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
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