Collective Intelligence

[sajiv]

Collective intelligence, as characterized by Tom Atlee, Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Francis Heylighen, Ron Dembo, and other theorists, is a working form of intelligence which overcomes groupthink and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process while maintaining reliable intellectual performance. In this context, it refers to robust consensus decision making, and may properly be considered a subfield of sociology.

Another CI pioneer, George, author of The Quest for Collective Intelligence (1995), defined this phenomenon in his Blog of Collective Intelligence as the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation.

A less anthropomorphic conception is that a large number of cooperating entities can cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism, achieving a single focus of attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of action. These ideas are more closely explored in Society of Mind theory and sociobiology, as well as in biology proper. Another approach builds on work in sociology and anthropology of science as a foundation, e.g., Scientific Community Metaphor