MIT Seeks to Understand Collective Intelligence
Newassignment.net conducted an interview on collective intelligence with Stephen C. Buckley, the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Business and Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. I am interested in the topic and was hoping for some juicy insights built on solid research. Instead here is what we got:
We think that something fundamental has changed in the past couple of years, in the way that people are using computers.
We haven’t conducted any research that would allow us to unequivocally point out the fundamental change that is leading us towards more and more use of collective intelligence, but I can speculate.
Collective intelligence has existed probably since there were two or more people on the Earth. What I think has happened is 1) the network has grown in a way that a lot more people are connected to each other now, and 2) when you have more people connected to each other, you get a lot of people with very specialized skills, and also have access to information. And those two things combined, allow people with very narrow interests, i.e. if you are a particle physicists, interested in corks, you can literally join an online community with tens of thousands of other particle physicists who are interested in corks, and discussing even finer elements within that narrow field of interest.
So you can really bring a lot of intellectual force to bare, from all over the world, very quickly on a particular problem. And that just simply wasn’t very possible before.
Still I like the Center for Collective Intelligence’s basic research 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?
Here is more from the Center:
How can the results of research on collective intelligence be used?
A primary application of all this research will be to help use new information technologies solve old problems in new ways. For example, the Center has current or proposed projects dealing with the following business and societal problems:
- How can large groups of people produce high quality written documents? For instance, how can the lessons of Wikipedia be applied to other groups and other kinds of documents? What kinds of technologies and motivational structures are needed?
- How can groups of people make accurate predictions of future events? For instance, in prediction markets, people buy and sell predictions about uncertain future events, and the prices that emerge in these markets are often better predictors than opinion polls or individual experts. When and how do these prediction markets work best? How can they be combined with simulations, neural nets, and other techniques?
- How can we harness the intelligence of thousands of people around the world to help solve the problems of global climate change? For instance, how can we use innovative combinations of computer-based simulations and explicit representation of argumentation to help people identify and analyze different policy alternatives?
- How can we create an on-line, searchable library of books from many languages and historical eras? For instance, how can we harness a combination of human and machine intelligence to recognize the images of words in these books?
- How can we help create commercially sustainable products and services for low-income communities around the world? For instance, how can we use cutting-edge technology to help a world-wide network of entrepreneurs and investors rapidly find, analyze, and replicate successful projects?
