Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is a theory that describes a type of shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, and computer networks. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. This broader definition involves consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Everything from a political party to a public wiki can reasonably be described as this loose form of collective intelligence.

It can be understood as an emergent property from the synergies among: 1) data-information-knowledge; software-hardware; and experts (those with new insights as well as recognized authorities) that continually learns from feedback to produce just-in-time knowledge for better decisions than these three elements acting alone. Or more narrowly as an emergent property between people and ways of processing information. This notion of collective intelligence is referred to as Symbiotic intelligence by Norman Lee Johnson. The concept is used in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction.

Writers who have influenced the idea of collective intelligence include Douglas Hofstadter (1979), Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Pierre Lévy (1994), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003).