This looks fruitful, but it might be argued that the exchanges of information in a colony can be reduced to individual exchanges and interactions, and thus there is not really any activity that is holistic. This is what Steven is doing with his example of pyramid building.
On the other hand, with ants, for example, it has been shown by de Neuberg and others that in ant colonies the interactions cannot be reduced, but produce complex organization that only makes sense at a higher level of behaviour. Examples are nest building and bridge building, among others. I assume the same is true for humans.
For example, in the pyramid case, why is it being built, why are people so motivated to cooperate on such a ridiculous project? Contrary to widespread opinion the workers were not slaves, but they were individual people. I doubt this can be explained at the individual level. If ants have complexly organized behaviour, then surely humans do as well -- we are far more complex, and our social interactions are far more complex.
John
At 10:33 PM 2014-03-07, Guy A Hoelzer wrote:
I think of collective intelligence as synonymous with collective information processing. I would not test for its existence by asking if group-level action is smart or adaptive, nor do I think it is relevant to ask whether collective intelligence informed or misinformed individuals. I would say that in the classic example of eusocial insect colonies (like honey bees, for example) there is no reasonable doubt that information is processed at the level of the full colony, which can be detected by the coordination of individual activities into coherent colony-level behavior. Synchronization and complementarity of individual actions reflect the top-down influences of colony-level information processing.
It is the existential question that I think is key here, and I hope our conversation includes objective ways to detect the existence or absence of instances where a collective intelligence has manifested as a way to keep this concept more tangible and less metaphorical.
Cheers,
Guy
On Mar 6, 2014, at 9:22 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith <ste...@iase.us> wrote:
> Is there such a thing as Collective Intelligence?
I am concerned that the methods of the Harvard paper demonstrate nothing at all and, however well intended, they appear to be insufficiently rigorous and one might say "unscientific."
If the question were: are there things that a group of individuals may achieve that an individual may not, build the Pyramids or go to the Moon, for example, then manifestly this is the case.
However, can we measure the objective efficiency of a group by considering the problems solved by individuals working together in groups such that we may identify whether there is an environment independent quantifiable addition or loss of efficiency in all cases? Perhaps, but one suspects not.
Bottomline: I think you must stop worrying about collective intelligence and speak to quantifiable efficiencies in all cases.
> How does IT effect the existence or non-existence of Collective Intelligence?
The internet does not seem to have especially improved general intelligence - it has made apparent the ignorance what what there all along. On the other hand, it appears to have misinformed more individuals than it has benefitted.
Steven
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://iase.info
+1-650-308-8611
On Thursday, March 6, 2014, Pedro C. Marijuan < pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote:
_______________________________________________
- Dear John P. and FIS Colleagues,
- Thanks for the kickoff text. It a discussion on new themes that only
- occasionally and very superficially has surfaced in this list.
- Intelligence, the information flow in organizations, distributed
- knowledge, direct crowd enlistment in scientific activities... It sounds
- rather esoteric, but in the historical perspective the phenomenon is far
- from new. Along the biggest social transformations, the "new information
- orders" have been generated precisely by new ways to circulate
- knowledge/information across social agents--often kept away from the
- previous informational order established. In past years, when the
- initial Internet impact was felt, there appeared several studies on
- those wide historical transformations caused by the arrival of new
- social information flows --O'Donnell, Hobart & Schiffman, Lanham, Poe...
- But there is a difference, in my opinion, in the topic addressed by John
- P., it is the intriguing, more direct involvement of software beyond the
- rather passive, underground role it generally plays. "Organizational
- processes frozen into the artifact--though not fossilized". Information
- Technologies are producing an amazing mix of new practices and new
- networkings that generate growing impacts in economic activities, and in
- the capability to create new solutions and innovations. So, the three
- final questions are quite pertinent. In my view, there exist the
- collective intelligence phenomenon, innovation may indeed benefit from
- this new info-crowd turn, and other societal changes are occurring
- (from new forms of social uprising and revolt, to the detriment of the
- "natural info flows" --conversation--, an increase of individual
- isolation, diminished happiness indicators, etc.)
- Brave New World? Not yet, but who knows...
- best ---Pedro
- Prpic wrote:
- > ON COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: The Future of IT-Mediated Crowds
- > John Prpiæ
- > Beedie School of Business
- > Simon Fraser University
- > pr...@sfu.ca
- >
- >
- > Software (including web pages and mobile applications etc) is the key building block of the IT field in terms of human interaction, and can be construed as an artifact that codifies organizational process in the form of software embedded routines (Straub and Del Guidice 2012). These organizational processes are frozen into the artifact, though not fossilized, since the explicit codification that executes an artifact can be readily updated when desired (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001, Yoo et al. 2012).
- >
- > A software artifact always includes a setting of interaction or a user interface, for example a GUI or a DOS prompt (Rogers 2004), where human beings employ the embedded routines codified within the artifact (including data) for various purposes, providing input, and receiving programmed output in return. The setting of interaction provides both the limits and possibilities of the interaction between a human being and the artifact, and in turn this dual-enablement facilitates the functionality available to the employ of a human being or an organization (Del Giudice 2008). This structural view of artifacts (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001) informs us that IT artifacts are, by definition, not natural, neutral, universal, or given (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001), and that IT artifacts are always embedded in some time, place, discourse, and community (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001).
- >
- > Emerging research and our observation of developments in Industry and in the Governance context signals that organizations are increasingly engaging Crowds through IT artifacts to fulfill their idiosyncratic needs. This new and rapidly emerging paradigm of socio-technical systems can be found in Crowdsourcing (Brabham 2008), Prediction Markets (Arrow et al. 2008), Wikis (Majchrzak et al. 2013), Crowdfunding (Mollick 2013), Social Media (Kietzmann et al 2011), and Citizen Science techniques (Crowston & Prestopnik 2013). Acknowledging and incorporating these trends, research has emerged conceptualizing a parsimonious model detailing how and why organizations are engaging Crowds through IT in these various substantive domains (Prpiæ & Shukla 2013, 2014). The model considers Hayek's (1945) construct of dispersed knowledge in society, as the antecedent condition (and thus the impetus too) driving the increasing configuration of IT to engage Crowds, and further details that organizations are doing so for the purposes of capital creation (knowledge & financial).
- >
- > However, as might be expected, many questions remain in this growing domain, and thus I would like to present the following questions to the FIS group, to canvas your very wise and diverse views.
- >
- >
- > Is there such a thing as Collective Intelligence?
- > How does IT effect the existence or non-existence of Collective Intelligence?
- > - http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf
- > - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1919614
- > - http://www.collectiveintelligence2014.org/
- >
- > How do national innovation systems (and thus policy too) change when we consider IT-mediated crowds as the 4th Helix of innovation systems?
- > - http://www.springer.com/business+%26+management/book/978-1-4614-2061-3
- >
- > Does the changing historical perception of crowds signal other societal changes?
- > - http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1907199
- >
- >
- --
- -------------------------------------------------
- Pedro C. Marijuán
- Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
- Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
- Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
- Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
- 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
- Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
- pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
- http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
- -------------------------------------------------
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- Steven
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