Collective Intelligence

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Definition

Doug Englebart can be considered to be the founder of the field of collective intelligence with his paper Augmenting Human Intelligence.

Collective Intelligence is related to Cyborg Anthropology because of the Actor Network of Human and Non Human Allies. ANT describes humans as connecting with one another through a technosocial relationship of non-human and humans that allows for greater communicate across distances. In the book review on networks and collective intelligence, Nielsen describes the benefits to cognition that can emerge from collaboration and through the use of technological scaffolds.

Carver A. Mead wrote Moore's Law, not Gordon Moore. He wrote Collective Electrodynamics. Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism. A lot of the book is about his relationship with Feynman. It relates the fundamental structure and dynamics of matter to dynamics. Collective intelligence and the idea of collaborating socially that relates to cyborg anthropology or not? A lot of it is Actor Network Theory.

In the analog world, we had to wait for events and occurrences to pass before they were documented. Even then, many pieces were usually missing. What could be pieced together by historians or biographers was a far cry from being able to tell a story real-time, or even speed up, slow down, or zoom out on particulate events. Instead of historically piecing bits back together. “We can now speed up time to visualize the dynamic aggregations of collective thought, the strange attractors of knowledge, the pulsing nodes of communication and the buzzing, self-assembly of networked human activity. These patterns invoke shades of what Stephen Jay Gould described as the “punctuated equilibrium” of evolutionary behavior and reflect what Buckminster Fuller called the “partially overlapping scenario Universe.” This new genre of dynamic, illuminated visions have come alive with full-blown intensity before our collective eyes. These visions are at once disarming, evocative, enlightening".[1]

Time and space are annihilated or compressed as people talk across distance, and it is throguh the collaboration of human and machine that this communication can occur. The majority of human communication is affected by a technosocial interaction prior to setting up a meeting across distances.

Related Reading

  • Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Translated by Robert Bononno.
  • Tomasello, Micheal. Why We Cooperate.
  • Programming Collective Intelligence.
  • Nowak, Martin A. Super Cooperators. Altruisim, Evolution, and Why we need each other to succeed.

References

  1. http://scaleindependentthought.typepad.com/scale_independent_thought/connective-intelligence/