Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [15]
Amplifying Collective Intelligence
Let’s take stock of the picture of collective intelligence we’re developing. It starts with the idea that within large groups there can be a tremendous amount of expertise, far more than is available from any single individual in the group. Ideally, such groups are extremely cognitively diverse—meaning that they have a wide range of non-overlapping expertise—but their members have enough in common that they can communicate effectively.
Ordinarily, most of this expertise is latent. A good but not great chess player may have individual areas of microexpertise where they equal or surpass the world’s best chess players, but in an ordinary chess game that is not sufficient to outweigh the many areas in which they are inferior. But if the group is large enough, and cognitively diverse enough, then the right tools can make it possible for the group to harness such microexpertise when it’s needed, and so the group can far exceed the talent of any individual. Designed serendipity can take hold, resulting in a conversational critical mass that rapidly explores a much larger space of ideas than any individual could on their own.
Underlying this broad picture is the fact that collectively we know far more than even the most brilliant individuals. Centuries ago it was, perhaps, possible for a single brilliant individual—an Aristotle or Hypatia or Leonardo—to surpass all others across many areas of knowledge. Today, human knowledge has expanded so that this is no longer possible. Knowledge has been decentralized, and is now held across many minds. Even the most brilliant people, people such as mathematicians Tim Gowers and Terence Tao and chess player Garry Kasparov, have an unsurpassed mastery of only a tiny fraction of our knowledge. Even within their areas of expertise, they’re often surpassed in specialized ways by other people, people with particular areas of microexpertise. By restructuring expert attention online tools can enable that microexpertise to be applied when and where it is most needed.
With this point of view in mind, we see that the problem of amplifying collective intelligence is to direct microexpertise where it will be of most use. The purpose of the online tools is to help people figure out where they should direct their attention. The better the tools can direct people’s attention, the more successful the collaboration will be. Put another way, the online tools create an architecture of attention whose purpose is to help participants find tasks where they have the greatest comparative advantage. Ideally, that architecture of attention will bring the attention of the right expert to the right problems. The more effectively expert attention is allocated in this way, the more effectively problems can be solved. (See the endnotes for discussion of the related idea of the architecture of participation, suggested by technology expert Tim O’Reilly.) This view of collective intelligence is summarized in the Summary and Preview box, which also previews many of the ideas about amplifying collective intelligence developed in the remainder of part 1.
Summary and Preview: How to Amplify Collective Intelligence
To amplify collectivegence, we should scale up collaborations, increasing the cognitive diversity and range of available expertise as much as possible. This broadens the range of problems that can easily be solved. The challenge in scaling up collaboration is that each participant has only a limited