The Intelligent Society

Abstract

This book has shown that CI has been important throughout our history. This is not only a story about how we have been able to cooperate in increasingly larger groups, but also about how we have gradually improved our ways of solving problems together. It all began with intimate collaboration in dyads, and with time we gradually learned to solve problems with unknown others through human swarm problem solving. Our collective problem-solving abilities were further developed when we learned how to improve our tools, and it excelled when we learned how to store knowledge. The invention of writing enabled new types of knowledge sharing, and the printing press opened up the possibility of stigmergic problem solving at an unprecedented scale. The story of CI is not only about group size, but even more about our extraordinary ability to improve our ways of solving problems together. With the invention of the Internet, CI is evolving into new and even more sophisticated forms. Because of mass communication, large-scale cooperation is now possible in previously unimagined ways. One of the most successful CI projects is Wikipedia, which illustrates how content production can be coordinated at a massive scale and with a diversity that is unimaginable without an online setting (Benkler, ; Castells, ). Originally, Pierre Lévy () coined the term “collective intelligence” as a new, universally distributed “global brain” that is constantly evolving and in which all humans are part of the same environment for the first time in our history. The fundamental premise is that no one knows everything, everyone knows something, and all knowledge resides in humanity. The global brain assumes that solutions already exist; they only need to be rediscovered through search engines or other tools. Like all major social transformation, the basic feature relates to how our perception of space and