collective intelligence

part of edge-city-patagonia-2025 — miniconf: history and (bright) future

published on x.com

theory target (deep article, not this talk): egregore

lineage

• Aristotle: wisdom of the crowds — potluck feast, everyone contributes dishes
• M. Condorcet: jury theorem
• W. M. Wheeler: superorganism
• Vernadsky, Teilhard: noosphere
• Engelbart: three people working together in this augmented mode would seem to be more than three times as effective in solving a complex problem as one augmented person working alone
• ant colonies, bee hives, and bird flocks
  • complex problems (shortest paths to food, task allocation, long migrations) without central control → field of swarm intelligence
• ant colony optimization (ACO), Marco Dorigo — Traveling Salesman Problem

methods

simple local rules ⇒ complex collective search and optimization

• random walk
• stigmergy

• market
• longest chain rule
• Conway's game of life

• emergence

modern measures

• MIT Center for Collective Intelligence — Thomas Malone
• c-factor — Anita Williams Woolley (Science 2010)
  • social sensitivity of group members
  • equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking
  • proportion of females in the group

closing

boundaries between human and machine collective intelligence are blurring

see egregore for the formal framework; collective for the four processes