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08 Apr 09

The Technium: The Bottom is Not Enough

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hive-mind emergence kevin-kelly

27 Oct 08

E.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism Tome

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superorganism hive-mind evolution kevin-kelly

Could large groups of animals function together as a single entity with distributed intelligence? Did evolution work through such groups, selecting at the group level rather than the individual? The implications were staggering, not only for bugs but also for humans. Group evolution meant that altruism and self-sacrifice — i.e., morality — might be as much a part of our genetic heritage as hair and eye color.

11 Dec 07

Can an online mob create art? - By Clive Thompson - Slate Magazine

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art clive-thompson collaboration emergence hive-mind

Art MobsCan an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?
By Clive Thompson
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004,
3 more annotations...
- In his excellent new book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (a former Slate columnist) argues that groups of people are smarter than any individual member.
- Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.
- The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, Darknet, on a wiki—a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one—and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The editor and the crowd

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collective-intelligence hive-mind nicholas-carr social-news wisdom-of-crowds

In his book on Google, The Search, John Battelle makes a similar point using different terms. He says that the internet contains a "database of intentions." Every search we make, every link we click, every word we write, every moment we spend looking at a page - each is a little piece of data about ourselves that we leave behind.
But I do think we can learn something important here, something about "the crowd" and "the editor" and their respective roles - and maybe, at least by implication, something about the evolution of media, too.
4 more annotations...
- But there are other things that the crowd is quite good at. The crowd tends, for instance, to be much better than any of its members at predicting an uncertain future result that is influenced by many variables. That's why stock market indexes beat individual money managers over the long run.
- The crowd aggregates all individuals' knowledge about variables while balancing out their personal biases and idiosyncracies. It's not the "wisdom" of crowds that makes crowds useful, in other words; it's their fundamental mindlessness. What crowds are good for is producing average results that are not subject to the biases and other quirks of human minds.
- As we adapt to the internet, we may just learn to forget that an algorithm, no matter how elegantly conceived, is no substitute for a person, and that a crowd, no matter how full of "wisdom," is no substitute for an editor.
  
  But I hope we don't.
- Posted by nick at March 9, 2006

07 Dec 07

Ask MetaFilter | Community Weblog

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answers community hive-mind search

25 Nov 07

Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

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amazon behavioral-economics book collective-intelligence crowd-sourcing game-theory hive-mind james-surowiecki

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest).
"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.
2 more annotations...
- He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.
- Most of us believe that valuable nuggets of knowledge are concentrated in few minds. We believe the solution to our complex problems lies in finding the right person. When all we have to do, Surowiecki demonstrates over and over, is ask the gathered crowd.