collective intelligence
a lecture of edge city patagonia 2025, 2025-11-04 · video · miniconf: history and (bright) future
theory target (deep article, not this talk): egregore
lineage
Aristotle: wisdom of the crowds — potluck feast, everyone contributes dishes
W. M. Wheeler: superorganism
Vernadsky, Teilhard: noosphere
Engelbart: three people working together in this augmented mode would seem to be more than three times as effective in solving a complex problem as one augmented person working alone
ant colonies, bee hives, and bird flocks
- complex problems (shortest paths to food, task allocation, long migrations) without central control → field of swarm intelligence
ant colony optimization (ACO), Marco Dorigo — Traveling Salesman Problem
methods
simple local rules ⇒ complex collective search and optimization
random walk
market
longest chain rule
Conway's game of life
modern measures
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence — Thomas Malone
c-factor — Anita Williams Woolley (Science 2010)
- social sensitivity of group members
- equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking
- proportion of females in the group
closing
boundaries between human and machine collective intelligence are blurring
see egregore for the formal framework; collective for the four processes