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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?""
I'll give them the benefit of trying to start a realistic project without any fancy, not-yet existing technology, and therefore accept that their attempt for collective intelligence is writing a business book in what they call Wikipedia-style, so far with 300 participants. But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education.
We've all grown up in a culture dominated by information transfer via text and been trained by our educational system to be producers of text ourselves. I'm currently doing it on slashdot, everybody is communicating via email and IM, because that's what we've learned.
But there has been a lot of research showing that richer media (not flash, but visualization and simulation) are often much more appropriate to describe complex subjects. There has been a trend for a long time to stuff text books with more graphics, diagrams, pictures, and educational software with videos, animations and so on. A picture can say more than a thousand words if placed in the right context.
Unfortunately we are not yet trained to use more than a basic hypertext processor for media creation. How many teachers can even draw a diagram? How many websites have useful graphics? If you look at wikipedia, it's basically a large book with a few photos and even fewer good diagrams, no simulations or whatever. So when reading e.g. wikipedia it is up to the reader again to create an internal visualization and hope to match the image intended by the authors.
I believe to make progress in collective intelligence we have to move our media production to match the mental capabilities of humans. Text was very useful when it was the only technical viable solution, but today there are many more and better media types, only our culture of media creation is behind the possibilities by some decades. YouTube may be a nice step in the right direction and what Lawrence Lessing said about creating CC licensed rich flash content also is. But starting another wiki style pseudo book is not.
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Come on, it's freaking obvious. What else can it be?
... I think it's going to take something more than MIT smarty men, to make committees useful.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Because God Knows there haven't been any going on so far...
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Sometimes is hard for a group of "smart" people to agree on something,I rather have them experiment with a cluster of idiots (available in large quantities,they usually agree on anything as long as is stupid) and have the system do the oposite of what they choose.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
The group think on Slashdot is unsurpassed in so many areas...
Put any discussion like this in a technical/Geek forum and the debate becomes about what kind of technology will make this all work. Sorry folks, even with a perfect UI or whatever, this is fundamentally a people problem. The major limitations are not how to deal with html, flash, IRC or whatever, but about how to deal with clashing egos, language & cultural barriers etc and how to arbitrate when experts disagree etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
We all know that when you get lots of people together, the result is less intelligence than the sum of individual intelligences, not more. It is called "groupthink". It is why meetings never result in anything useful. It is why every collectively designed standard is a piece of garbage. Decisions require a decider, period. If the decider is intelligent, you get good decisions. If the decider is stupid, you get stupid decisions. If the decider is the president, well... I'll pass on that one. The point is, there is no such thing as a "collective intelligence"; group members hinder each other, not help, due to each individual following his own agenda.
Think of how much more rapidly Congress could create worthless legislation and shameful scandals with the assistance of sophisticated Artificial Stupidity algorithms. There's probably also a Beowulf cluster joke in here, somewhere.
After reading the article, it seems like old wine in new bottles. They have coined "Collective Intellegence" (formerly the Center for Coordination Science) apparently for public relations purposes, and the information given reveals no new technology. The only project mentioned is a business-oriented book written wikipedia-style.
Is there more to this than groupware-on-steroids? Would like to hear the possible downside to this approach, since analog people don't mesh seamlessly with digital technology...
the goal of this project is to increase the intelligence of the group
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
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.
See Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild," a study of navigation practices on a Naval vessel, for an answer to your question. I am willing to bet that very little of your own "intelligent" behavior is coherent or meaningful outside of a broader system, and that you rely on the cognitive capabilities of many others in order to operate yourself. What distinguishes "good input" from "stupid input" for human activities is usually something which is distributed across minds.
I posted this before if you want True AI If you want smarter networks. Take Digg, then add groups.
For example you have if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
Democrats mod stuff down Republicans may mod up. So they should each have their own scoring section.
There are a LOT of groups people can be a part of. Even social cliques if you so desire.
Eventually people who's articles that get modded up a lot will start with a degree of moderation to them.
Or you can search on your favorite authors.
I hate the internet because I always know what is coming next, but never the motivation to code it.
God spoke to me.
Here's why
First there's the obvious issue of "negative intelligence" where plugging stupid people into a system has a detramental effect.
Especially when those morons can't spell.
"Center for Collective Intelligence"
I do believe that she's rolling in her grave over this.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius