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MIT Looks to Give Group Think a Good Name
netbuzz writes "With Friday's opening of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, researchers there hope to address this central question: "How can people and computers be connected so that — collectively — they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?""
Folks at UCSC have done similar research with this paper found on the arXiv....I remembered reading it when it first came out and it's still a pretty neat concept.
Keep the faith, share the code
Vernor Vinge has often talked and written about intelligence amplification techniques, such as amplifying the intelligence of an individual or harnessing the power of many minds together. In his latest novel, Rainbows End (yes, the apostrophe is omitted intentionally, a fact the author draws attention to multiple times in the book), Vinge postulates one such mechanism for realizing group intelligence. What if an AI that was only moderately smart built up a social network of "experts" and well-placed non-experts, and found ways to essentially get people to do things for it by promising various inducements? The beauty is, an AI would be very adept at tirelessly managing such a network so that each contributor wasn't just contributing to the AI's primary goal, but also contributing to satisfying the promises made to other contributors.
Furthermore, the participants in this network wouldn't necessarily have to be aware of each other, nor would they need to be aware that they were part of a collective intelligence. People tend to cooperate more easily when they don't realize they're doing it.
We humans have a lot of core competencies, but neither managing group efforts nor making decisions by committe belong to this category. Machines, on the other hand, are fantastic at administrative minutiae. Machines also are much better at number crunching in general, something we already rely on them heavily for. The merging of human and machine cultures seems like a logical progression to me, and I don't believe I am drinking Kurzweil's Kool-Aid.