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Collective Intelligence: Humanity’s Mass Mind

document Distributed Knowledge, Open Innovation

Collective Intelligence: Humanity’s Mass Mind
by Gabriella on September 29, 2011

Science fiction stories often talk about the “Collective” – or “intelligence”, if you will – where the mass of mankind’s knowledge is accessible through a telepathic thought. While much of science fiction is still just fiction, we’re a whole lot closer to the idea of the Collective then you might think. It’s already here, in the form of the Internet. “Big deal,” you say? Ah… read on, oh lucky visitor! Humanity’s Mass Mind
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players… William Shakespeare”

Consider how much knowledge is now at your fingertips! Marketing data, medical studies, scientific papers, blue prints: anything you want to know, anything you want to learn, can be found on the Web. Not only that, but the Internet has become a collection of peoples’ thoughts, opinions, studies and experience on any given subject. So much so, that it’s become a mass mind – a living, feeling, learning creation.

We all play a part…
The fascinating thing is that each of us plays a part in helping this creation grow. By writing and posting new content, we add to the collection our own thoughts, experience and knowledge. Even if the topic is the same, with few exceptions, each person’s content is unique, because our views on our personal experiences. How amazing! How wonderful! How fantastic! With prolific online authors, you can search their names, and learn all about them. It’s almost like reading their minds – it’s all there for us to digest.

Collected Information Leads to Collective Intelligence
All this information pouring into the online collection has begun to serve a greater purpose than one individual learning new things. This collected information, humanity’s mass mind, is leading to new forms of Collective Intelligence (CI). In turn, Collective Intelligence is leading to mankind’s continued growth as a species – to learning new things that no one has ever known before!

What is collective intelligence?
The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence describes CI as “groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.” (emphasis ours) Crowd-sourcing, collaboration, and the wisdom of crowds are all minimalist forms of collective intelligence. It’s seen in nature, in the hive mind of bees or in the way ants colonies work as a unified entity. The key word in the MIT definition is seem. For any collaboration to be a true example of collective intelligence, it has to lead to new levels of intelligence. In other words, something more than what was before.

Why are we bothering to discuss this?
That’s a darn good question. We have a darn good answer. Collected information and collective intelligence are changing the way we live, act, react and interact. It matters for SEO, because optimizers need to learn how to capitalize on it. It matters for marketing, because social is a big part of collective; your target market’s wants, needs, thoughts and opinions are right there for you to gather, in big, bright, bold words. It matters for business because of all of the above and then some. Look at the applications we’re building! We’re creating our home security systems online. We’re pulling an entire company’s data stream into one central location in the cloud. We’re gathering information from around the world in a matter of a few seconds. The world is growing in leaps and bounds – the way we interact with computers and people (social, blogging, search, surveys, comments, programs, applications, research and development, marketing, etc.) has changed in such a way that we’re ALL a part of that growth.

5 Real World Examples of Collective Intelligence
Everything you put out there, everything thought, opinion or bit of knowledge, is a contribution towards the future of mankind. You never know what will spark of the next round of innovations and ideas. Listen – do you really think the people behind every successful business, every great piece of technology and every standard scientific process knew their ideas would be successful, great or become a standard? How many of these things started with just a spark?

It might not have even been the “inventor’s” own thought – it could have just as easily started with someone else’s comment… The thousands of real world collective intelligence examples should be taken as inspiration. They are just the beginning of what’s possible. We’ve barely started, yet there are literally thousands of real world examples of collective intelligence in use: Google Google is an oft-used example, yet it’s important to specify the search engine itself, not the search engine’s output: Google’s Output – The feedback that comes from any given query is subject to misinformation. Anyone can write about anything… and we do. Therefore, it’s important to point out that mass authoring isn’t synonymous with mass authority. Just because many people write about something doesn’t mean we learn from that writing. Google- If you’ve ever seen the list of patents that went into creating Google, you’d quickly notice that the patents don’t always have the same creator’s name. You’ll see names like Mayur Datar and Ramanathan V. Guha, but you’ll also see Alexis Battle, Barbara Engelhardt and so on. Not all patents were created by Google employees for Google, and most patents were created by a team of inventors. What we end up with, then, is a search engine designed, built and added on to by hundreds of people. Unique in its overall abilities, it was the only one of its kind when first created: intelligent design developed through collective intelligence. Google + From the time that Google Plus hit the online world, it’s been an example of collective intelligence. They opened a bare bones project, not to the masses, but to a specific audience – the geeks and coding freaks of the Internet. They gave these individuals the ability to give automatic feedback on all areas of the system.

Why? In order to turn out a strong, working product when it’s released for everyone to use. The company wants the best social platform out there, and who better to finish the creation process than the very people they’re targeting? Open Source Projects Anything “open source” can be considered a strong example of collective intelligence. Open source projects are developed by the people for the people; open source is a completely organic approach, if you will. In fact, some amazing products have come out of the Open Source Initiative. The list includes several well-known products, such as: The Apache server WordPress Drupal MySQL Mozilla Firefox Many, many more BRAIN BRAIN, Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), created by Hewlett Packard, is a fascinating example of collective intelligence. According to the creators, “Existing processes tend to be either too data-driven, and therefore lacking the perspective of human insight, or too ad hoc, and therefore inconsistent with the data. “ BRAIN was developed to gain more accurate information for prediction markets using data side-by-side with team surveys. It’s worked for HP, and other companies, such as IBM and Ford, have implemented prediction markets as well.

KuiSchi Knowledge Unifying Initiator for Science and Technology, or KuiSci, is “a meeting place for discussion among scientists and technologists, a place for presenting national and global scale problems, a forum for brainstorming, skill and expertise exchange among scientists to harness the collective solutions. KuiSci is a place for innovative work creation. “

On to Bigger and Different Things
We’re in a technological space we’ve never been in before – not in the entire history of mankind. We’re able to collaborate globally in ways that have previously not been possible. Open source projects are changing medicine; social networking is changing how we learn in a classroom. –And, the power of the collective is changing how we do business. That’s not so bad; change is the beginning of growth. Although no one knows how things will turn out in the future, we do know that it will probably be something totally unexpected – something different. Something no one has thought of before. As content developers, marketing managers, application developers, search engineers, SEO geeks and so on, it’s our responsibility to make sure we follow a mantra of respect, honesty and communication. Maybe “Respect, honesty and communication for the betterment of mankind” should be part of the 10 Online Commandments (wonder how well that would go over?).

Over the next several weeks, months and so on, we’ll be talking more about Collective Intelligence and how it applies specifically to marketing your online business, branding, users’ opinions, etc. In the meantime, put your thinking caps on; if you have any questions or comments, you know where to put them (in the comment box, people…)!

Summary
Collected information and collective intelligence are changing the way we live, act, react and interact. It matters for SEO, because optimizers need to learn how to capitalize on it. It matters for marketing, because social is a big part of collective; your target market’s wants, needs, thoughts and opinions are right there for you to gather, in big, bright, bold words. It matters for business because of all of the above and then some.

Description
Here's 5 Real World Examples of Collective Intelligence; Google , Google + , Open Source Projects , BRAIN (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks) , KuiSchi (Knowledge Unifying Initiator for Science and Technology).

Tags: Business, collective intelligence, Crowdsourcing, marketing, SEO

Posted by Fritz Schaefer

Nov 14, 2011 01:09 pm GMT Viewed 1973 times

Author: Gabriela Avram Source

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