Dear Colleagues, John Collier is sufficiently well-known and respected in his fields not to mind that one less good comment is attributed to him and allow its author, namely me, to take the credit for it ;-). John P.'s response, to MY question, then, was as broad as it was useful, bringing out a clear tension between IT and non-IT perspectives. The situation, the need for work on the 'nebulous concept' of intelligence is similar to that in the effort of some people, in China and elsewhere, to define an Intelligence Science as opposed to Artificial Intelligence. And was not the start of Information Science by Pedro and Michael Conrad in part as opposition to information as (just) technology? As those familiar with my positions will know, I am much more interested in non-IT-mediated Collective Intelligence (NITCI), which I agree exists provided one takes a process standpoint which is focused not only on outcomes but 'upstream'. Here is where John P.'s reference to 'ability to perform' comes in for further analysis. In my conception, the existence of, and interaction between, collective and individual processes is not only possible but a basic logical and ontological feature of intelligence in general. Finally, although (showing my age), I would not have expected that it would be necessary to repeat that culture can exist independently of software, I was glad to see that a difference between them is acceptable. One possible next step would be to define both Individual and Collective Intelligence in terms of the cognitive process of CREATIVITY. Absent this, the most powerful capability for Promethean outcomes will not be intelligence in my book. Cheers, Joseph ----Message d'origine---- De : pr...@sfu.ca Date : 14/03/2014 - 15:34 (PST) A : fis@listas.unizar.es Objet : Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 581, Issue 8 Dear FIS'ers, Thanks so much to all of you for your wonderfully thought provoking comments, questions, and feedback! In this note, I'll attempt to address some of the queries/comments that have been shared. John Collier says: [----As I understand it, John?s approach is specifically based on using Information Technology mediated groups of agents to derive the existence of a collective intelligence, but I would like it to be explained in what this intelligence consists. In other words, are we dealing with knowledge-as-such (stored and shared data) or capability for effecting change. John P. does say that crowd capability is directed at processing knowledge, but does this exhaust the content of the concept of intelligence as capability?----] This is a great question John, and one that has largely been ignored in the field, or is at least still contentious in my mind. In a sense, the avoidance of this issue signals that this domain is still immature, and further that there is opportunity to shape the domain in this respect, if one were so inclined. The Woolley & Malone et al. crew (in the Science 2010 paper) focus on the small group level (very small!), and define CI as a group ability to perform. This intimates a process model of CI. Much like Steven I'm not a big fan of this work, principally because there is no place for IT in this notion of CI, and it seems to me that communication is driving all outcomes (which I think is essentially Loet's point too). It does reveal, or rather reminds us, how very nebulous the cognitive concept of general intelligence is in it's own right, and so in this respect the work is useful. The other popular work attempting to define CI, is from Pierre Levy (1999), who defines it as [----...a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills...----]. As opposed to the group-level, Levy is here focused on society as a level of analysis. Thus far, I've yet to see any work that attempts to reconcile these different levels of analysis, though off the cuff these two definitions of CI seem to share a process-orientation, with a focus on performance/mobilization outcomes. >From my view, broadly speaking, I think that we can certainly say with some >confidence that there should be a difference between IT-mediated CI and >non-IT-mediated CI (or at least this is my hypothesis). In the former, frozen, >yet adaptable artifacts (ie software/algorithms/AI) are involved, while in the >latter they are not. You could of course argue that >language/society/culture/communication is a technology/artifact in it's own >right, and philosophically I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but we can also >agree that software is demonstrably different than culture for example. It would appear that the explicit codification of knowledge is a bridge between the two categories that I draw. Further, both forms of CI would most certainly have some level of individual human intelligence in common too. For me the key difference is that in the IT-mediated case of CI, the existence of AI/algorithms denotes a demonstrably different system of interacting parts. If this is true, we should expect different dynamics (and probably different outcomes) for each system. I very much look forward to any further thoughts from the group! Best, John
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