Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence (CI) or group intelligence (GI) is the emergent ability of groups, whether composed of humans alone, animals, or networks of humans and artificial agents, to solve problems, make decisions, or generate knowledge more effectively than individuals alone, through either cooperation or by aggregation of diverse information, perspectives, and behaviors. The term swarm intelligence (SI) is sometimes used interchangeably with collective intelligence but is simply one instance of it. Collective intelligence encompasses not only complex adaptive systems, which self-organize and adapt in dynamic environments, but also creative and cognitive processes observed in social groups, which are often referred to as the wisdom of crowds. In this context, collective judgments, sometimes from non-experts, often exceed the accuracy of expert predictions, as illustrated by Francis Galton's famous experiment on estimating the weight of an ox. Contemporary theorists have posited that intelligence can be interpreted as an emergent collective process that manifests across various biological and social scales, including neural, organismal, and group levels. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in the context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus decision-making, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective intelligence should not be conflated with metaphysical theories of panpsychism or with claims about group consciousness. These concern the fundamental nature of the mind, and the possibility that consciousness is a ubiquitous or emergent property. The empirical study of collective intelligence, however, focuses on observable mechanisms by which groups coordinate information, tasks or problem-solving. The term group intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Anita Woolley presents collective intelligence as a measure of group intelligence and group creativity. The idea is that a measure of collective intelligence covers a broad range of features of...