Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence, as characterized by Peter Russell (1983), Tom Atlee (1993), Howard Bloom (1995), Francis Heylighen (1995), Douglas Engelbart, Cliff Joslyn, Ron Dembo, Gottfried Mayer-Kress (2003) and other theorists, is an intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals, an intelligence that seemingly has a mind of its own.

Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of computer science, and of mass behavior--a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.

Some figures like Tom Atlee prefer to focus on collective intelligence primarily in humans and actively work to upgrade what Howard Bloom calls "the group IQ". Atlee feels that collective intelligence can be encouraged "to overcome 'groupthink' and individual cognitive bias in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process—while achieving enhanced intellectual performance."

One CI pioneer, George Pór, defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as "the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation. "[1] Tom Atlee and George Pór state that "collective intelligence also involves achieving a single focus of attention and standard of metrics which provide an appropriate threshold of action". Their approach is rooted in Scientific Community Metaphor.

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