The Future of Collective Intelligence
Working collectively has been critical to the survival and success of the human race. In this new era of rapid and complex change, many believe it will be our ability to harness collective intelligence that will determine how successful we are as communities, organisations and a species.
What is collective intelligence?
The term 'Collective intelligence' was coined by Thomas Malone, head of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, to convey the idea that "intelligence does not arise only in individual brains; it also arises in groups of individuals. This is collective intelligence: groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent."
In a recent interview with Deloitte Insights, Malone broadened his definition. "I think it’s probably more useful to think of collective intelligence as the property that a supermind has ... Collective intelligence is something that can emerge from a group that includes people and computers. Or it could be a group of only computers, or of bees or ants or even bacteria. Collective intelligence is a very general property, and superminds can arise in many kinds of systems, although the systems I’ve mostly talked about are those that involve people and computers."
So what's next.
The next evolution of collective intelligence is to complement human intelligence with the specialised intelligence of AI programs. The goal is to collaborate with computers to maximise our potential for sustainable development and optimisation.
According to Nesta the most "common challenge in tech-enabled collective intelligence (CI)-based solutions is scale and making sense of the different people, ideas, contributions and different types of data within a network... Recent advances in these methods could play a significant role in enhancing CI by increasing the efficiency and scale of data processing, making more accurate predictions about future events or identifying new patterns and relationships between datasets." The table below captures some of Nesta's early thinking on collective intelligence challenges and how AI could overcome them.
You can see this shift in the innovation landscape. Earlier this year, Mindhive 2.0 pivoted from an idea management tool to a collective intelligence ecosystem - designed to facilitate interactions among a global community. Mindhive Founder and CEO Bruce Muirhead recently announced the beta trial of Mindhive 3.0, which includes the design and implementation of intelligent matchmaking algorithms, machine learning and in-depth analytical tools to move us closer to the goal of predictive insight.
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