(2018-01-26) Thinking Clearly About Collective Intelligence A Conversation With Geoff Mulgan About His New Book Big Mind

David Sloan Wilson: Thinking Clearly About Collective Intelligence: A Conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his new book Big Mind. (2018-01-25-HowToMobilizeGroupIntelligence) There is little doubt in my mind that groups can think, and can have true or false beliefs. But the ways groups do these things are not precisely analogous to the ways individuals work.

What we call “mind” focuses on the lower-level interactions that result in the gathering and processing of information, leading to adaptive collective action.

As soon as we associate “mind” with “unit of selection”, then the possibility of human group minds leaps into view. It is becoming widely accepted that our distant ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive self-serving behaviors within their groups, so that cooperating as a group became the primary evolutionary force.

As Peter Turchin shows in his book Ultrasociety, the societies that replaced other societies during the last 10,000 years did so in part because of their ability to gather and process information, leading to effective collective action at ever larger scales,

Knowing all of this has tremendous potential for recognizing collective intelligence in human life where it currently exists and socially constructing it where it is needed. However, most of what I have recounted is new, emerging only within the last two or three decades, and is often not reflected in the thinking of otherwise smart people on the subject of collective intelligence. In particular, there is a tendency to naively assume that collective intelligence emerges spontaneously from complex interactions, without requiring a process of selection at the level of the collective unit.

It was therefore with trepidation that I began reading Big Mind:

To my delight, I found him very well informed

I therefore lost no time inviting him to have an email conversation, which he generously accepted.

see large scale cognition, like evolution more generally, in terms of trade-offs. I call it cognitive economics: what selection or survival advantages are provided by certain kinds of cognition, and at what cost.

A great deal of work has been done on this at the individual organism level in terms of the advantages of a larger, but very energy hungry, brain. I’m interested in the parallels for groups of organisations: if they spend scarce resources on abilities to observe, analyse, create or remember does that confer advantages?

conventional wisdom that axiomatically takes the individual as the unit of analysis, including methodological individualism in the social sciences and the rational actor model in economics

There is little doubt in my mind that groups can think, and can have true or false beliefs. But the ways groups do these things are not precisely analogous to the ways individuals work.

helped by the ways in which psychology and neuroscience have revealed that the individual mind is better understood not as a monolithic hierarchy, with a single will, but rather as a network of semiautonomous cells that sometimes collaborate and sometimes compete

second conventional wisdom regards collective intelligence as an emergent property of complex interactions, without paying careful attention to the special conditions that are required.

I offer several different challenges

The first recognizes organization as costly

second lens recognizes conflict, and a constant struggle between forces for cooperation and forces that aim to disrupt or misinform.

third more sociological lens recognizes that most real complex human societies combine multiple cultures, some hierarchical, some individualistic, and some more egalitarian and cooperative. (games theory)

anthropologist Mary Douglas

could you please provide one of the best examples of human collective intelligence?

The global science system is probably the best single example (scientific method)

Seen from afar the science system looks like a wonderful emergent system; seen up close it depends on many individuals devoting their lives to the hard work of building up a community, and establishing its norms, and persuading others to give it money, status and other resources.

To continue, I’d like to focus on an example of collective intelligence that is a work in progress—the smart cities movement.

Unfortunately far too much of what has been labelled as smart cities is either facile or irrelevant, often meeting needs that don’t exist (like refrigerators that tell you when you need to buy more milk). Too many plans failed to attend to the human element, or focused only on smart hardware not on helping people to be smart.

Few attended to the most pressing needs of cities – for health or jobs. And few learned basic lessons from evolution.

One of my former PhD students, Dan O’Brien, is involved in the smart cities movement in Boston. His research on 311.

All of these examples have worked best with some space for iteration and learning.

collective intelligence at the global scale requires policies that are formulated with the welfare of the whole earth in mind

number of variables involved in something like climate change, let alone its interaction with economies or social life, makes it next to impossible to model

So to complement our imperfect tools we also need to cultivate a parallel ethical stance

three concentric circles of accountability.

We are in an odd phase of history which is simultaneously bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and unusually foolish or malign leaderships. Seen in the long view I tend to confident.

We shouldn’t rely on hope however, or fall into the trap of believing that there grand historical forces will either make things turn out for good or for bad. Systems – markets, humanity, science – don’t automatically generate solutions. History tells us that again and again and the space for agency – sparked by both imagination and fear – is where the most important work is done.

They point to a final insight: over the years I’ve learned that the more detached people are from practical work the more they risk of slipping into negativity and fatalism. (Pathological)