Augmented Collective Intelligence (2)
Briefly unpacking the notion of "augmented collective intelligence" each word refers to a unique human set of characteristics:
Much has been made about the "intelligence" part -- the brain of our species has developed metacognitive (self reflective), learning, and reasoning abilities that enable us to manipulate our environment more effectively than any other species. How that came about is a matter of scientific debate. My favorite explainer of how we came to have the kind of brains we have is William Calvin, who links spurts in brain evolution to...climate change. Sapiens is another recent narrative about how the "cognitive revolution" came about. The "learning" part links individual brains to the social aspects of our cooperative superpower. We think together.
Along with our amplified cognitive capabilities, humans have a strong social capability: We recognize others and remember how they acted in past interactions; we empathize with others; we seek social contact; we learn from each other. As Robin Dunbar put it, "Primates evolved large brains to manage their unusually complex social systems." Our brain's biologically evolved capability for learning isn't superpowered until it connects the individual with the collective accumulated knowledge we call culture.
The third aspect, the "augmented" part, has coevolved with our cognitive and social capabilities: Social learning predates Homo sapiens: the Acheulean hand axe used by Homo erectus required knowledge of a precise sequence of hand-strokes to craft the tool out of stone. Enough of these axes have been unearthed to deduce that many individuals learned by observation. However, the design remained unchanged for a million years. Social learning and the pace of innovation took a leap with the advent of spoken language, which accelerated collective learning. Writing, print, and the world wide web were tools (media) that multiplied the ability to learn new knowledge and to diffuse it through the population beyond barriers of time and space -- mind amplifiers.
Although much of the public conversation about the impending impact of ever more capable computers has focused on artificial intelligence, a different approach may have more immediate and at least equal impact: artificial intelligence augmentation. J.C.R. Licklider forecast "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in 1960, and Doug Engelbart laid the theoretical foundations of augmentation and built the working artifacts we now call personal computers in "Augmenting Human Intellect" in 1962. It took decades for processing power and experience with mind amplifiers to begin to achieve what the dreamers foresaw sixty years ago. And now a variety of social learning for computers, "machine learning," may again multiply our ability to use tools to think together. We may finally be approaching a threshold of machine learning capabilities and evidence-based knowledge of how human use media to solve problems collectively.
Technology is only part of augmented collective intelligence, but knowledge about the mechanics of the social part has lagged behind. Engelbart set down a good definition of of "collective IQ": "a measure of how well people can work together on important challenges – how quickly and intelligently they can anticipate or respond to a situation, leveraging their collective perception, memory, insight, vision, planning, reasoning, foresight, and experience into applicable knowledge." But Engelbart wasn't able to stimulate a full-scale research effort.
More recently, Tom Malone at MIT Sloan School, founder of the center for collective intelligence, and his research team have been able to measure and analyze the collective IQ of groups, offering evidence that diversity of viewpoint is more important than the individual intelligence of the members of the group, and that the presence of women increases the collective IQ of a group.
In 2018, Malone published a book, Superminds, excerpted here.