Geoff Mulgan is the author of Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World.From his Q&A at the Princeton University Press blog:
So what is collective intelligence?--Marshal Zeringue
My interest is in how thought happens at a large scale, involving many people and often many machines. Over the last few years many experiments have shown how thousands of people can collaborate online analyzing data or solving problems, and there’s been an explosion of new technologies to sense, analyze and predict. My focus is on how we use these new kinds of collective intelligence to solve problems like climate change or disease—and what risks we need to avoid. My claim is that every organization can work more successfully if it taps into a bigger mind—mobilizing more brains and computers to help it.
How is it different from artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is going through another boom, embedded in everyday things like mobile phones and achieving remarkable break throughs in medicine or games. But for most things that really matter we need human intelligence as well as AI, and an over reliance on algorithms can have horrible effects, whether in financial markets or in politics.
What’s the problem?
The problem is that...[read on]