, prediction, creativity, judgement etc.), learning loops and forms of organisation. The aim was to provide a way to diagnose, and improve, the collective intelligence of a city, business, NGO or parliament.

Collective intelligence strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective. According to Eric S. Raymond in 1998 and JC Herz in 2005, open-source intelligence will eventually generate superior outcomes to knowledge generated by proprietary software developed within corporations. Media theorist Henry Jenkins sees collective intelligence as an 'alternative source of media power', related to convergence culture. He draws attention to education and the way people are learning to participate in knowledge cultures outside formal learning settings. Henry Jenkins criticizes schools which promote 'autonomous problem solvers and self-contained learners' while remaining hostile to learning through the means of collective intelligence. Both Pierre Lévy and Henry Jenkins support the claim that collective intelligence is important for democratization, as it is interlinked with knowledge-based culture and sustained by collective idea sharing, and thus contributes to a better understanding of diverse society.

Similar to the g factor (g) for general individual intelligence, a new scientific understanding of collective intelligence aims to extract a general collective intelligence factor c factor for groups indicating a group's ability to perform a wide range of tasks, although the score is not a quotient per se.