Collective intelligence is a form of collaborative intelligence. For example, a pencil is a product of collective intelligence. For a pencil to be made one needs a lot of people who have different skills. Not everyone knows how to cut down a tree or for that matter the right kind of tree for the wood that is best for the pencil. Not everyone knows how to obtain the lead or knows how to manufacture a large amount of pencils. So even the simplest things or products we use on a daily basis are the product of collective intelligence. Pierre Lévy defines the concept of collective intelligence as “…a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills.” (1994:13).

Interesting video below on collective intelligence:

Thomas Malone gives another example of collective intelligence during a lecture at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Montréal. He understands collective intelligence as the intelligence that arises with a group of individuals, for instance armies, countries, companies and families. It is groups of people that are working together in such a way that it appears intelligent.

With the Internet came another form or kind of collective intelligence. Or better said, the Internet or current digital ecology enabled a new kind of collective intelligence. The earlier examples of collective intelligence are Google and Wikipedia. Malone sees Google as collective intelligence by explaining that it is a place where millions and millions of people create webpages, connect those webpages together and when you enter a question into the search engine it generates an answer using algorithms. Wikipedia is an intellectual product of collective intelligence that has and is created by many different people with almost no centralized control, but also with almost no one being paid.

Now, how can you better utilize collective intelligence in our current digital era? A very good example of collective intelligence is an online platform that is trying to tackle the problem of global warming. Climate Colab is an online platform that has and connects a community of leading experts on climate change, but also connects a large group of students, technologists, professors, NGO, business people and al kinds of people worldwide. On this online platform this community is developing and making proposals to do something about climate change and reaching climate change goals. These proposals can be economic, political or technical and are mostly organised by contests. Most inspiring is that certain proposals have been presented to the United Nations, which makes this a beautiful example of collective intelligence.

I highly recommend watching the video of the presentation of Thomas Malone (see video below). It was very interesting and especially the part on how they measured collective intelligence!

Thanks for reading my update!

References:

• Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, 1994, p. 13
• Summer School in cognitive Science: Web Science and the Mind Institut des sciences cognitives, UQAM, Montréal, Canada. Lecture by Thomas Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management. (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD1107TXtFw
• OnEnglis Online (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7-CEDyoibQ
• https://www.climatecolab.org/