Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [9]
Superficially, the idea that online tools can make us collectively smarter contradicts the idea, currently fashionable in some circles, that the internet is reducing our intelligence. For example, in 2010 the author Nicholas Carr published a book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, arguing that the internet is reducing our ability to concentrate and contemplate. Carr’s book and other similar works make many good points, and have been widely discussed. But new technologies seldom have just a single impact, and there’s no contradiction in believing that online tools can both enhance and reduce intelligence. You can use a hammer to build a house; you can also use it to break your thumb. Complex technologies, especially, often require considerable skill to use well. Automobiles are amazing tools, but we all know how learner drivers can terrorize the road. Looking at the internet and concluding that the main impact is to make us stupid is like looking at the automobile and concluding that it’s a tool for learner drivers to wipe out terrified pedestrians. Online, we’re all still learner drivers, and it’s not surprising that online tools are sometimes used poorly, amplifying our individual and collective stupidity. But as we’ve already seen, there are also examples showing that online tools can be used to increase our collective intelligence. Our concern will therefore be with understanding how those tools can be used to make us collectively smarter, and what that change will mean.
We’re still in the early days of understanding how to amplify collective intelligence. It’s telling that many of the best tools we have—tools such as blogs, wikis, and online forums—weren’t invented by the people we might suppose are the experts on group behavior and intelligence, experts from fields such as group psychology, sociology, and economics. Instead, they were invented by amateurs, people such as Matt Mullenweg, who was a 19-year-old student when he created Wordpress, one of the most popular types of blogging software, and Linus Torvalds, who was a 21-year-old student when he created the open source Linux operating system. That tells us we should be wary of current theory: while we can learn a great deal from existing academic studies, the picture of collective intelligence that emerges is also incomplete. For this reason, we’ll ground our discussion in concrete examples in the mold of the Polymath Project and Kasparov versus the World. In part 1 of this book we’ll use these concrete examples to distill a set of principles that explain how online tools can amplify collective intelligence.
I have deliberately focused the discussion in part 1 on a relatively small number of examples, with the idea being that as we develop a conceptual framework for understanding collective intelligence, we’ll revisit each of these examples several times, and come to understand them more deeply. Furthermore, the examples come not just from science, but also from areas such as chess and computer programming. The reason is that some of the most striking examples of amplifying collective intelligence—examples such as Kasparov versus the World—come from outside science, and we can learn a great deal by studying them.
As our understanding deepens, we’ll see that scientific problems are especially well suited for attack by collective intelligence, and in part 2 we’ll narrow our focus to how collective intellige is changing science.
CHAPTER 3
Restructuring Expert Attention
In 2003, a young woman named Nita Umashankar, from Tucson, Arizona, went to live for a year in India, where she worked with a not-for-profit organization to help