Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence

During this presentation we are going to look at the history of collective intelligence,

examples of collective intelligence and theories that people have on the topic, as well as our own personal opinions on the

matters discussed throughout.

DefinitionThe definition of collective intelligence is:

‘a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals.’

Over the next few slides, we will attempt to demonstrate examples of collective intelligence.

HistoryIn 1911 William Morton Wheeler observed ants working

in a group and saw them as not individuals but as one single unit working as one in a colony which created a “superorganism”

A year later in 1912, Émile Durkheim identified society as the sole source of human logical thought. Which we believe to be a true statement because a lot of our knowledge is from other people so we are like the ant colony.

Example Number 1: PoliticsOne example of collective intelligence would

be political parties and the way in which the take the views of people to form policies, select their candidates and run election campaigns.

Example Number 2: GamesOnline multi-player games are another

example of collective intelligence. Games such as Halo, Second Life and Call Of Duty rely on gamers coming together as a community to form the game’s identity.

Example Number 3: WikipediaThe online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is one of

the best examples of collective intelligence. Anyone can add information to an existing page or indeed create a new page of information; pages also hyperlink to other areas of the website that people have edited.

Example Number 4: GoogleGoogle is a prominent example of collective

intelligence. The search engine is made up of millions of websites, which have been created by people all over the world.

Example Number 5: FacebookThe social networking world is perhaps the most

popular form of collective intelligence. Friends post statuses which then act as newsfeed, which informs other friends of their thoughts. Friends can also recommend other friends, applications and pages to any person on their friend list.

Final example: Amazon If a person has a Amazon account they can buy or sell

products to other people with accounts this is collective intelligence because the people are making up the website.

The website also recommends items that may also interest you judging on what you have already looked at which is collective intelligence also.

Things such as customer reviews can also be heavily influential when choosing a product. You are essentially basing your opinion off of the opinions of other members of the public.

Theories on collective intelligenceAccording to Don Tapscott and Anthony D.

Williams, collective intelligence is needs four principles in order to exist which would be openness, peering, sharing and acting globally.

Openness: for collective intelligence to work to it’s full potential it needs people and companies to be open about their ideas to the rest of the public on the WWW so their products can be improved.

Peering Peering: taking old information or products

and modifying them to match yours and others personal needs before releasing it to the public so people can take full advantage.

One example of this would be torrents. For torrents to work the more people you have the faster you can download what you are looking for, if a file only has 3 people downloading it it will take a long time but if it has 3000 it will take less time

Sharing and Acting GloballyThere has been the question of whether it

should be illegal to distribute intellectual property from companies because other companies can use it to their advantage.

An example is if a company did a survey and got results and then a rival company got the results and used them for their own gain.

Apple VS Microsoft We have already explained acting globally it is

essentially how the internet works with collective intelligence.

ConclusionIn our opinion we think the internet would not

be able to flourish without the use of collective intelligence.

When we do not know something Google is used to further our knowledge and with websites such as Amazon we can update our knowledge on new or old products that we may be interested in purchasing.

It’s astounding to go from Wheeler observing ant colonies to the global tool that is the internet which we as a population rely on so much.